Carolyn Srygley-Moore

Tell the Prisoner

·

Tell the Prisoner

there is a key.     He has locked his copy in a golden box.

What reasons are there to run toward the sea?

Earthquakes move us inward, or so I would think.

Toward the fresh water bodies.  Toward the finger sized black flashlights

that write in the dark but never die.

There is a talk of a big storm.       Some say it.

A storm out of a Stephen King novel.       Winds, pounding the shore,

lighthouses dissolving beneath the snow.   The search for light

begins, never ends. Light unlabeled.  Light unbroken.

Love, Love. I checked the morning news. One inch of snow

in Saratoga.       Blanket the horses.         Blanket the doves.

Tell the Prisoner there is a key.            He will feel manipulated

by the devils.          He will feel only slight relief.  He has more

reasons than ever to run toward that big paper balloon

called the sea.          It eats his features.        It yawns his face

into its suction cup            & takes him back

to the village        bicycles built for a thousand          back to his cottage

inland       where the lighthouse salts meat       where the dirty white dog

named Salt          walks around the circus poles       pissing

gentle relief.              Prison either makes you believe or pares

your belief from you.       I have been there.      It named me "who"

it tamed my cussing soul.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore

 

 

 

'Miracles of the Blog: A Series' by Carolyn Srygley-Moore can be purchased here  

Carolyn Srygley-Moore

Construction Sites

Forgotten winds

bearing golden sawdust

of construction sites. Forgotten sense

of treachery         midst saw & sills

yellow electric wires, live. At University

I would walk the weight of oranges, crates of oranges, walk the shape.

I would walk the prongs of anchors, bales of anchors, walk the shape.

In half-built constructions, I would sing songs for the weeping Lady.

Night would close-in, calling, softly.

My best friend had nearly died in an automobile accident.

Our friend John had been driving by the river, headlights switched off,

saying he could trace the curve in imagination. Memory

fails however. Memory fails, failed, the boy in the backseat was beheaded.

The girl holding his hands the weight of his hands

held in her memory a headless body       for an instant

before her sense of self & other capsized.

I sang, in half-built homes,                amidst tiers of white string knotted

& holding the myth of terraces together, sang for my friend.

She vanished into the dunes, the sculpted white dunes, later, knowing

a kind of God. Healing in that manner.

I sang, My Lady, Our Lady.

It would be some time before I too would hold the hand of the dead.

It would be some time before. Sawdust like cigar smoke in my lungs.

Gold reap of time. Gold reap of substance.

Let us know some wine.

The addict's knowledge of wine.

All the World is a Banquet (some poet once said)

Downstairs 

or across the street

a transistor radio.   Or is that voice, voices

converging on the nape of her neck

where the black cage shatters?

Cage of glass bones & cartilage.

We go for drives in the soft rain

like voices calling, softly. We stop

at fluorescant diners, she orders nothing,

her fingers curl in upon her palms

that she touches nothing....Yes.

I too have been thin enough

that people assumed I did not eat.

I ate. I ate voraciously.

I ate the rind of the voices rattling in my paper skull.

I ate the pulp of the ripe mangoes turning dark

in my palms. I ate what others thought

could not be devoured: shadows,

as the stone is lifted,

light,

as the stone is lifted.

Even the skulls of demons

ground to white rice

were salt to fish & nuts.

All the world was a banquet

as my stomach growled,

chyme's acid, eating

its own lining, chyme's acid

eating its own disloyal & transporting

soul.

Tell the Prisoner

Tell the Prisoner

there is a key.     He has locked his copy in a golden box.

What reasons are there to run toward the sea?

Earthquakes move us inward, or so I would think.

Toward the fresh water bodies.  Toward the finger sized black flashlights

that write in the dark but never die.

There is a talk of a big storm.       Some say it.

A storm out of a Stephen King novel.       Winds, pounding the shore,

lighthouses dissolving beneath the snow.   The search for light

begins, never ends. Light unlabeled.  Light unbroken.

Love, Love. I checked the morning news. One inch of snow

in Saratoga.       Blanket the horses.         Blanket the doves.

