My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,
My tears like vinegar,
Or the bitter blinking yellow
Of an acetic star.

Tonight the caustic wind, love,
Gossips late and soon,
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of
The sour lemon moon.

While like an early summer plum,
Puny, green, and ****,
Droops upon its wizened stem
My lean, unripened heart.

by Damon G

. glum, morose, surly, sulky, crabbed, saturnine, gloomy mean showing a forbidding or disagreeable mood. sullen implies a silent ill humor and a refusal to be sociable
    I'M BECOMING UNWOUND
. glum suggests a silent dispiritedness . morose adds to glum an element of bitterness or misanthropy
    I NEED SOMETHING TO HAPPEN
. surly implies gruffness and sullenness of speech or manner
    A VIOLENT THING, EVEN
. sulky suggests childish resentment expressed in peevish sullenness . crabbed applies to a forbidding morose harshness of manner
   THE CRUSH OF A BREAKDOWN
. saturnine describes a heavy forbidding aspect or suggests a bitter disposition
   A REASON TO WANT TO
. gloomy implies a depression in mood making for seeming sullenness or glumness .
   GET UP AGAIN

KUSTA BEN LUKA is my name, I write
To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow-roysterer once,
Now the good Caliph's learned Treasurer,
And for no ear but his.
Carry this letter
Through the great gallery of the Treasure House
Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured
But brilliant as the night's embroidery,
And wait war's music; pass the little gallery;
Pass books of learning from Byzantium
Written in gold upon a purple stain,
And pause at last, I was about to say,
At the great book of Sappho's song; but no,
For should you leave my letter there, a boy's
Love-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon it
And let it fall unnoticed to the floor.
pause at the Treatise of parmenides
And hide it there, for Caiphs to world's end
Must keep that perfect, as they keep her song,
So great its fame.
When fitting time has passed
The parchment will disclose to some learned man
A mystery that else had found no chronicler
But the wild Bedouin.  Though I approve
Those wanderers that welcomed in their tents
What great Harun Al-Rashid, occupied
With Persian embassy or Grecian war,
Must needs neglect, I cannot hide the truth
That wandering in a desert, featureless
As air under a wing, can give birds' wit.
In after time they will speak much of me
And speak but fantasy.  Recall the year
When our beloved Caliph put to death
His Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason:
"If but the shirt upon my body knew it
I'd tear it off and throw it in the fire.'
That speech was all that the town knew, but he
Seemed for a while to have grown young again;
Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer's friends,
That none might know that he was conscience-struck --
But that s a traitor's thought.  Enough for me
That in the early summer of the year
The mightiest of the princes of the world
Came to the least considered of his courtiers;
Sat down upon the fountain's marble edge,
One hand amid the goldfish in the pool;
And thereupon a colloquy took place
That I commend to all the chroniclers
To show how violent great hearts can lose
Their bitterness and find the honeycomb.
"I have brought a slender bride into the house;
You know the saying, ""Change the bride with spring.''
And she and I, being sunk in happiness,
Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,
When evening stirs the jasmine bough, and yet
Are brideless.'
"I am falling into years.'
"But such as you and I do not seem old
Like men who live by habit.  Every day
I ride with falcon to the river's edge
Or carry the ringed mail upon my back,
Or court a woman; neither enemy,
Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;
And so a hunter carries in the eye
A mimic of youth.  Can poet's thought
That springs from body and in body falls
Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky,
Now bathing lily leaf and fish's scale,
Be mimicry?'
"What matter if our souls
Are nearer to the surface of the body
Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!
The soul's own youth and not the body's youth
Shows through our lineaments.  My candle's bright,
My lantern is too loyal not to show
That it was made in your great father's reign,
And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.'
"Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech:
You think that love has seasons, and you think
That if the spring bear off what the spring gave
The heart need suffer no defeat; but I
Who have accepted the Byzantine faith,
That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,
Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;
And if her eye should not grow bright for mine
Or brighten only for some younger eye,
My heart could never turn from daily ruin,
Nor find a remedy.'
"But what if I
Have lit upon a woman who so shares
