Once a Chicken, Always a Chicken (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy), Sonnet #555

 

The never that underlies the always

Comes closer sooner than we think it can.

Consider the egg. Its perfect shell says,

I’ve nothing inside until cracked open.

A running girl can jump over mountains,

Her muscles like overflowing fountains.

She can swing a bat at a vampire bat

And wrestle a dinosaur to the mat.

These toys of the mind are inside the egg,

And boys of her kind have a broken yolk.

They run fast as hell with a broken leg.

Nothing about anything is a joke.

Some essential status, long ago broken,

Was once and is always unawoken.

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:

My Human Disguise.

Jealousy (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy), Sonnet #554

 

The lady with the clever smiles

With two lovers and a husband:

She keeps the little boy in one

Suspicious with her playful wiles,

Thus perpetually unmanned.

As though he is her only fun,

The lover two knows the others,

Sees them as his loving brothers;

He thinks nothing is going on.

The husband she calls her “ape-pun.”

Horny, he must wear her apron.

He shoots her with his be-be gun.

This is their peniletimate line,

Uncoupling with the final rhyme.

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:

My Human Disguise.

The Satin Tuning Fork (Yves Tanguy), Sonnet #499

My book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:
My Human Disguise.

I cannot tune a guitar very well

Because I pluck a string and hear three tones,

Not one. My inner ears have extra bones.

My head is a struck and struck again bell,

A tuning fork made of satin and silk,

Vibrating musically like stirred milk.

A real tuning fork makes the air explode

And ring with a slowly diminishing 

Volume without ever quite finishing,

An eternal sonic episode.

I tap mine and tighten a tuning post.

At least that note is right. The other strings

Wobble off pitch the way a warbler sings

Or like the humming of a tone-dead ghost.

Bond of Union (Escher), Sonnet #315

For Ruth

They say that only gravity can make an orb,
That when two pliable objects come together,
An attracting force at their centers will absorb
All imbalance, all turbulence, wind and weather,
And even out the distance from center to rim
To form a satisfying equilibrium.
The loves of men and women are beribboned air,
Much that's empty and much almost decorated.
It's up to each to seek the beautiful and fair,
To smile, to look past the moment, sad or sated
(Though we'd wrestle the sun if it would hold the day!),
When the moment is over and has rolled away.
My love, our ribbons tighten and, like gravity,
Have made a single perfectly round you and me.

Fateful Hour At Quarter to Twelve (Klee), Sonnet # 289

The waxing quarter moon, a pendulum,
Swings from eleven ten to forty-six,
Its math always slightly wrong in sum,
Its path a leaning gravity can't fix.
We stand beneath the clock-faced obelisk
And with tiny leaps try to grasp the disc.
I knew a witch once who wore sunglasses
When the hour's two hands approached midnight.
She said it had nothing to do with light,
But the way the dark turned to molasses.
She feared nothing more than the coming day,
Except its damn'd tendency to stay.
We're sleeping now with no time to time out,
Or a moon to wane, or a dream to doubt.

Creation of the Birds (Remedios Varo), Sonnet #288

The owl's facial disks concentrate sound;
Her deep-set eyes see darkness as daylight.
What she eats is terrified to be found
And will starve itself to stay out of sight.
How can she be the creator of flight,
Of song, wood, and water birds, and raptors?
She writes with music and paints with the moon,
And tolerates a mechanical goon,
Because it soothes her destructive raptures.
From the condor to the tiniest wren,
All fowl suffer the tattoo of her pen.
An idea she can't set free, she captures.
On her breast rests an ancient violin
With strings that sing only in Avian.

Personage Throwing a Stone at a Bird (Miro), Sonnet #287

Personage! Oh, you personage, you.
Beluga-pale, belly button-eyed bonze.
You deep. Your lipless brains all tempered bronze.
What you won't do to be no parvenu.
I know, the hot sands blister your five toes,
And where the other five are no one knows.
A shoe, a tie, a scrap of clean clothing
Might mitigate universal loathing
Of your base beginnings and low learning
And quell your bowels' insistent churning.
Now don't, I warn you. I know you have heard
Desperate deeds oft undermine men's minds --
Wiped clean, they eagerly embrace all kinds.
But we'll hate you hard if you stone that bird!

Carnival In The Mountains (Klee)

#131

The pale, blind lady with the veiny cheeks
Keeps her apples from the reach of the boy
Who's sporting a blue man's grinning death mask.
A fire-breasted chicken watches for geeks,
Extrudes an egg here and there, a decoy.
No head-biter shies from his sanguinary task.
We are in the green mountains where the air
Is green as moss and moss is black as tar.
Clouds droop between the peaks like suckled breasts
And every home is home to nameless beasts.
The Carnival King is a mechanical man,
With lightning brains and an eye for a hand.
The revelers kill him with a handful of sand,
And dump the apples into his belly trash can.