Tell the Prisoner there is a key.            He will feel manipulated

by the devils.          He will feel only slight relief.  He has more

reasons than ever to run toward that big paper balloon

called the sea.          It eats his features.        It yawns his face

into its suction cup            & takes him back

to the village        bicycles built for a thousand     back to his cottage

inland     where the lighthouse salts meat   where the dirty white dog

named Salt          walks around the circus poles       pissing

gentle relief.              Prison either makes you believe or pares

your belief from you.       I have been there.      It named me "who"

it tamed my cussing soul.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent being Miracles of the Blog, published by Punk Hostage and available from Barnes & Noble online. She has been widely published internationally, including in pages of Estuary and Thus Spoke the Earth. Carolyn lives in Upstate New York with her husband, daughter, & rescue dogs.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore

'Untitled-September'

Why bother
doll eyes haunt
rolling back
into the mound of flesh:
pink, pink
in the attic
rocking horse shawls
glint like water
in moonlight
the trespasser

arrives: you cannot be happy
he says his hands filled with scalps
or no, yes you can,
but only without convention.

 

---

 

Waking
To a window electric
A tea kettle
Humming
Collector of blue
Rain
Thunder
Spackling the song
Grandmother
On long front porch

Stockings
Rolled to her ankles
The heat cracks
First psychosis
Black shoes
Pronged as anchors
Window
Filled first rain

 

---

 

Childhood
Is fragile
As a plane's skeleton
Pushed off the dancers edge
See shall it fly
 

---

 

In fits and starts
We love
Oily engines
Noisome
Reverse is no option
Though we see
The unforgettable
In the rear view
Mirror
Flashing
Headlights

  

---

 

I will forget
This
In a Warhol minute

---

 

 

Carolyn Srygley-Moore is the author of two digital books of poetry, and three paper books, two of which are due to be published this year. She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars where she won awards for her poetry, and is published in numerous international ventures, including Up the Staircase and an anthology regarding the Haitian tragedy. Carolyn lives in upstate New York with her husband and daughter.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore-

Ode to Horatio & Other Saviors

The moon is a window filled with bright winds.
It is more than a door.          It has no hinges
by which to cape the sea with vermillion light.

Where are you now Horatio?    The dog
bitten to death for the sake of love.

The imagination sustains itself by virtue of
waterholes & its lions & its elephants.

By virtue of vengeance.        Frightening, the enemies
one garners over the years.         Are they
enemies, really, like Lady MacBeths, time-traveling?

Scrubbing the lot of blood from their hands?

The moon is a window          dragging the sea
as a man was dragged behind a pickup truck,
having enemies, by means of only his skin timbre.

Horatio was a dog not man, a dog owned by a virulent

woman.      I saw him quake in the crate
I lifted the body from the ice chest.          I laughed
not thinking it real....The imagination sustains

itself.      No plank leads from the ship
to step upon, into safety. No plank leads from the stern
or bow.    I say to my husband

save me! You must save yourself this time
he says; you must be your own indelible savior.

The Word Crazy
 

Solitude shines on the balcony like the whites of eyes.
I'm crazy he says            I'm crazy for you       the rain pounding.
Children leave their existences unexamined
they clutch solitudes    like playthings: for indeed they are
peopled with sailboat & sailor         with the Middle C
stretching the pianist's hands             one octave to another.
*
I'm crazy he says            I'm crazy for you.  The great tiger
is dying.    He can hardly walk the rockface
down to the source of water.           I forget that, the source
of water, as if I too encounter a great enclosure
as if I too live in the zoo.            I'm crazy he says crazy
for you.           A card player's chair sits alone mid-field.
*
Who is it calling the trump?        WHo is it saying
crazy like it's a good thing            confirming the landscape
of lithium & zoloft & no           such things need no detox.
They are what the body lacks & needs in replenishing.
I'm crazy he says     I'm crazy for you.        & you mount my lips
with your kisses your flayed tongue your inordinant unpride.

The Things We Leave By the Sea

This morning the sky is rice paper
meant to be sketched upon: monsters, mostly monsters.
This morning the bankrupt piano
is playing Vivaldi of its own accord.
I am frightened for someone. It is not for me
that I draw my breath inward, sharply,
as if facing down a ski slope that I cannot ski.
              Darling, you forgot your shoes!
You wore your blue sandals & the funeral's black dress
to the art exhibit. You forgot your shoes.
You polished your nails blue       so they would peek through
the sandal opening.   The strap is unbroken, unbroken.
We leave such things by the sea,
our black funeral dresses              our unbroken sandals.
             The sky is not paper but parchment.
I dreamt of an inheritance I broke, one piece after the other:
cream colored elephants, castles, riders.
Was that last night? Time is an inheritance.
I tuck my knees to my chin & dream of safety.
Dream of rocking beneath the table      as war went on around us.
Domestic violence is a kind of terrorism.
If the mother thinks death is advancing
what do the children feel?          O the sky is a parchment
you drew your teddy bear monsters upon.
            It ripped like a mirror     & you stepped on through
to the other side of descendance.
You stepped on through. 