Your thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,
So strains to look beyond Our life, an eye
That never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,
And yet herself can seem youth's very fountain,
Being all brimmed with life?'
"Were it but true
I would have found the best that life can give,
Companionship in those mysterious things
That make a man's soul or a woman's soul
Itself and not some other soul.'
"That love
Must needs be in this life and in what follows
Unchanging and at peace, and it is right
Every philosopher should praise that love.
But I being none can praise its opposite.
It makes my passion stronger but to think
Like passion stirs the peacock and his mate,
The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouth
Is a man's mockery of the changeless soul.'
And thereupon his bounty gave what now
Can shake more blossom from autumnal chill
Than all my bursting springtime knew.  A girl
Perched in some window of her mother's housc
Had watched my daily passage to and fro;
Had heard impossible history of my past;
Imagined some impossible history
Lived at my side; thought time's disfiguring touch
Gave but more reason for a woman's care.
Yet was it love of me, or was it love
Of the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,
perplexed her fantasy and planned her care?
Or did the torchlight of that mystery
Pick out my features in such light and shade
Two contemplating passions chose one theme
Through sheer bewilderment? She had not paced
The garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,
Before she had spread a book upon her knees
And asked about the pictures or the text;
And often those first days I saw her stare
On old dry writing in a learned tongue,
On old dry ******* that could never please
The extravagance of spring; or move a hand
As if that writing or the figured page
Were some dear cheek.
Upon a moonless night
I sat where I could watch her sleeping form,
And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved.
And fearing that my light disturbed her sleep
I rose that I might screen it with a cloth.
I heard her voice, "Turn that I may expound
What's bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek
And saw her sitting upright on the bed;
Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?
I say that a Djinn spoke.  A livelong hour
She seemed the learned man and I the child;
Truths without father came, truths that no book
Of all the uncounted books that I have read,
Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,
Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,
Those terrible implacable straight lines
Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream,
Even those truths that when my bones are dust
Must drive the Arabian host.
The voice grew still,
And she lay down upon her bed and slept,
But woke at the first gleam of day, rose up
And swept the house and sang about her work
In childish ignorance of all that passed.
A dozen nights of natural sleep, and then
When the full moon swam to its greatest height
She rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleep
Walked through the house.  Unnoticed and unfelt
I wrapped her in a hooded cloak, and she,
Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desert
And there marked out those emblems on the sand
That day by day I study and marvel at,
With her white finger.  I led her home asleep
And once again she rose and swept the house
In childish ignorance of all that passed.
Even to-day, after some seven years
When maybe thrice in every moon her mouth
Murmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,
She keeps that ignorance, nor has she now
That first unnatural interest in my books.
It seems enough that I am there; and yet,
Old fellow-student, whose most patient ear
Heard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,
It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.
What if she lose her ignorance and so
Dream that I love her only for the voice,
That every gift and every word of praise
Is but a payment for that midnight voice
That is to age what milk is to a child?
Were she to lose her love, because she had lost
Her confidence in mine, or even lose
Its first simplicity, love, voice and all,
All my fine feathers would be plucked away
And I left shivering.  The voice has drawn
A quality of wisdom from her love's
Particular quality.  The signs and shapes;
All those abstractions that you fancied were
From the great Treatise of parmenides;
All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things
Are but a new expression of her body
Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.
And now my utmost mystery is out.
A woman's beauty is a storm-tossed banner;
Under it wisdom stands, and I alone --
Of all Arabia's lovers I alone --
Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
In the confusion of its night-dark folds,
Can hear the armed man speak.

Who was there had seen us
  Wouldn't bid him run?
Heavy lay between us
  All our sires had done.

