EASY PREY

EASY PREY

This is the simple way most view life,

their notions compartmentalized

either black or white, haunched behind

glass panes, deceptively final,

as if selecting one, negates

the other, a trade-off between

What-you-see-is-what-you-get

and Look-deeply-into-my-eyes.

We think we see the pebbled rain

in the clarity of assumed truth.

Questions abound in the spinning

orbs of niggling uncertainty.

Too often we opt for beauty,

the strains of the joy horns,

something to see and grasp in hand,

the misguided sense we live here

Forever. Or we give ourselves

back to where we began:

Repentant, exchanging black

and white for God’s Light.

#

I'VE SEEN THEM

I’VE SEEN THEM

“They live in the mirrors.”

My brother Justin and I looked at each other, made our eyes roll, lips curl the way bystanders do when they see or hear what hints of madness or at least a loose screw or two loose in the head.

“I know,” George went on. “I’ve seen them!”

Though both of us were linemen for Pensacola Light, we took on the role of psychiatrists as we repeated, “Continue, George. Describe what you saw.”

George Fillmore hesitated. His right hand visibly shook. A tic pulsed away in his left green eye. Had we not known him well, we would have said George was experiencing the DT’s, but Fillmore was a devotee of H2O. He never drank the bubbly sodas Justin and I lived on nor did he ever demonstrate the slightest leanings toward an imbalance in the upper story.

Then George waved his hand toward his bathroom and we led the way until we were standing before the mirror. “Look!” he said. “Those three men!”

"Those three men are us, Georgie Porgie,” said Justin, but when the three men in the mirror turned around to face us, we clearly saw they weren’t us at all. Their distorted bodies, their faces expressing features not our own. “George,” I said, like a man who finally sees the light, but is hard-pressed to know what to do with it.

Justin made the horrid mistake of touching the glass. The screams that followed were his as reluctantly he dove into the mirror. We saw now that he had transformed one of the three into himself. The screaming stopped. Justin seemed content inside the mirror, beckoning us to follow. “Just dive in,” he said.

I turned around toward George. He had left the bathroom and returned with a hammer. “It’s the devil’s work,” he said as he raised the hammer. “We need to destroy the mirror before it drags us both into whatever Hell is in there.”

“What about my brother?” I asked. “We destroy the mirror and Justin’s gone forever.”

But George was not going to reconsider. He swung the hammer. The mirror shattered into shards of glass.

The two of us heard Justin calling us from a sharp sliver of broken glass. George again raised the hammer and smashed the mirror jigsaw piece into shiny grains. Justin was gone.  

The investigation was brief. Without my brother’s body, there was no case. He was somewhere out there, which was true enough, but I was convinced there was no way I’d see him again.

After burning down his house, George disappeared as well.

I wrote all this down. Why I don’t know. Who would believe it?

They say if you break a mirror you’re in for seven bad-luck years. What is there to say about me? I destroyed the mirrors in my apartment. I avoid gazing into one, though I suspect one day, accidentally, I will. Justin, maybe even George, will stare back at me with that come-on look and I will succumb.  

#

PUNCHINELLO: A Petrarchan Sonnet

PUNCHINELLO: A Petrarchan Sonnet

    [based on the art of Caras Ionut]

En route tonight attired in red-white suit

and mask, cycling fast to hide a lengthy nose,

Punchinello appears in classic pose.

Tonight, in gloved hand he will strum a lute

to thunderous applause. He’ll bow: a brute

who masquerades a gentleman whose foes

are few. They see facades, just what he shows,

not the tormented fool riddled with woes,

but friendly comic Mr. Punch whose break

elicits belly laughs, guffaws galore.

The stick with which he whacks those on the stage

is hardly humor. A second encore

brings him back. He bows and we say, “How sleek!”

as if Punch alone dons masks to hide deep rage.

                               #

A POEM DEDICATED TO LADY HOPE

A POEM DEDICATED TO LADY HOPE

 [based on a photo by Barbara Florczyk]

In a heavy rain, you hang out the wash,

then hum a tune you cannot name

nor care to for fear the need to hum it

will leave you.

All sorts of unexpected things like that

while the child that I am hangs in close

at your heels, shadowing you,

eavesdropping on choice bits

of talking to yourself

as though you were your only friend.

But you never see me:

not in the heavy rain

nor in the madness of your senseless chores

nor in the humming,

not anytime you go about your living,

heels ahead, laughing at things

that when I reflect upon them

are funnier than they are when you don't say them.

So, I hang in close, shadowing at your heels,

and holding tightly to Life itself,

your only child.

#

TROIKU #2

fresh fallen snow
dot the flower heads
like white patches of stars

the yellow Chrysanthemums look
upward assembling Heaven
with myriad facets of their petals

more yellowish
than autumn leaves –
each petal a miniature sun

#

SKIP THE LIGHT FANTASTIC

I once believed that if I read

too many tales of fantasy, 

somehow a witch would find a way

to make my life a travesty.

She's pile on my scrawny head

whatever mash her cauldron made,

then melt to mush my sanity.

I'd chase that little Riding Hood,

cleave her head with a wedge of steel,

or follow Snow White bashfully.

I'd shed fake tears and disagree,

I'd stomp my feet in nasal whines,

I'd live my life vicariously.

But is it smart to live a lie?

Perhaps I ought to give the boot

to books without a shred of truth.

#

(C) 2017 by Salvatore Buttaci

TO SHED SOME LIGHT

(inspired by a painting by Matt Dixon)

I miss the old light bulbs Uncle Sam

replaced with new halogen incandescents.

To shed some light on the situation,

watt prompted intensifying the lumen count?

The white coil screwed into the fixture

strikes me as almost other-worldly alien,

the way it lies about long-life illumination,

the subterfuge, the home invasion

of those content with a darker shade of light.

But what disturbs me most is the loss

of that metaphoric light bulb that clicked

with every new idea bulging with

brilliance, lighting the road just enough

to gather words and phrases to build a poem.

#

http://www.salbuttaci.blogspot.com

SIRIUS DOG STAR

Sirius Dog Star

terror of night skies

you bite a bone moon

Sirius Dog Star

chasing a comet’s tail

swift as cosmic dust

you bite a bone moon

but where in the heavens

can you bury it?

#

REFLECTIONS (based on the art of Andi Abdul Halil)

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/photo-challenge-162/ 

Sparrows bob their feathered heads in puddles

of April rain. Up and down they peck the waters,

their beaks jackhammering the stillness

into concentric circles that reflect

gray-brown passerine faces, a bird revue

of headshots before nature’s funhouse mirrors.

Sometimes I wish I could drink with them,

see how many faces I have worn,

how many shards of water glass reveal

my life’s masquerades, kneel before the puddle,

drink my fill beside that bobbing sparrow

until the rains end, the bird shakes dry its wings,

and the mirrors fade with the amen of my confessions.

#