Two Poems

[Kikuyu_Black_Paws]

Strings

 

I have known the chaotic warmth of a musician’s living room:

Crowded, embracing, cluttered with creases and clinging creativity

With empty MelloYello cans in orange and limey lemon

Mimicking the peaceful glow of low lamps and sweet smiles,

Set here, there on the sagging seamed floors, skewed by years and sleepless nights,

Their welcoming creak with every step joined to the peeling, lead-painted walls

Covered in years past by a poison-free manila laminate, aged, familiar, fondly noticed,

But mostly hidden by sagging shelves of carefully ordered CDs, books, sheet music, and KISS figurines.

And an aged piano crouches by the boarded window, among smiling taped pictures and sticky notes,

Next to the sloped couch with its soft blankets and its handmade pillows, its teal-quilted arms

Bearers of the exhausted muse too weary to crawl into bed, to leave the snug nest,

Beyond the spilling mantelpiece of cherished memoirs, the row upon row of neat guitars, the strings,

The violin, and the strong, gentle hands creating the intangible music of home.

 

 

Saturnian Giraffe

 

In the disturbed prison of my nightmares

I see a Saturnian Giraffe.

I think, “There are no giraffes on Saturn,”

But there he stands in majestic glory,

Disturbing glory,

Elegantly gory,

Striding above horizon lines in drops of red.

On a pastel desert he treks his way—

Two-dimensional against a flat blue sky.

How slowly his skeleton legs move,

Distorted, bone limbs.

His clawed feet shouldn’t be able to move in this sand;

They are not cleft like a camel’s, to glide effortlessly against a surface that yields,

But he has no difficulty. His talons do not even sink into the grains. He floats,

Eerily.

The landscape steals his colors:

Red, yellow, blue,

Filling their hues with primary and leaving him ghostly and pale.

His flaming mane wisps into a nimbus spine,

And the divisions of countries etch along his hide.

I wonder why he meets with a crouching bishop,

A bishop in the hues of his fiery mane?

But if there can be giraffes on Saturn,

Dragging fire and cloud silk in their hair,

Pale as the skeleton legs they stride on,

Why cannot they also tread past bishops

Faceless, crouched in red,

Over pallid deserts

And dimensional blue skies?