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Zach Gomes  May 2010
Rhizophoria
Zach Gomes May 2010
I saw him at work;
When he would visit the mangal
With a ***** over his shoulder.

He rolled up his pant legs and walked
Through the tidal wash.  Once he had picked a tree,
He hacked for three days to cut

The mud and the mangrove
Free from the surrounding forest.
He piloted his self-made island into the lagoon.

Shortly, he became mangrove crazy,
A disease he called Rhizophoria
In the notebook he had taken along.

With mud lobsters and tree for his only company,
Of course he had mangrove on the brain.
His life became an ellipsis—

The two centers were the tree and himself.
From tubular mangrove branches, propagules fattened,
And seeds nested inside them;

He would scribble notes with delirium as they fell
Plumply into the lagoon
And were pulled away by the warm current.

Each time the tree condensed its salt
Into a sacrificial leaf,
He would sadly add a tick

To the tally of the dead he kept in his book.
He once wrote:
‘The salt is burning my eyes.’

Late afternoons, with beer in our hands,
We would watch him from the beach,
Five hundred yards away.

Eventually, his mangrove island drifted ashore—
He lay by the suberic roots
With a crust of salt along his cheek.
Deep in the creek
where speckled light kisses the saline shore
and mud hole bubbles leave crab trails
I knock upon her door.

She opens with a whisper on her skin
licks my **** with her southern tongue
winds rise the dusts within
the mangrove falls quiet to her moaning song.
Down in the bayou where the mangroves grow
There's talk of black voodoo, like Marie Leveau
The Swamp Witch, is legend, she has magic so black
That those who have seen her, have never come back
There;s tales of the noises that come from the dark
Of werewolves and zombies as rough as the bark
The mangroves are sentinels, to where the magic resides
Where even a longboat has no room to glide
Bodies go missing from the graveyards most nights
And there's always a fog shading the fireflies lights
The Swamp Witch is ruler and Queen of this world
Where souls are all taken and spines can be curled
They say that she came here from Canadian lands
She was a metis they say, from the Western Tar Sands
A mystic by nature, a dark witch by blood
She lives deep in the swamp, protected by gators and mud
The gators respect her, they do as she bids
They keep watch on the waters, they're her reptillian kids
She keeps zombies as gendarmes, collecting bodies to turn
Just how black is her magic, no one can discern
The Swamp Witch is legend, she is as old as all time
The air in the bayou is as thick as the slime
The cajuns say voodoo is the core of her heart
They avoid fishing where the mangrove trees start
The Swamp Witch, a legend ? or is she truly the Queen
She's the Louisiana Witch, no one survives once she's seen.....
As he scanned the far horizon of the mangrove beach
He imagined her silhouette by the sea of Norwich
A home he had left long to be so remotely far
On this alien shore with her face a distant star!

The sea winds kissed his skin in a bid to make amend
For his walks in the blazing sun weariness of dayend
He felt a peace in his ruffled mind craving for a rest
Amid the waves’ serenade dreaming a lulling nest!

What if he made his home on this ****** desolate beach
Walked the sands thought-romancing the woman of Norwich
Swam wild in the saline sea then lie in the mangrove’s shade
With no statistics to worry about only love’s buzz in his head!

Not going back to the asphalt path he would build here a hut
Laze dream lying in the shadows of wild and green coconut
In the starry evenings when the sea would hold her bewitched
He would walk the trails of scent left by the woman of Norwich!

This man went with the mission of building on the sea a port
But the mangrove gave him a reason to make there a love resort
No relic survives now the waves having carried beyond reach
All except the lingering scent of his love for the woman of Norwich!
Andrew Frazer, Lieutenant Governor of Bengal (1903-1908). He fell in love with the stretch of beach on the western edge of the Sunderbans and built there a bungalow. Nothing remains to remind of him except the name of this place – Frazerganj, now a popular beach resort. Henry’s Island is not far away.
The first new star flashed waves of blue tonight ,
securing my belief in the afterlife
A grove of ferns lit my imagination
For I became a shipwrecked captain -
that stumbled upon an island nation
Exploring the deep jungle without machete ,
potable water nor compass
Knee deep in mangrove forest
Tropical winds whispered and moaned
A lean-to of fronds became my maritime home
In the presence of a million stars
An army of sand ***** paraded before -
their newfound master from near and afar
Crashing waves lulled a poor sailor to rest
The whispers of Poseidon
A dream about a lookout in the crows nest
Counting orbs in the tail of the Milky Way-
with visions of mermaids , ghost ships and rogue waves
Copyright July 2018 by Randolph L Wilson * All Rights Reserved
Jonathan Moya Nov 2020
All you wicked men
what is wrong with you?

