Pied

Earth returns the heat it supped all day

Owls vault on thermals seemingly reserved for eagles

Prometheus, dressed as Daedalus for Halloween,

Pretends himself to be

The austringer fostering o’er nephew; callow Talos

A shot of infrared in some winsome ocher dark

Some match-struck asteroid mark

Why could the earth not filch its own spark?

Fickle god gifts fire; harbingers global warming

And the illuminated man follows

The birds; marched into the oven

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Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

Here There Should Be Dragons

Each sea, vast,

Fasts in

Mankind’s right mind

Too concerned with the ground

Beneath his feet

To believe he’s squatting on

Less than thirty percent

O’ those tectonic plates

Awfully grabby

For our lack of conquest

And if it’s mapped

As placid transects

It hardly counts

But what lurks beneath the surface

Is always nine times that above

Who would ever care to

Brave the deep?

And if I were a nereid

This is where I’d choose to hide, too

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Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

ريشة

I was a bird once

Tore my feathers in a dream

Though I beheld six kinds of light

Could only chase them via screams

And all along the feather shaft

Bursting from my seams:

The dreams of words

And other light

By quill someday:

More flight

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Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

Dumpster Fire Fairy Tales

Atop a needle attends the electric dawn

Gossamer green funeral gown

Preying Mantis meets prodigious Prada school

Protect my head; it is so vulnerable now

Hitting the back of the tower, the banks of the river,

The scalding car hood, the bed and the bear rug

I have been so rarely vertical these days

I expect my hips to swagger without moving

When I stand

The way my head spins through

Shipwreck after shipwreck

On dry land

I have still been saving the best for you…

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Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

Dust Never Settles Up

I’ve got the kick drum in the stairwell

Got the tambo and the snare, well…

Those two were a lie,

But paint a picture in good health of

Rushed beats pushing up and painting the steep ascent with thrusts opposite the side which falls to feet

Of a rhythm section that’s in the cellar

Progressively percussing on a shelf

Rattling with the beller

Of feeling played inside out

Meanwhile stairs don’t know they got wants not to be spoken of

To be stroked in opposite directions

Walked inverted like an MC Escher sketch and

No one dared to dispute physics

To have dust settle

On the unseen sides

The heart is just a backbeat, trying to stay competent, trying to stay relevant

Much as it tries

It’ll never be melody

In our eyes

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Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

Worsted

Why pray to Minerva

And hope the wool she dyes

Will be steadfast to light?

Why hope her hand is steady;

Her taste for story: true and ready?

Why hope that what she weaves

Will not be unraveled easily?

What do we gain by being written

In words or in scars or new patches of cement with

Llittle sticks or in the center of somebody’s story?

I think, if we’ve a good heart, we gain from knowing

The glove will fit

The fabric will wear

Before it ever rips

We can trust

The garment is built to last

What do we get out of being the fiber?

Other than the satisfaction of knowing

Someone is warmer

Someone is wiser

Someone, somewhere, is enveloped in color

For seeing your moment in history

And holding it up

To their face by the fire

Life

Recorded

The way we’d live it again

If we could

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Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

Panta Rhei

Why do we feel like blood longs To belong in our veins… When it’s forever dying to escape? Forced around bodily synchrotrons At ever accelerating rates Into loop and delta capillaries Against will and gravity Valves in calves requiring The turgor of tube stockings To keep a rigid grasp On their chain gang, coal-stoking veins, When: Blood seeps where it cannot go Defying bandaids and stitches Path of least resistance Where it rests Far away from beating breast Though congealed and cold Cupped in the hands of valleys The low dug holes, despite What’s good for us Who are we to keep it at arms length in pulses? Who are we to stop it up at all?

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Maureen Armstrong @haikkun Prompt from Mark @definegodliness

Dysgraphia

I’m feeling deflated Not enough ATP To produce hot air lung contractions Failure to grasp (gasp?) Any words that crack Like a too-full balloon neck getting snapped Instead, I’m loose latex Cold, condensed saliva inside Stick a pen in and maybe a Word would ensue But it could be confused For a sigh That’s what the mundane does to you Oh, what a trip A trip to the goddamn grocery store Still buying ramen Though you don’t have to no more I need a little excitement A little heartbreak A little indictment Some sniffing salts to jumpstart This tongue and fake my muscles Into shaking out a poem or two God, I don’t know what kills worse Being bored Or being blue

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Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

Physics

You know how grown men

Can be taken down like a bullet

By a bee?

It’s like trying to chase

A bee with a bullet

Press the pillow so hard

Against your ear

You hear it like a clock beating

Keeping track

Of nothing

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Maureen Armstrong @haikkun