Carolyn Srygley-Moore is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Songs Scared from the Conch // as Voices Carry. She is a Pushcart and Best of the Web nominee.  Widely published, Carolyn lives in Upstate New York with her husband,daughter, and three dogs. Interviews with Carolyn are accessible via the Google machine..

Carolyn Srygley-Moore-

I Have Seen Her, he said
 

                           I have seen her he said           the girl
with black hair jagged as spider-legs
walking with          a black book chained to her eyes
language chained to her hips.
                         I have seen her he said.
muttering as God must mutter           talking
to herself he said.      She seemed  a glassblower's vase
in her Poe T-shirt:          WHAT WOULD POE DO
it read        a telltale heart as the emblem
around which all logic revolved.
                         O I have no illusions       he said
she could never love a man of need like myself.
Yet I have seen her        her torn Levis
disparaging the mention of a certain truth
as truth is never certain.
                                                  Yes
I watched her from my car            parked before the pink dunes
began            I watched her from my car
as one watches a random mote of ash
as one sets fire to the           sea
She was one without history.
It was dark:                 the moon could not disentangle herself
from her own ventricles of light        hinged doorways
pulsing  pulsing.


Man is a Social Animal, she said  

I worry about everything       you say.
If the curtains are translucent      as water is
if our forms are bent as a fallen stick
to the onlooker.         You know, the cat
provokes the dog:  struts about the house
bats a bottle cap
as the dog, watching          trembles.
I worry about everything.
On the other side of the windshield
all is the norm
North Korea     has backed down.
Isolation works             as a tool
by denmother & world powers alike.
Man is a social animal              the anthropology major
said              in the kitchen
as she poured herself a vodka.
What book is that from            I said
& walked the stairs to my room
where the graveyard               existed
in Rilke & Hemingway &
I know it is that simple, really:        the new dog
bites the older dog
& gets the back turned toward her.
I worry about everything.
It is March              our first storm
for the season.         The March hare
rattles his paws.
It is that simple, really.
Even the hound-dog purrs.
 

The Question of Photographs, Distance, Mistakes
   

I have sketched, drawn, painted
the blue oak  outside the farmhouse       some streets down
some years away. The art instructor said
"the sign of an artist is the ability to take a mistake
               & make something of it!"     I worked for a month
on the soldier's left boot         until it was such an error

I changed it to a waiting dog.        Still, the essence
remained:    One soldier holding another
as one bears a vase of roses still-living,
roses on the verge of brittle black.
            Yes the second soldier was weeping.
It was a photograph            jungles of 60's Vietnam.       I always wonder

how photographers distance themselves
from the subject., ie., the soldier weeping,
the girl afire running the streets of Saigon:   & pause, snap
the picture.            One has to have a sensibility
                of what defines history         I guess
our perception of history. I gave that pencil drawing to a girl

in college; perhaps it has burned
like a safehouse to the sandy yellow ground.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Songs Scared from the Conch // as Voices Carry. She is a Pushcart and Best of the Web nominee.  Widely published, Carolyn lives in Upstate New York with her husband, daughter, and three dogs. Interviews with Carolyn are accessible via the Google machine..

Carolyn Srygley-Moore-

Contemplating "Freaks", & what that entails
·
I am no hermaphrodite
but I feel for any being left on the hillside to die
just for the body they inhabit
in its unholy divine maiming.
*
Once I watched the movie Freaks
& cried throughout, feeling
the cupped orange shell of the emptied prayer
ricochet through my hollowed bones.
*
Despite my blue eyes, my long blonde hair
Despite my five fingers five toes
& no fear of water
I crawled like the one without legs
I ate swords like the one with the flexible esophagus
I swallowed fire like winter.
*
Are you crying my mother said         that time
I was sixteen & crouched in a corner
behind a white chair          are you weeping
aren't you happy? Of course
I am happy       I said.
*
& whom is one protecting
when one lies like that:   one's mother
or oneself?           I watched the movie Freaks
in someone else's living room.
I have always lived in someone else's living room.
*
I remove the cloths from the clocks
I remove the sleeping tarp from the bird cage.
I weep for those who are left behind
on the Trail                  on that Trail
leading up the mountain in Lake George
marked with red, the cedar
as if marked for war.


