Penned on watermarked cotton paper
Cursive letters script the words
of a surrendering rhythmic rhyme.
The ardent sonata was written
by the light of a Blue Moon’s shine.

The blood red ink bled through
the white wrinkled cotton pages;
musical notes dried by the warmth
of glowing Moon Beams radiance
in the subtle pollination breeze...

The maestro Coyote’s howl cried out!

Instinctively rousing the stillness of the night;
       a feral essence echoed
       through the eerie silence
       of the distant horizon,
bringing helpless lovers to their knees.

The words to the Cabernet Sauvignon
       stained midnight  lullaby,
       were emotions quilled,
       blending an aura accenting
       organic warmth of tones...

       The native maple trees'
flowering canopies of Spring
released a dusty yellow pollen
onto the watermarked cotton sheets.

In a moment of rapturous intimacy,
       an elixir of intoxicating bliss
illumined the achingly euphoric moments.
A natural untamed wildness was exhaled;
       savored ecstasy released
       into a passionate song of love …

That poignant melody forever lingers,
       like hieroglyphics on the walls
of some long lost abandoned cave.

Engraved, etched, brushed and stroked
       onto the brattice canvas
       of a musical Minstrel’s
            melodic montage ...

       Watch the artiste’s fingers
       prancing graceful ballet
       Worn down catgut strings

                                *moan
          
     ­                  weep

              purr**

       crying out lustfully.
     as if it were
    enraptured lovers'
  breathless sighs

  the rhythm’s cadence
whispers a masterpiece
       in an infinite
       harmonious time...

       The tempo’s lines
                Phrasing…

                 ...hush...!

             ♪♫♪ ~ ♫  ♪♪

        Listen to the pictures flow...
Listen to the weeping guitar strings
      of the passionate troubadour
stroking the metaphorical canvas scene.

       The ebb and flow
       of the musical rhythm's throb
arouse the Blue Moon’s hypnotic  allure,
    throwing incandescent shadows
    that dance around Moonbeams.

Joyfully twirling, blissfully embracing
in the blossoming Forget-me-not fields;
            Bluebonnet Lupine
               swirl and tango
       with the moonlit breeze.

       Lilacs fragrant aroma drifts
with spring’s churning romantic haze;
rekindling this fleeting memories recital.
The Minstrel and the Minstrel’s song
         now yearn to be set free ~

      Timbre without reverberation …
The twilight serenade was never penned
  to be hidden from the Nightingale

A romantic moment’s sorrowful lament
to be abandoned like a broken dream;
   fading unnoticed into forevermore ―
      Unsung,  unsaid, unreleased,
                     unrequited
                through eternity…

              The maestro Coyote
       is a wilderness troubadour
       illumined under the gloaming
               full moon’s spell.

                Howling soulfully...
               wailing impulsively ~
              ... crying hopefully
             pleading mournfully
                     lamenting
the Minstrel’s breathless cadenza ...

A bitter sweet musical embryo of love
                 found and lost
                       below
           the full Blue Moon’s
               glistening light…



©  H.  Rivers ... 2012, 2013
           all rights reserved

"It's just one cut,"
said the sharp lady doctor before language
melted off her clipboard and the operating lamps
grew huge and spilled their bright innards into my eyes.

I lay on the cold tiled floor of the museum.
One monstrous cut -- the white shark suspended
above in a last hungry lunge yawns, belly open.
Around me what a wide-eyed fisherman pulled out:
old tires, whale-oil lamps, Damien Hirst, bones upon bones.
Damien sits on a tire, bored as hell. See the jagged edges,
he says, they pulled him into our cold afterlife
and cut while he suffocated, explosive oxygen flooding
his lungs from the wrong direction.

Later, the doctors showed me
what had for so long kicked and screamed to be out.
Liver-colored, swollen, wrapped in catgut, it was not
as expected. Others had promised ground seaglass,
poppyseed freckles, huge lungs like fibrous balloons
for flying or spouting poetry nonstop in day-long stretches.
Where were my eyes?
It was supposed to have my eyes.

A day in the life of an alley cat, struck dead on the least busy street in the smallest town in Nebraska.
1 am: Druggy, *** you money, ******, don't deserve love, not easy to tell mom. I think of you. Your lungs are begging for my scold. Control is the word you use when no other fits the sentence. You occupy my mind when I am restless, testing the limits of kindness and low voices.
4 am: Your smile, the warmest hot chocolate of your eyes, your knuckles, the baby fat that melted from you, it haunts me. It's like I caught of a glimpse of the wrong angel, the half rotten, beyond gone, but still glowing angel. I killed you with a .45 and a gallon of mouthwash. You dripped into the Earth as a puddle beneath my toes. Gracious Lord, do not forgive me. I know I don't.
8 am: Insomnia without poetry. Tired without body. Maggots without mouths. Catholic priest, without sympathy. God without mercy. Drug abuse, without the realization of undignified addiction. Suicide without the comfort of killing, certainty.
3 pm: Sentiment, true and real, above annoyance and protectiveness. I am now a ghost above a body, finally weightless, finally free of His hands.
6 pm: Joy breaks open like a candy, soft center.
10 pm: Life tears my fingers open, unwraps the flesh from bone like Christmas. I feel my tongue fall out. Dusty antique radios are cleaned, losing authenticity. Their songs scream, sounding a lot like Billy Joel, after the catgut snaps. I feel my mind crawl out of the china cabinet.
11 pm: Nothing. There's really nothing to say at all.

