31 Days On The Tip Of My Tongue [Nos. 1-15]

 —Poetry and Photos by Robert Lee Haycock,
Antioch, CA

 

 

1
Tables of Content


These words do not fit
In a house made of bottles
She touched my shoulder
With sleep in her hand


* * *


2
Palimpsest

Shall I tell you a story of once or twice upon a time?
An excuse to burn things for beauty?
The children shout.
I hear lullabies. 


* * *


3
A High Sulking Fog 

Limned upon a marbled page
Many footed lines feast
The foolscap's rough tooth
It galls the oaks to think it 

 

 

 

4
So Tell Me But Tell Me So 


 
Possessed of a tin ear


and a pornographic memory
I tried to unwrap a dream


but the word got out


* * *

5
listen to the morning open her new eyes

every single star in this sad sky
got tangled up in the trees last night
tripping down ill lit streets
on the tiptoes of my tongue


* * *

6
A Raucous Chorus

sings solfège
behind the cafetorium
and I hear no end of voices

 

 

 

7
Her Thousand Tongues

her thousand tongues beg me to come away
so I close my eyes and walk through walls
that we didn’t know were waiting


* * *


8
This is the tomb of the woodpecker that
was Zeus!


A landscape from a  


long-forgotten dream
whispers to the wheeling dark
There is a rabbit on the moon  


And an old man with a lantern


* * *

9
My elbows on the checkered oilcloth

remembering my first Orange Julius
a little moiré star that pointed to an adjacent
numerical scale
a song I didn’t know I had forgotten 
the taste of my last words

 

 

 

 
Enraptured

 

10
All These Houses We Thought Were Dreaming


a thousand times and then one more
street lamp dandelions in the fog
my thoughts wandered off the bus


a stop too soon


* * *

11
Shadow Puppets


She dances ‘til her hair’s aflame 
dreams a smile as she dies
cosseted by ghosts


* * *


12
I shaped a golem and brought him to life

I shaped a golem and brought him to life
many blustery years ago 
He never had an easy time of it
A little-known fact left a bad taste in his mouth

 

 

 

 High Chaparral


 

13
My Well-Tempered Radio


Look through my eyes
Bassoons and didgeridoos
I thought I knew the name of every thing


* * *

14
Talking Through My Hat

I didn’t see
these noisy roses
throw out the nines
a sixpence song to
hoard a windfall of shadow


* * *

15
from the green room of your dream

leaf-laden heads bent in prayer
to a big blue bag of precious nothings
listen to my flowers sing


__________________

Today’s LittleNip:

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters [and poems] which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.
 
―Héloïse d'Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse

__________________


Joy in the Kitchen today as Prodigal Poet Robert Lee Haycock returns from who-knows-what journeys. This SnakePal first visited us in 2013 and was a regular contributor of poems and photos. But then… well… people drift away. But now he’s back, with new poems, and I have paired them with some of the first photos of his that were posted ‘way back when. Today we have numbers 1-15 of his “31 Days”, and tomorrow we’ll have numbers 16-31. Thanks, Robert Lee!

__________________

—Medusa

 

 

 

 Contra Loma
—Photo by Robert Lee Haycock

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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