Kali whispering fates swirls her tongue forming
loci for impending chaos disintegrating
she saves one child chosen as witness
to her wrenching nod poised rendering
swift judgment upon all soft creatures
she clacks geographic prophetic scripts logorrheic
fingers curled with dramatic glee
multitudes of vertiginous yawning palaces
of iron Underwood typewriters
spinning tales of harrowing crises
decrying stories permeable
some querulous left tumbling
victims fetched oft by chance
earth born bounty’s sons and daughters float along oblivious
pupation’s hopeful peels light laughter and curiosity
aubergine eyes, twirls of glorious eiderdown,
espouse rambling besotted naïve ideals
floral tempests accelerating
peering at horizons of impoverishing windmills
monstrous blades gouge perilous trenches
wind creates shimmering uplifts where children hover fixated
argon burns bright in neon telemetries of serial reflections
mudslides contentiously obliterate, shift our paradigmatic visions
hunger’s hard tacked swirling blunders rent innocents sideways
through thundering organs mangling broken starved bodies
derision forgone relegates foreshadowing in helical caverns
reams of toroidal cross capacitors quantifying dielectric constants
scanning for insulators: none found
Kali licks her lips again croaking
vita incerta, mors certissima
Chromapoetica 
There you go again! Making my head spin ’round and ’round. Good golly, Anna!
I hope this makes you cry! http://charleslmashburn.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/she-sat-alone-2/
(just kidding) sorta
Thanks Charles, I do appreciate you come back for more head spinning, it means a lot to me :).
Good one !!
Loved these lines
pupation’s hopeful peels
lights laughter and curiosity
float along oblivious, aubergine
Nice read !!!!
Thanks Jyoti, I enjoyed the wisdom of your words today.
These are my favorite descriptions:
“where children hover fixated”
“aubergine eyes”
“her fingers curled”
“vertiginous yawning palaces”
Thank you, did you ever finish your sestina? Mine’s posted at dVerse, I’d like to read yours if you finish it.
circles within circles. Your poems require more than a quick read and fleeting comment
True, I probably should have chosen a less experimental piece for the Rally but it was what I had completed.
deep and thoughtful words.
thanks for sharing.
Thanks, so glad to have the rally back!
one saved chosen to witness
Kali’s wrenching nod poised
rendering swift judgment
upon all soft creatures
So many amazing images in here, I feel rather small and unsafe, like something big and sharp is whirring around over my head. Maybe it’s a giant brain, or just a dictionary. A big one that will hurt very much when it lands on me. 😉 I love the way you’ve danced the vocabulary in this, and I’m totally unclear if there’s an underlying narrative, other than composition, the words ‘fetched oft by chance’ but it doesn’t matter particularly because the mood and slideshow are so compelling and intoxicating. A pleasure to read, though life is uncertain–death and poetry are not.
Ah, too funny, this is why poets need readers, I thought I’d gone and watered this one down too much (in language, in bordering on moralizing, and in the veil). I’m happy to know the real threat came through even if I didn’t quite manage to make it clear what that monster in the sky is though I’ve laughed myself silly imagining the giant brain or dictionary of dread. Now I’ve got the difficult task of revealing the theme which is sad.
Ok, appropriately solemn faced returned, the underlying narrative is about starving, dying children – ‘fetched oft by chance’ by geography, or war, or chaos. Kali here is the destroyer cast as a writer of their fates. See I thought this final version bordered on spelling things out so I clearly need a revision to clarify. Thank you, as always, for your immeasurably helpful feedback!
Oh, and I am open to suggestions on how to revise since my internal editor has been leading me into a thicket with this one.
Ok, the crew came and did some bushwhacking and laid flagstone on the fox trail (I hope).
Oh it works so much better upside down! You’ve kept all the imagery, but by transposing it a bit, you’ve changed the focus, and also turned the little wheel on the binoculars that makes it sharper. Now I’m looking down a road where I can see the work of the goddess of infinite destruction, scripting the story on her typewriters (with all those busy fingers) dancing with a thousand knives and picking her sacrifices, the weakest and most helpless. Thanks for shining a light for me.
Thank you! Without you, my friend, I’d still have salad in my hair :). Interestingly as I got this from you some gigantic animal (bear, elk, moose, you never know up here) was splashing around in the water on top of our storage tank. I was dying to know what it was but our light doesn’t shine that far so I only managed to scare it off. How much more gratifying to know what moves out there in the dark.
Do they call someone who loves words a logophile? One of the things I like most about your work is the number of new words I encounter. And my Kindle makes it easy to look them up. Do you create your poetry around your words or do you search for words to express the poem?
Yes, a logophile is a lover of words and I just wrote and posted a 2,400+ word poem about that at OLN :). As to where my words come from – a little of both, sometimes I find a word I love so much I build ‘a world’ around it, more often I want to say something, something that needs room for ambiguity, complexity, depth and paradox. I liken it to scrying when I search for words – and here’s a behind the curtain secret: sometimes I form a word, in my head or out loud, which I don’t know if it’s really a word, I just think it should be and then search to find its closest equivalent. By the way this is not my sestina (in case you thought I took massive liberties with the form, which is not unlike me :).