My sister's friend broke his back
when he wrecked his car.
The night of, I met her, coming in from work late,
she was fumbling across the gravel to her car in the dark,
murmured a few words,
when I asked her where she was going.
Mum told me someone had called.
I remembered
Dad meeting me in the kitchen
murmuring a few words,
Making a few phone calls, late.

The next day
I went with her.
Walking along all to familiar hospital halls.
I remembered playing Amazing Grace
as a woman died,
her friend's eyes, glass.
And the man who told me my
Catgut and horsehair
sounded like angel's singing.
I thought it sounded hollow,
empty, cold,
like the corridors.

The ICU hummed quietly with beeps and whispers.  
His mother thanked us for coming
she embraced us, pressing her soft body against our ribs.
He lay there honest, disheveled.
The morphine loosened his tongue.
He told my sister he loved her,
over and over again.
"Your sister is great. Don't you just love her? I love her."
he told me.
She held his hand, blushing.
I remembered your voice
on the other end of the phone line,
scattered, your tongue loose and
saying anything that fell into your mouth
half-formed thoughts
mis-pronounced words,
and a thousand impotent
"Don't worry"s.

He healed.
Left hospital after a few weeks.
My sister had to tell him
she didn't love him like that.
and he hated her for it.
You left a few weeks after,
said you loved to easily.
I couldn't hate you.
But I also couldn't love you
like that.

Sing my song of forgetting,
Of lips never wrong, never upsetting,
Sing the wine-infused air along,
From the violin’s grapevine song,
Purely gifted as the altar wine and alms
Of the Santa Maria della Visitazione,
A cadenza from the catgut of stringed waves,
     The vibrato in polyphonic staves across the lagoon,
          Amid the psaltery sway of submerged algae plumes,
               Like the strident tails of the horses of Neptune,
Or the teardrop-surge of the glass chandeliers of Murano,
The same powdered hue of Venetian sky,
As bluebirds fallen into their own drowned tune,  
As absence awash over the sun-scattered tombs of Olympus.

Sing with a felt-tipped tongue,
So my song of forgetting is never undone.

It always starts with a Woman;
a woman with skin like sweet milk chocolate.
A woman with a voice like warm honey on a cold dark night
And brown eyes in which a man might comfortably lose his soul.

The club was cold; not much of a club really;
A drafty old barn of a building somewhere in Arkansas
A big barrel half filled with Kerosene was lit to heat the hall.
The Young black folk of the town were gathered around

Young B.B. King was playing the blues, on a guitar with no name.
That was when the fight broke out on the dance floor.
two strong men doing battle over a woman who worked at the club.
It always starts with a woman.

Punches were exchanged; in the melee someone kicked over that barrel
And fire, like a river, roared across the floor.
Everybody started to run for the only open exit.
B.B. King ran too, until he recalled he had forgotten his guitar.

She was nothing special except for the man who played her
The man who coaxed sweet sad sounds from every catgut string.
King wasn’t a rich man and that guitar was his meal ticket
So he raced back through the flames.

Just as he retrieved his guitar, the building began
Its slow sad collapse into ash and embers
He barely escaped with his life and his guitar.

Standing outside in the cold night
Looking on the ruins of what had been a good paying gig.
That was when he met Lucille;
She was the barmaid with the sweet milk chocolate skin
And a voice like warm honey on a cold dark night;
Those two men had just fought and died over
a pleasure that neither would ever possess.

That was when B.B. King christened that old beat up guitar
“Lucille”:
To remind him of this night he almost died.
to remind him never to do something that stupid again.
Like I was saying, it always starts with a woman.

There is something wrong with my viola
for every time I tune it up
the bridge does start to creak

Oh the sweet sound of horse hair on catgut
the resin rising with every stroke of my bow
but I still hear that creaking bridge

My sweetheart is snug against my neck and chin
the music that I make comes from deep within
yet my only vex is my creaky bridge


By Christos Andreas Kourtis aka NeonSolaris

I've allowed these sounds space
To find a home in between my ears
Metal Machine
Music of the Spheres
Bass digging deep, rattling intestines
Unfamiliar sounds to boggle the mind
Calm the beast and soothe the breast
No catgut drawn across string
Or human muscle powering the beat
Electricity, electronic alchemy
Like lightning streaking across the night sky
Left to right, blink and you'll miss it
Sonic ice, freezing sheen, dripping into sharp daggers
They fall and impale
This is the sound they make
When cold first hits the brain

He played his air on a g-string, mine.
I rapidly moved away.
His teeth remained attached.
hereby  to aforementioned string.