There he was, a-springing
  Of a pious race,
Setting hags a-swinging
  In a market-place;

Sowing turnips over
  Where the poppies lay;
Looking past the clover,
  Adding up the hay;

Shouting through the Spring song,
  Clumping down the sod;
Toadying, in sing-song,
  To a crabbed god.

There I was, that came of
  Folk of mud and name--
I that had my name of
  Them without a name.

Up and down a mountain
  Streeled my silly stock;
Passing by a fountain,
  Wringing at a rock;

Devil-gotten sinners,
  Throwing back their heads,
Fiddling for their dinners,
  Kissing for their beds.

Not a one had seen us
  Wouldn't help him flee.
Angry ran between us
  Blood of him and me.

How shall I be mating
  Who have looked above--
Living for a hating,
  Dying of a love?

How shall my animal
Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,
Vessel of abscesses and exultation's shell,
Endure burial under the spelling wall,
The invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the face,
Who should be furious,
Drunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus,
Roaring, crawling, quarrel
With the outside weathers,
The natural circle of the discovered skies
Draw down to its weird eyes?

How shall it magnetize,
Towards the studded male in a bent, midnight blaze
That melts the lionhead's heel and horseshoe of the heart
A brute land in the cool top of the country days
To trot with a loud mate the haybeds of a mile,
Love and labour and ****
In quick, sweet, cruel light till the locked ground sprout
The black, burst sea rejoice,
The bowels turn turtle,
Claw of the crabbed veins squeeze from each red particle
The parched and raging voice?

Fishermen of mermen
Creep and harp on the tide, sinking their charmed, bent pin
With bridebait of gold bread, I with a living skein,
Tongue and ear in the thread, angle the temple-bound
Curl-locked and animal cavepools of spells and bone,
Trace out a tentacle,
Nailed with an open eye, in the bowl of wounds and ****
To clasp my fury on ground
And clap its great blood down;
Never shall beast be born to atlas the few seas
Or poise the day on a horn.

Sigh long, clay cold, lie shorn,
Cast high, stunned on gilled stone; sly scissors ground in frost
Clack through the thicket of strength, love hewn in pillars drops
With carved bird, saint, and suns the wrackspiked maiden mouth
Lops, as a bush plumed with flames, the rant of the fierce eye,
Clips short the gesture of breath.
Die in red feathers when the flying heaven's cut,
And roll with the knocked earth:
Lie dry, rest robbed, my beast.
You have kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light,
And dug your grave in my breast.

Old women are forgotten wombs
whose graceless bodies have fed the world,
then been sent to sit in its shadows...
not quite seen, unacknowledged
and without nurture.

Old women are crucified with the nails
of oppression and poverty.
Invisibility swallows them when
age freckles out-number the fresh
patches of youth.

Old women have scarred and calloused
knees from kneeling in submission to
lesser minds that felt bigger for the
looking down.

A rosary of sorrows is strung through
the weary fingers of old women.
They are hung on the crucifix of youth
and beauty to wither into dust.

Old women have crabbed and ruined toes
from shoes worn too long - that a child
might have new ones.
Alone in cubicles or corners, frayed photos
beneath their coats, old women remember
children that have long forgotten them.

Old women do not seek a man’s arms...
for that is not a refuge, but a honeyed trap
where souls are flayed and burned.

Old women talk to themselves because
no  one else has ears to hear, or words to share.
Even their echoes are faint and whispered.

Such wondrous minds...libraries of living life,
vision and experience...left untouched because
they are not behind a pretty face.

Behold the woman....she is a wealth of wisdom
and power, beauty and courage - to those
wise enough to touch her power.

Her reckoning will come...

Until then - she endures.