There is no black Justice
seen on the Sistine Chapel.

Only the stupidities that
can make a stuff bird laugh-

the small axe ready
to cut the big tree down.

https://youtu.be/b0Tk-FoiX_0

Based loosely on theSteve McQueen anthology  of films.  The first in the series is titled Mangrove.  The title is from a Bob Marley song.
Geno Cattouse Feb 2013
would walk out of the city on Sunday afternoon after Sunday Mass
Dinner at noon was the custom. then the city would slip into  Sunday coma.
Mantovani, Acher Bilk, and the BBC wafted from the Television less homes we passed
on our way to the river.

Old chocolate men reclined on rickety old wooden porches smoking hand rolled
whatever as we strolled by giving us the lazy eye. All knowing , know nothings.
Sun beaten and calloused to lives of hard labor. every now and then one would just give a
jaundiced nod and look away/ Live to smoke another day.

Half paved tar and gravel roads simmered and writhed in the distance.
but our bare feet.
slapped in rhythm .cut off knee pants and skinny bare chest attested to sparse living but we
never knew it cause the mangrove jungle was minutes away and big
unwanted catfish to hook and throw away. Disdainful (Kiatto).

Off the simmering road now hopping toads. Johnny fiddler ***** for bait .
The canoe awaits us two small school boys in our natural state. One seven one eight.

Pelicans survey slowly above where the river meets the sea A small ripple and down he goes. He knows where school is in for mackerel and terrapin. Bone fish too.
We small boys with no fear . Innocence a pole and cork. One hook apiece is our gear.
Knee deep in mire as we push of and jump. A paddle apiece as we stroke against the tide to traverse the emerald river wide. The far bank. My Aunt Doris's shack.

Man over board to tie of the. Bow.

A snack of tortillas and beans then up the river no fear. Fun and the fish
Sun and the wish for an endless Sunday. We hate Monday. Back the priests and nuns.Slate writing board and times tables.
Let's fish.
Let us dream.
Tied off in the mangrove shade.
Swatting horse flies quietly. Quietly?

Like bird dogs we study the floating cork.
A wiggle, a bob. A bob. Set the hook and out comes the prize.
Then more. More flapping underfoot.we can hardly.walk. The glee
A bonanza.
All fried up and crisp.Catch and release. What madness. Catch and consume.

Day is done in the Carribean sun.
Home eastward. The pitch road is more forgiving on bare feet now
with the September sun at our backs. A leisurely stroll back to the
house. No worries,

A bath  and change for the Sunday evening show.
The Thief Of Baghdad or  maybe El Cid.
The Duke Audie Murphy in a double header.

The walk home along the moonlit seaside.
To start another Halcyon stream.
Another time and place rooted firmly in my memory.
Read  THE RIVER ROCK. More from Memories of a childhood in Belize.
The golden tinge of sun pierced the cloud
But the mangrove held onto its dark cloak
She hid somewhere between the light and shadow
When from one irresistible daze I awoke.

Unbeknownst flamed up the rocks salt white
Dry since the waves receded beyond the *******
A cold loneliness crept up in the spell broken light
As if eons had passed without the sight of her.

Then one seagull’s spriteful fish dream shriek
Motioned me up from the vacuous stupor
Buzzed each sand grain all years’ unborn speak
Was to be seized this moment and tell her.