I played mine on an e-string...
Two of us together made our heir, on missing teeth and broken strings.
Just doing our string things.

EGBDF
Slaves to staves.
Cleft palettes.
Catgut and nylons,
No, not stockings.
(c)Livvi

It is not easy to hold a cat
under ones arm, everyone
knows that and they bend
in the middle just to make
it more difficult.

Plus they claw your jumper
or worse they might fang you
with their teeth.

At night, alley cats make an
awful racket always out of tune
reminds me of when I began
to learn to play my acoustic.

The neighbours complained
constantly, but I persisted, I
had to, I was alone, it was
my companion, felt nice to
the touch, warm with an hour
glass figure like a young lady.

Even standing against the wall
it is as nice a piece of furniture
as one could wish for, mine has
a name, Tarugi because she is
an anagram.

She wears a Dutch Capo sometimes
and a chastity belt, but what is most
interesting is that once when I had
guests for lunch only to discover
that I had no way of grating
The Parmesan™ over the Spagetti,
I began to panic but Tarugi came
to the rescue by rasping the
cheese on the strings of Fret one.

It was a perfect solution.

Besides all that, she has a womb
where music gestates, she also has
six umbilical chords. It is through her
navel she resonates. Her ancestors
came from Anatolia she’s Turkish,
her mother was Sophia from Marmara.

          Otto, the man was her dad.

Silly, silly me. Mind of my own,
swimmingly setting bubbles of simile loose
in your
mind, in factors felt as real as any thought you thought.

as real as any thought you thought, this
particular, alien idea,
emerging, critique click cliché YES, all the mises, pro
liberality, certain and absolute solutions to UV salves

"Sunshine, came softly…"
The alienated minds of the children purchase in 1948,
was anticipated, seen as a future path,
to negotiate, eh, take the bold leap
over the briars, or dare
to follow the hounds,
and crawl into the chapparal so similar to home.

¿Hoy, Compa, te acuerdas… to you do you recall…

muse, imp, urge, will to know, while knowing nothing,

no good no ill, only wonder, and then not wonder if, but what?

Are you- with or con- knowledge or science, not of, or…
loving me for being alien,
nothing near real,

a familiar feeling, with no words clinging
in hope of some idle thoughts you hung out to dry,
as washed grocery bags, set to trap answers
blown by winds named now for saints,
then for powers, real as any, these
winds
returning on circuits predicted by AI.

Santa Anna warning,  strange weather all the elders say,
in the past,
these winds were earlier, by a moon,
and they often followed dry storms of lightning and thunder
fanning any smoking flax to vibrant flame,

claim the promise, Yes, all
the promises given the endurer to the end,

the only hero you personally know, inside out, is you.
Should you play a standard trope,
or seek the character's principle

shape, in formed from thought, Toth, is said to have thought

Cathar, hide, and watch, we may ask Google, we need not own
the knowing, we need not hide the hoarded secrets,
required lessons, treasured knacks and tricks for pulling wire

fine as any spider's silk, listening in every palace, believe me,
we lace the planet in silken sensing threads, singing windsongs

silly old tuners, hear for practice, the lightest test touch
just
there at the base of the thought, fiddlesticks, catgut crossing
spider kites
eyes tight to the squint, discerning gleams
seen
there, then.
You still see that morning meadow with gold in its mouth,
kiting spider trails, wet with dew, we, atop the old stile,
standing, stone still, staring at raw beauty
saying, try to remember…

In order to feel that,
one must eschew dog
in favour of cat food,
install a ski lift,
give short change and
shorter shrift,
paint palindromes
torch light garden gnomes
take out pay day loans
and skip town.

It surely follows on that
when the day has gone
the night appears,
and owls eyes scan the
fields for mice.

I have nine lives
used up one
and twice I've nearly split
from number two,

it's the catgut or rotgut
or the garden hut for me
where no one sees the
madness in my eyes,

there's only reflected light
in these cats eyes

List to the green light, little boat
Always toward my Starboard Home
Home in my fevered brain
Away from tomorrow's surgery
In this blue liquid dream of escape
Where the end of the story is many shiny days
And not possible death on a table
A table serving open hearts
And scalpels in gleaming chrome
    Sponges and stitches of blackened catgut
    That may or may not promise tomorrows

Float me to survival . . . my tiny green light of hope
Help me arrive at my Starboard Home

Done for the day
and I'm sure
that I have been.

It'll be catgut or rotgut
that gets me in the end

They say,
never give a sucker an
even break and I take
that to heart,
if there's one born every
minute
that's a lot of suckers.

Find me in the classified
under certified.

I'd gladly take the 28 days
outa the ways of everyone
if only to get on
with myself.


to find that happiness
is a draw on a state of mind
impossible to understand
how my mind found it
but find it
it did.

Now to get on with it
forget the *******
and enjoy every moment.