It was also my violent heart that broke,
falling down the front hall stairs.
It was also a message I never spoke,
calling, riser after riser, who cares

about you, who cares, splintering up
the hip that was merely made of crystal,
the post of it and also the cup.
I exploded in the hallway like a pistol.

So I fell apart. So I came all undone.
Yes. I was like a box of dog bones.
But now they've wrapped me in like a nun.
Burst like firecrackers! Held like stones!

What a feat sailing queerly like Icarus
until the tempest undid me and I broke.
The ambulance drivers made such a fuss.
But when I cried, "Wait for my courage!" they smoked

and then they placed me, tied me up on their plate,
and wheeled me out to their coffin, my nest.
Slowly the siren slowly the hearse, sedate
as a dowager. At the E. W. they cut off my dress.

I cried, "Oh Jesus, help me! Oh Jesus Christ!"
and the nurse replied, "Wrong name. My name
is Barbara," and hung me in an odd device,
a buck's extension and a Balkan overhead frame.

The orthopedic man declared,
"You'll be down for a year." His scoop. His news.
He opened the skin. He scraped. He pared
and drilled through bone for his four-inch screws.

That takes brute strength like pushing a cow
up hill. I tell you, it takes skill
and bedside charm and all that know how.
The body is a **** hard thing to ****.

But please don't touch or jiggle my bed.
I'm Ethan Frome's wife. I'll move when I'm able.
The T. V. hangs from the wall like a moose head.
I hide a pint of bourbon in my bedside table.

A bird full of bones, now I'm held by a sand bag.
The fracture was twice. The fracture was double.
The days are horizontal. The days are a drag.
All of the skeleton in me is in trouble.

Across the hall is the bedpan station.
The ***** and stools pass hourly by my head
in silver bowls. They flush in unison
in the autoclave. My one dozen roses are dead.

The have ceased to *******. They hang
there like little dried up blood clots.
And the heart too, that *******, how it sang
once. How it thought it could call the shots!

Understand what happened the day I fell.
My heart had stammered and hungered at
a marriage feast until the angel of hell
turned me into the punisher, the acrobat.

My bones are loose as clothespins,
as abandoned as dolls in a toy shop
and my heart, old hunger motor, with its sins
revved up like an engine that would not stop.

And now I spend all day taking care
of my body, that baby. Its cargo is scarred.
I anoint the bedpan. I brush my hair,
waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard,

for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart
and were ******* together. They will knit.
And the other corpse, the fractured heart,
I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.

Yet lie a fire alarm it waits to be known.
It is wired. In it many colors are stored.
While my body's in prison, heart cells alone
have multiplied. My bones are merely bored

with all this waiting around. But the heart,
this child of myself that resides in the flesh,
this ultimate signature of the me, the start
of my blindness and sleep, builds a death creche.

The figures are placed at the grave of my bones.
All figures knowing it is the other death
they came for. Each figure standing alone.
The heart burst with love and lost its breath.

This little town, this little country is real
and thus it is so of the post and the cup
and thus of the violent heart. The zeal
of my house doth eat me up.

The female temple.
Hollow shell in the minds of men.
An autoclave
for a belly, a copy-and-paste mind
of blasphemies. A page
in man's contradictive bible. Just blondes and brunettes.
Just virgins and non-virgins.
Nothing more than breathing incubators.
I am a person, I have a brain, I say.
They smile at me with a condescending
wink. A nod. Good girl, well done.
They tousle my hair. Well fine, boys.
Watch me climb the ladder with one hand,
backwards, in heels. When I reach the top
I'll ram these six inch Louboutins
straight through your hearts.

It was the eve of a black obsidian night
full purple moon and stars shone bright
  the howl of one lone wolf filled frigid air
damp cold mist needed down outerwear.

The screaming banchee's breath vapor
was noxious green befitting the caper
  of scaring all children by his loud noise
of trick or treating little girls and boys.

A massive link ink wrought iron fence
surrounds eerie mansion in suspense
  Frankinstein pushes thru spider webs
while a monster exercises quadriceps.

A ghost wanders in Cemetery's grave
and a pumpkin avoided an autoclave
  the doors began to creak very loudly
a Raven and Owl sang quite proudly

Slick sleek ebony crows sit atop a roof
while another swoops, soars like a goof
  do listen, you can hear their shrill echo
tombstone-songs by mummy's gecko


© Carmela M. Patterson

BRUSH

Brush free the carpet
of mud and fluff.

Let’s brush off the hurtful comment too,
that snide remark, those graceless words.

We’re cleaning yet collecting,
straightening up, taking out the dirt.
Repositioning dust. Always temporary,
never the same, brush, brush,
to and fro, again – again - again.


SCOOP

The ice cream tub has one
to make the portion fair
for that ever-observant,
pernickety child.

When walking the dog,
we scoop the ****.
carrying the plastic bag
to the waiting wanting bin.

Yet the all-important wooden
scoop is made from a block
of a 2 by 3, with chisel, gouge
and a steady hand.

This farmer’s friend, this open spoon,
lives in darkness and under the lid
of the deep grain bin,
to feed white chickens.


POKE

Getting it out,
placing it right –
but much is trial & error.
If it won’t go in,
give it a poke . . .
and it might.

Nowadays it’s a software app
to help you cheat at on-line games
and , God forbid, an important tool
in the tattooist’s bag – the hand poke,
liner and shader with standard
8 – 32 thumb screws and
completely autoclave able.