The wind having carried the voice of her name
Spread it across the mangrove and far
From the receding waves rose a rising flame
When in her hug beneath an acacia I found her.
In the meantime in the Állos kósmos or Ultramundi, Wonthelimar after hearing the speeches and paragraphs of the speakers saw from paradise how Calypso Lepidoptera appeared, approaching in great magnitudes on the dry land on the banks of the blue and golden stones of Skalá. In torrents of rushing from the water-sky with wind-water, by geomorphological hydraulics of the collapse of the irresistible capacity to harass each other in the ears of Seleuco's dialogues, after they piled up in the sneaking curds of him on the island of his speech. Right there it settled from the koelum or sky of the Lepidoptera from the Orofí or ceiling, on the natural arches of aeolian erosion and its devastating plumage, appearing in the subaerial splendor of Chauvet and its gloomy darkness, changing the morphology of the bank of Skalá turned into enchanted turquoise light also with Calypso nuances. From here Wonthelimar obscures the circumflex arc or circumflexes, which pierced and eroded the surface, piling up the ex-generals of Alexander the Great, to skewer them on the stump that was languidly seen supporting them, after the tides of Lepidoptera that avalanche in destined per capita towards the destined underworld of Wonthelimar.

Wonthelimar was separated from everyone by the moat that was separated from the gods of the surface, but now where the supporters of Seleucus were predestined by imbibing themselves in the bilocated kingdom of Chauvet and its darkness, where they were put into agreements of suitability and clarity of words discursive for the eagerness to persuade his major general. But they all fell into the middle of a dark Ultraworld, judging themselves to be dying in stockpiles of biosystems where no one helped them and gave them some indication or diagnosis of being separated from the canopy that drained them from spectral affairs, speaking as vivid visions of benefits and sovereignties that escaped from themselves without contemplation or quietism of the human race, which procreates xenophobia to kings without throne or nation. Under the Attic, calendar were the months here were only eighth, Anthesterion, received them with the name directly of the main festival celebrated in this month, Anthesteria. In goods of name contests in the semester of Pyanepsia, Thargelia, and Skira where they were relatively significant, in some of the greatest celebrations in the life of a Polis, which is not recognized in the name of the month. Some sparkled in the sound of the Great Dionysia celebrated in Elaphebolion (ninth month), and the Panathenaia in which they are only indirectly recognized in Hekatombaion (month one), named after the hecatomb, of the sacrifice of "one hundred oxen" celebrated at night. End of the Panathenaia. This is where the suspicious fondness of both families of Seleucus and Alexander the Great differed in the accent that marks the written line of the infra Polis, where the leaders of Haides or Hades are lost, for the purposes of Aïdes, as not indivisible, but with the presence of Wonthelimar, who is invisible but epically static on his balustrade in all the rings that chorally wore them for each patronage of the diádocos generals, even so he had betrayed the Hellenic legacy, by a Hellenic-Orthodox one in the disappearance of Alexander the Great in Babylon without knowing that it had been rescued by Wonthelimar, surpassing the limits of the rings of stefánes ibix, or Aros de íbiz, as nano kvantikoí daktýlioi, quantum nano-ring that augured to sensitize the dermis of its carpal phalanges, from the eighth, Anthesterion to Elaphebolion (ninth month), minus the one hundred and twenty days of gestation in a month of the attic of imníbiz, that it was of wise advice to receive him in the new engend rivers of Wonthelimar in the depths and bundles of marrow with gestation forms of an Ibex goat, with their embedded bases of stalagmites, filing the meaning of each life that was lodged in the depths of the caves and its opacity. The Eygues of Valdaine was the Acheron, but with half the deceased who sat in rows and unleashed their laurels that possessed poor aids tormented by mandrake root hands.

The underworld was a swamp that covered the heels of the diádocos in the immense blackness of the cavern that wounded them one and the other with its Kopis, by more than a hundred blows and slashes that covered them with mud and moans in their buried half bodies. That they had been intruded from linear entrances to the underworld of Wonthelimar. In the thick musts of the quagmire where objects with ornaments of fear and cavalier materiality lay, such mangrove deserts satiated with gloomy fibromyalgia and amnesia, refiguring in the wandering bones, that sinned in lights and destinies that were adopted in the sub-world with incorporeal needs., more than the exhaustion that tore the skeletal muscle of each one behind the meager compromise openings, in the strong ligaments of the host Wonthelimar that took them at forced steps towards paradises where there will never be consciousness from a Theseus typology, but from a sub taxonomy - Verthian mythological, for purposes and among others that unleash it by propelling self-infernos that are not those born by a Macedonian force or Satrap into puny kings turned into a servile, mute and decayed.