When I was in high school I studied Latin for a couple of years, then later in life sort of self-studied Greek. Then realized the value of having those as a solid base when I studied nursing. I think that offers you the ability to “create” words using their roots. Thanks for responding. I like the idea of scrying for words. :0)
I unfortunately went to public school so Latin wasn’t an option (my husband had classes at his private school) but I completely agree with you about the usefulness of roots – scrying is awfully fun :).
Very Nice Poetry with an amazing Imagination
Great Work of Creativity !! Highly Expressive !!
It was indeed enjoyable after reading this one !!
Anyways, Take a look some of my Poetry Collections …
http://ashbeezone.wordpress.com/category/talent-underground/poetry-zone/
some of my Haiku Collections
http://ashbeezone.wordpress.com/category/creative-challenges/the-haiku-challenge/
and also, on my very recent Work as well
http://ashbeezone.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/india-of-my-dream/
!!! Happy Rally !!!
Cheers !!
Thanks for all the enthusiasm, I look forward to reading some of your work.
what lovely words you twirl here Anna. i find it helpful reading your comments so i can appreciate the work here. these lines struck me if I can understand the theme of your work:
“hunger’s hard tacked swirling blunders rent innocents sideways
through thundering organs mangling broken starved bodies”
happy day and see you~
Thank you Heaven, those lines are the emotional core of the piece so I think you understand it very well. I greatly appreciate your visits.
Kail’s some maleficent babe, eh? Setting her fore and aft of the poem gives this mind dance a center to the centrifuge and its subterfuge. There often is a heavy threat to a child in the polysyllabic vapors of your work, making wonder if the logorrhea is a charm against old brutal truths … It’s not easy to get too far into the whirl of these experimental forms without spinning off on the wind of one meaning or another. Perhaps you intend that, or prefer the reader to sit and watch the whole thing revolve and evolve. It makes critique almost impossible for this reader, although I do remember an essay prof saying that it always pays to leave gold coins on one’s trail to keep the reader engaged (and reading). This has a penetrable shape and depth, with lines of a certain length and stanzas doled out in edible portions. Also, dense cognitions (and dense language) need rest-stops where the reader can orient and pause before diving in again. I have no idea of these things are of any assistance to you – nor if you desire or need any such feedback — these are truly unique creations — yet I’m always engaged and challenged by what you write. Kali is a figure whose feral, bloody force is the sort of derrick you mine effectively and creatively. Vita incerta, mors certissima indeedy. – Brendan
Hey, I’ll take any apotropaic magic I can get logorrheic or otherwise :). I do like the disorienting nature of the experimental forms as I’m, sneaky scientist that I am, trying to rewire some neurological pathways in the reader. It’s good to build new connections, like exercise for the brain. We only get that exercise when the cognition is difficult, at least according to some studies. Though I absolutely agree I shouldn’t lead you off a cliff as I unfortunately did a while back. You are very welcome to offer ideas and critique I am learning as I go. Sometimes I risk too much all at once and need to be told these things. I do want you to be challenged but not to the point of intense frustration and heavens do tell me if something makes you want to give up (that would be wholly tragic). As I’ve said to Joy I appreciate honesty even when I don’t like it :). However, I like what you’ve said and everything here helped me this afternoon as I wrote and rewrote Pneumatological Enigmas. Sometimes I forget we’re looking to make a path as poets and get all excited by building complex puzzles which I then forget to leave clues to because I’ve been distracted by the next shiny poem, painting, musical composition, or the dishwasher beeping to let me know I have chores to attend to. Always a pleasure, please come back soon.
You have written up a force that can discriminate, but who knows which way? A powerful expression of the threat. And the sad results of the relentless destruction of all that crosses its path.
Thank you for reading and commenting.
Wow! What fantastic imagery with all the contradictory words “dramatic glee..” ” impoverishing windmills”!!
Simply brilliant…! 🙂
Thank you, I’m sorry your comment took a while to show up but the spam filter ate it. Nice to meet you.
I love the part:
peering at horizons of impoverishing windmills
monstrous blades gouge perilous trenches
wind creates shimmering uplifts where children hover fixated
argon burns bright in neon telemetries of serial reflections
I totally loved this poem and read it like 3 times or more. Keep up the good work. Really love the poem.
Thanks Janrae, I’m so happy you loved it. It’s nice to meet you, I look forward to reading your work.
‘earth born bounty’s sons and daughters float along oblivious’ for me this line says it all, by way of contrast, highlights the bizarre ‘oft by chance’ vulnerablity of children adrift in an accidental ancestral microcosm, and all those intimate pressures shaping their lives, let alone enter ‘Kali’ the macro force….far too many great word combinations to enter here!!…really enjoyed, but feel sad at the injustice….
Me too, there’s little sense to be made out of the death of so many children each day. I experience it as a cyclone of chaos. I love the way you captured the poem here and so glad you responded well to it. Thank you!
Kali is great 🙂 and so is your poem! I would like to be part of a spoken word kirtan with these verses 🙂
Oh, a kirtan would be wonderful. Thank you for your kind compliment. I look forward to reading your work.
A deeply sad poem. Thank you, Anna.
Thank you for your visit!
You are a master of words. Loved it.
JP
http://tasithoughts.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/ive-got-you/
Thank you for reading and commenting. Nice to meet you.
I found myself needing to come back and reread this a few times – which opened up new parts every time I did – great work
Thank you Jo and especially for taking the time to reread!