She flicks through her central inner catalogue, the one engraved on her heart, and counts shattered illusions, the brevity of lovers, how quickly they depart. Ignoring her staccato cris de coeur, no empathy for a woman like her, those masterful money-makers – when it comes to the bedroom – have no finesse, their lovemaking’s nostrum. […]
Tag: Wordle
Scatter Words
The bend of the pen scatters unthinkable threads on a minatory page. After the thirst of an age of impasse, the erudite runaway bride writes her apologia underneath a poem about social dyslogia. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Wordle #190
Unturning Worms
How the helminth of malice squirms! A gangly parasitic worm, it knocks us out of orbit and turns us hard-hearted. We glide in our inchoate masks, our faces smile but inside we bask in misery. Searching for company, we find the imperative of ignominy; it puts us in the public lens and misery’s company has […]
Ocean Graveyard
Out on the nightmare sea, pitched and tossed by waves and misrepresented mermaid’s octaves ships approach the graveyard of negligence, the locker of Davy Jones, with its stash of pearls and gnarled bones nullified, picked clean and white by Neptune’s unleashed parasites. While gulls plane a sea breeze on stiffly out-stretched wings, you can’t move […]
Noisy Faucet
Throughout the night, while other folk were fast asleep, their noisy faucet mumbled cyan, vaunted a tragedy of paraffin, a gradual puddle, ready to flame into Koi no Yokan, a nod to the arsonists’ tradition, scantily clad in new lovers’ promises. Kim M. Russell, 2018 My response to Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Wordle #187
The Haunted Inn
On a lonely fell is a coaching inn where the locals stare and sometimes grin, imbibing ale and swigging rum as unsuspecting grockles come. Those who choose to stay the night will wish they hadn’t, with hindsight. Wrapped in sweaty nightclothes’ trammel and listening for the keyhole’s rattle, the naïve and malleable ponder and sigh at […]
Higgledy-piggledy
In the labyrinthine malformed lanes and backstreets of imagination, dead-reckoning never takes me north, south, east or west, but always looks left, to the sinister side of my brain. Blindfolded by the torn curtain of fantasy, I press on in my wanderings, and my gait cannot help but feign a gritty, natural inclination to embed […]
Sugar Rush of Imagination
In foolish figments, the wild willowwacks of child- hood, I am myrmidon to my master chocolate. My stash is hidden in entangled tree trunks; knots and holes encircle glints of wrapper and my dark greed, the eccentric need for sugar that makes me jump when Mother discovers crumbs and smears on the bedclothes. Kim M. […]
The Homeless Café
Some shine like celadon, confidence permeates every pore, while others, abashed and nervous, sag like vacant old sofas to the floor, salvaged by a café for the poor and homeless, a place to read and drink tea, chat over mugs of steaming coffee, clip articles from out-of-date magazines donated by local charities, debating the offal […]
Demons
In the shattering pangs of sadness, bring me nepenthe so I may climb into vague forgetfulness and abdicate world-weariness. Neolithic numbness turns me to sallow stone, my only hope has perished and left me all alone. The four corners of this earth grow ever near, closing in day by day, accompanied by uncontrollable, irrational, offhand […]