It is necessary, that solitude of all the entrances from the abyss into which they fell, was titanic and of ultraphobic acquiescent inspiration, and in the acid gestures of search of Persephone or Aerse that in random gestures fled from their persecutors, like females who ended fleeing from themselves falling into the back room where the end of souls is never exceeded or Psyché re emigrating from the punishments of a satire or a static that resulted in a ghostly wandering, or in tendentious spinners that tribulated in belated bundles of repentance. From primitive times, subjugations have been longed for in kings who would never think of leaving their cracks and washing their hands behind the backs of others who stood by, leaving the courage to lose themselves in the perversity of a body deposited in the Tartars, having to give them their prehistoric debts and meadows of carpeted debts and caged rooms.

The generals commanded by Seleucus walked barefoot along with the stump that wounded them in seams for their plantar areas, and in extreme distress, they did not dare to ask mercy from the cave host who transported them through the deep pit of perpetuity, where the frigid bullet of angina of Wothelimar, filled them with memories that protected their survival. In unworthy caprice and watery *****,… it ran frivolously down their legs, even after each impulse to recover the flashes of estimating being scared of oneself, after finding dead fruits subsisted halfway, feeling voices from the origin of the abyss that I quoted them.

Etréstles says: "Mashiach allow me to enter this grave, I do not know if I should go to rescue them, because I know what will happen..., I only ask that if I enter with courage, help me to find the same light of the exit, with the same memory of not to waste arrests, and not to lose myself in my entrustment by those who I know will not return”

Behind some Sabine poplars, it is seen how the elytra of the Lepidoptera were opened for those who crossed from the darkness without the appearance of their fruitful eyes that tickled praises of surrender, and not of ibid in the ibid that surrounded them, as if they were violated that heal at the moment when their faces departed from the miracle of privacy, and from the solitude decreed of non-existent company, companionship calming any dogmatic symptoms and hypoxia that the glimpse of the Eygues and the Acheron left them, further behind in which Saint John the Apostle and Vernarth, Reader and Petrobus to bring Etréstles back.

Saint John the Apostle says: “Vernarth go for your brother,… he wants to protect the souls of Seleucus and his comrades, go soon because there is little left to fill them with darkness which will even besiege in their reasoning and anti homelands that will not be from the din of the campanile, out of tune with joy that runs on the graces of the gift that frees you from the worst virus by not being anti-viral… ”.

Vernarth replies: “Etréstles is the slogan of Erebus, perhaps of Bumodos…, I have to stop him for his profession, since the comrades of Seleuco will not return, the effigies of Wonthelimar have made them of his children in Ultramundi, and what is Solstice of the underworld, it is only a small Sun that fits in the buttonhole of the orthogonal slot that confines it”.

At that time Raeder paraded where he before they reached the omega of the gully pit, running swiftly over the eyelets of Wonthelimar, leaving both completely naked, to tear them away from the contrived spell and bring Etrestles back all the way together and running., but both stripped of lightness and acceleration escaped from the centripetal bodies. After the tortured walls of the pit, they no longer supported themselves in their Skotos or Erebo of Wothelimar in such a primordial deity of this theogonic and fantastic event in the bilocated cavern of Chauvet in Skalá. Here all the densities and units of physical genres, from above and below surrounded them in the thick sulfur atmosphere, Ananké in such a goddess of inevitability ran after all who tried to reverse the situation of the diádocos, for the purpose of consenting their paragraphs Hellenics and to save their lives, but the mother of the Moiras went behind Etréstles and Vernarth along with Rader and Petrobus who were basking in the glow of Persephone that imbued them as they stagnated drinking mead with the Canephores who followed him. From this cryptic moment or from the bombastic insignia of Crete, Kanti's trotting from his Cretan figure was felt united with the Lepidoptera Calypso, redeeming Demeter from her crying on the edge of some Bern olive trees, emptier now that the last gradients of the agonic and venous voices in the hilarious of some diádocos that were completely absorbed by the benevolent illusion of Wonthelimar, snowy in the harrowing tenuity of his gestures and of the great Iberian that took them towards the heights of the hillocks and towards the Ultramundi that It turned them into proles of the mountainous areas, and into super aquatic monsters with thousands of loose eyes in the arches of the generals bleating, which transposed ****** subjugations of primal deities, and philastics of phantasmagorical genres of Hellas that is plucked from the peritoneum of their stomachs, and that guttural eradicated them from the blue adrenaline of Apollo.