The boy with no words
Sitting in a doctors office
The words Autism was cast on him
Like the wizards in the books his mother reads him
This boy sees his mother
leaning on a wall for comfort as she screams
“Oh god why!”
The screams paint the walls
Doctors try to act like they feel her pain
Throwing around comforting words
Just so she could shut up
The doctors are embarrassed
Because other patients are looking
Shaken up like the soda cans
They crabbed from the lounge
The Boy just sits there
On the glossy floor, thinking
“Get up, we are missing Saturday cartoons”

Clouds of white March mornings
Surf inside this smokechamber I call a brain.
I was twelve and you were thirteen
Both separate rigid crystals growing
In the back of Mom’s awful red minivan.
We stained our fingers with Oxnard cherries
And got high on orange and eucalyptus.
Sand behaved like molasses.
My Walkman was full of ants
Who hated Third Eye Blind with a vengeance.
I had a pimple on my chin
Which I tried to hide with makeup
And I really hoped you’d notice
My cotton candy body splash
I got it because you like
Juicy Fruit gum and
That smells like cotton candy to me.
I chunked down short white shanks
On the red crabbed beach towel
Hoping you wouldn’t notice the ricotta billows
Developing on the upper thighs
Between slushy rivers of purple lightning stretch marks.
I couldn’t deal after ten minutes so I got in the water.
I laid myself across submerged tidal-pool boulders
Near-floating on the frigid little water-pyre
Congealing my skin like vanilla pudding
Bogging me down like a sea sloth.
It took me a halflife to figure out
That while I miss those mornings,
I do not miss you.

I hate the uneducated and the ignorant.
I hate the pompous and the phony.
I hate the jealous, the resentful.
The crabbed and mean and petty.
I hate all ordinary and dull little people
who  aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
I hate the New People
with their cars
and their money
and their T.V.s
and their stupid vulgarities
and their stupid crawling imitations.

I love honesty and freedom and giving.
I love making, I love doing.
I love being to the full.
I love everything that is not sitting
and watching
and copying
and dead at heart.

When I can no longer dredge, move water
dragging silt through sand, disappearing
my hands tied by seaweed, clawed and crabbed
strange ocean of paraphernalia, I trudge the land
my lips, red crusts and salty bled
fingers stiff, rusty locks, rubber gloved
swallowed up, fastening round a net, a trap
to pull the ocean in

Crabbed old feet - imprisoned
in shoes too small, too *****
and too red.
A bit of music escapes
from some trendy café,
she dances in the wailing cold.
She remembers when
she was pretty.
She remembers being young.

Now a ***** wall
of fears drifts as she finds
her old age has begun.

She is worn down, worn out
by the pain every old woman knows.
The laughing mouth of the grave
waits to welcome her home.

AGUILAR
                                                         ­        But a happy few
            Broke from our cages and were spared for slaves,
            Within the warlike clutch of Na Chan Can.
            My freedom have your wax and honey bought.
            One stubborn soul, Guerrero, stays behind.          

CORTÉS
            And with slave’s ransoms, we must rescue him.

AGUILAR
            He will not come.

ALVARADO                          You must mean “could not,” man.
            What exile, broiling in the pits of hell
            Is tossed a rope from heaven and will not come?
            Your Spanish rusted in these humid airs.

AGUILAR
            These Mayas have seduced him to their cause.
            When I confronted him, he spoke to me:
            “I am a wartime chieftain, and their judge,
            And see how lovely are my wife and sons!”
            Three handsome half-castes nestled at his hip.
            “You go,” he said, “and may God go with you.
            But black tattoos have spiraled round my eyes,
            And broad, thick discs now pierce my ears and lips.
            Would Christians welcome one so scarified?”

CORTÉS
            God only scorns the scars of souls.

OLMEDO                                                   ­   Well said.

AGUILAR
            His crabbed wife waved in my face and spat:
            “What grimy scarecrow dares provoke my lord?
            Shove off!” But our Guerrero caught my arm.
            “I’ve warned our Mayas of Castile,” he hissed.
            “If Spanish visitations will be suffered,
            The scabies of their ‘culture’ will erupt,
            And Europe’s slow, inexorable flow
            Must soon encrust and case these florid lands
            As running wax will coat a candlestick.
            Then must I trim Death’s wicks.”

CORTÉS                                                 What can that mean?