CUT

Hogwimpering drunk
or ****** out of mind.
Seventies slang for
individual incapacitation.

A cut can hurt,
display the inner
through incision
in the outer.
Reveals, opens up,
allows a division from
one to another.

This cut of meat on the slab?
For you, madam?
I can cut it up
nice and small
for the baby to chew.


RAKE

Lying there in the long summer grass,
it needs standing up, its teeth cleaned.
When autumn comes it redeems itself,
clearing the path, letting the lawn breath.

In the hand of sculptor, ceramicist, modeller
it fashions variously, cuts, pulls away, gouges,
scrapes, a multi-purpose stick with two ends:
of wrapped wire, of ribboned steel.


LOOK

To make sure it’s right:
correct and straight,
balanced, in proportion.
The magnifier helps,
the camera too,
getting the angle,
the position , the light
gauged . . . with a little looking.
You have to look,
see?


HIT

Whatever needs placing firmly,
needs fixing permanently,
can do with a hit (or two).
A nail with a hammer,
a door with a foot,
it could be a winner,
and right on target,
strike out the opposition,
disable the enemy.
A killer noun.
I prefer the verb.

I had went to visit some friends
some acquaintances
these people i used to know
I was a ghost in my hometown,
where no one used my given name.
they brought me in through a screen door and
sat me down in the kitchen.
their voices were like underwater sounds
they told me to be still while he said hello.
I looked down a flight of basement stairs
where bathed in a blue light like Chopin’s  no. 19 in E minor
sat a tiger burning bright.
up the stairs it bounded forth in muted strides
to the floor it pinned me under protest
in cemetery stillness it said hello.
the kitchen was an autoclave
I never asked for help.

my hometown calls to me in my sleep
like an indian death wail on a buffalo robe
so my eyes sink back into the firmament.
bathing in the predawn light
my bones are an old horse I ride,
I score one for the body then I get onto a plane
then I score one for the body and I get onto a plane
then i score one for the body as it lays dying without complaint.
kneeling before the Holy Cross by the roadside
I take note of really just how much room there is on the bed beside me
strange bedfellows are I and the space I’ve been given.
there is a queen sized outer darkness within my twin sized
gestures of self control.
the dusk is day now and the moon is the sun
and my hometown calls to me like Jericho’s Trumpet
sounding from inside the Pale.

in my hometown I am a pilgrim
I saunter towards the seaboard
where the docks hold greek columns that soar into the air
like the elephant’s legs in Salvador Dali’s “The Temptation of St. Anthony”.
nostalgia burns my throat like acids and bases
and the columns lead up to nowhere and this place isn’t
how i remember it beyond the Pale.
limping with thin soles
dragging a dull hypothalamus like a dead mule chained to my ankle
we would sit and watch our forefathers stare at the static on the TV
from their arm chairs in the dark.
we would offer them coffee and ask how their day was and they
would tell us that sometimes they feel like a lone alley cat.
It’s like my buddy's roommate when I would go to visit; always alone inside his room.
sometimes I would see him around town and say hello and notice his face and
see that he was still alone inside his room.

well, I have skin in the game and I have a reputation
and i’m attached to my non-attachment.
sometimes a subtle brand of disgust creeps in to replace my avarice
and sometimes I starve to death holding a long handled spoon
seated at Caligula’s table.
sometimes i can’t tell their maidenhood from their madness
so i hoard one for the body.
sometimes i remember the way bees will talk to each other by dancing
and how old men will tell you they’re afraid to die.
Sometimes I hand a *** a 20 and weep as I watch him fold it
into an origami crane.

while I was in town I looked up my former landlord
I held a fondness for the times when they didn’t use my given name.
I wanted to see my old room and I had kept a raven back then and
he assured me it was still around.
the room was now and attic and was much bigger than I had held it
in my memory, vast almost.
I ask the dust as it was thick upon the floor boards and something
felt abandoned in the air.
the roof was in disrepair and one whole side was nearly completely gone.
tranquil ribbons of cirrus clouds stood in the sky through the roof like
a child’s drawing.
“Is it like you remember?”, he asked.
“Way over in the corner there was a couch my brother would sometimes sit in” I replied.
I asked after my raven and he pointed to the part of the roof that still was.
from the shadows came a bird song like an irish low whistle from above the Pale.
“That doesn’t sound like him”, I said (more to myself than to my host),
“that’s an owl or something.”

I hung you like a lantern in my dark cave
worshipped at your feet but made you my slave
sterilized my heart inside an old autoclave
and tattooed my soul so I would become brave

tried to teach the teacher about genuine apology
attempted to outrun the runner with finicky philosphy
glued the pieces together to make a seamless epiphany
and ended up laughing at myself amidst the general cacophony

I created this mess when I was not at my best
and instead of looking to you now I see right through you
nightmares of yoy dying have turned to desires that leave me crying
I pray that the Rapture may come to steal you away or take me from
the past at last is gone.

I walked the rockiest path that I could find
in an effort to toughen my soles and strengthen my mind
I kept my eyes peeled in case I found a sign
that with eyes wide open I had not been rendered blind

When I reached a plateau I thought of resting
but when you stay long enough you start to think of nesting
watching the birds overhead reminded me of cresting
no rest for the weary testers during testing

My Father used to say on a day like today,
'the sky looks promising'
and I would often think.
promising what?

but expressions like this are by far
the little things I remember the most
and as I looked out this morning
I thought to myself,
'the sky looks promising'

interesting.