This odyssey dispelled the orthogonal lines of the poetic affliction of those who could see the sunset and the Spyché ***** that antagonized Ananké's numinous efforts to extubate them, and perhaps exile them to the Theban plains to graze Achaeans of the first degree alongside Shamash. Lamenting of young afternoons and of the abysmal with beautiful hair of the generous of effects, swampy and of feverish Hadesian or Hade's rounds that crippled their districts, they emanated from some Marie Curie junk and vapors radiating this Parapsychological Quantum to them from their own holy final body., for a virtuous and rout of the Ultramundis of Wonthelimar.
Wonthelimar Ultramundi
Joey  Dec 2014
Masquerade
Joey Dec 2014
It was a Masquerade, she said: a place we could go to hide. I wasn't in fright of her. I had it all under control. She took me by the hand, softly, that cold summer morning. The confusion that surrounded us allowed us to see more clearly. We were both wearing horse masks, and she whinnied at me so eagerly. The apple tasted bitter, but when I licked her lips, I felt the sugary sweetness of saliva mixed with cake crumbs and wine. We flirted. We sang together. I saw her naked, twice. When she took off her clothes and threw her tights around my head, I couldn't see the flesh she flaunted to the rest of the room. She licked my chin, all the way up to the tip of my mask, lifting it from my skull with her tongue. When her song was sung, I wallowed in pity and doubt. Her father chased me from the balcony. I climbed faster than he and escaped with my life, barely. The walk through the mangrove was dusty, and spiders kept climbing down my back, spinning their threads along my spine. I contemplated my mirage in the rippling waters before taking the final steps into my doorway. Looking up, greeted by elephants, tigers, peacocks and pigs. They strangled me with their elixirs, and we danced with the moon until our legs abandoned us.
SomethingRascal Jul 2016
Poison the well.

We do all that we can.
Not for the great return,
no,
but to know.

I'm good for a while I'm last.
The plump moon lights up my room.

My mind is now a flat graph
no desire no lust no dream

the cold winds from the rumbling sea
make no dent on me
I look at my palms
and see the cracked floor
gnarled roots of mangrove on the wall
blend seamlessly with all I have
like once I had her in this room
love together
taking wingless flight to the moon
but now I more like sitting here
prospecting no words to rhyme
not angered at the blankness
for in this vacuous moonlight
I wait without a hope of gain
without a despair of loss
unconstrained for time
contoured by fireflies
alone
recounting a new beginning
from the end.
bayou baby

She comes from the swamplands
Back in the mangrove
Back where the stories say
Magic runs wild
The devil plays host
And all who visit must stay

Witches and Zombies
Together by night
Gators and Snakes there as well
The river, it changes
Cut you off in a flash
And then you end up in hell

Hair as black as Kentucky Coal
And eyes green as the sea
She's the witch queen of the swamp to most
But, she's a Bayou Baby to me
Born out of the magic's world
Where the mystic world runs free
She's the witch queen of the swamp to most
But, she's a Bayou Baby to me

She comes to town
to get supplies
That's where I saw her first
I followed close
Back to the swamp
And saw her do her worst

A simple boat
A single lamp
An oarsmen, long, long dead
A different route
Through water black
To a place where most folks dread

Hair as black as Kentucky Coal
And eyes green as the sea
She's the witch queen of the swamp to most
But, she's a Bayou Baby to me
Born out of the magic's world
Where the mystic world runs free
She's the witch queen of the swamp to most
But, she's a Bayou Baby to me

She saw me
And I looked back
She knew that I would follow
She slowed down
Her travel home
And she trapped me in the hollow

I never told
Another soul
Of who I go to see
I travel out
At night alone
My Bayou Baby waits for me


Hair as black as Kentucky Coal
And eyes green as the sea
She's the witch queen of the swamp to most
But, she's a Bayou Baby to me
Born out of the magic's world
Where the mystic world runs free
She's the witch queen of the swamp to most
But, she's a Bayou Baby to me

— The End —