Ghosts & Effigies

They say this house was built in 1780.
I see fractions of light sometimes
moving against the windows
as ghosts would move.
But I don't believe in ghosts any longer.
Not ghosts of the dead, anyway.
But echoes of response
echoes of answer.             Where were you
when I was stranded by the river
the bank filled with twisted wood & the memory of napalm?
The river was rising        my heart was frothing
with a rabid fear.     Where were you
when the girl living in the house behind us
disappeared         only a white sneaker carried on the current
remaining?            Surely
we are more than effigies of a lost America
carried, burning            down foreign streets.
Every lover has another side
to him.           O in the kisses of daybreak
every lover has another side.


Threats & Confidences of Mirrors

1)  Strange        watching oneself from a distance
a girl talking, laughing, making love
catching the snow on fire.
I have walked past shopfront windows many a time
& wondered who was that person passing
to my left or right             who was that person walking

right in front of me?          Earlier
today: seated in the living room
with all the mirrors in another place
I thought this is a good age, my age.
I am no longer so afraid.

Ah even the snow even the fire
were once my nemesis.


2) I brought the mirrors inside
from the back yard
where the door seller waits always
for my fear to brandish itself.
I brought the mirrors indoors.
I was no longer apprehensive of that instant when
they hold glass before one's lips
to see if one is exhaling.
To see if one is past the point of need.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Songs Scared from the Conch // as Voices Carry. She is a Pushcart and Best of the Web nominee.  Widely published, Carolyn lives in Upstate New York with her husband, daughter, and three dogs. Interviews with Carolyn are accessible via the Google machine..

Carolyn Srygley-Moore-

Riddlers Amidst Galaxies

The riddler speaks & everyone listens.
There is new snowfall          drifts of black snowfall.
The driveway is not treacherous    yet.
The riddler speaks       face painted
green & gold & red             with chalk ash
one draws circles within
as within the milk of the lotus.
                Genital flowers.
There is a galaxy within my right breast.
There is nothing to do about it.
The riddler speaks         gloves turned inside-out
as the earth is turned upside-down
as trees are grown          roots to the treacherous sky.
One must have expectations.
For the breast to empty         itself
of the galaxy             the planets & moons filled with water.
                                  We are happy enough.
I explain the surgeon's visit to my husband.
I told him                  I think there is nothing wrong
& he believed me.             We agreed
there is a galaxy in my breast
& beyond that              another world forming.
Another earth to build a yellow house upon.
                                                          A way to right the trees
as the green-gold riddler speaks. Cancer is jagged
like cauliflower         he says            your planets
cast no shadow            light gleams
through to another side.



Wine & Monsters & the Infinite Zeros

They drink their wine. I drink my blue monsters
as by intravenous injection: they numb me.
I am aware more than ever how we are stalked
by endings.          By an age when
we carry our dying for years
we do not leave the wounded behind
backs bent & broken          like the iced-down trees
we bear red stretchers laden with those
with ribcages broken open to massage the heart
to massage the very blood.
                 Do not misunderstand.
I will carry even the dead
past bends in the road         as the sun keeps going down
but I prefer to whisper to those who stalk endings
who are not stalked by the finite         who take charge
adjusting the thermostat when the temperature is below zero
tracing zeros in the mist on the bathroom window
the mist of their own breath
the linked zeros of the infinite.
 

Baltimore to Albany

In Baltimore reading Rilke
I saw the city's last wall peeled away from the grates
I saw the city's last train depart
I saw the lamp shimmy on the bedside table
I saw a woman slumped on the curbside
peeling her face off in both hands
as one might peel an orange.
Only the blank was revealed beneath.

Pink pink.        The sun or the moon, pink
as a baby's crib cap
if she is a girl-child    born Good Friday.
Born in Albany.     The spaces between
Baltimore's last wall standing
& Albany        are specious glimpses
of an entity falling
backwards through the blank of
a veritable dawn.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore lives in Upstate New York with her husband and daughter. Her work has been widely published, and radio or blogzine interviews can be found via Google. She has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best-of-the-Web. Her books Memory Rituals: an Army of Suns and Enough Light on the Dogwood also can be found via google. More work can be found on Carolyn's facebook site. She has two or more books forthcoming in 2012.
 

Carolyn Srygley-Moore-

Surrealism in the Whites of the Eye
 

Surrealism has its place.       The streets of France
the hills     of Colorado.           In New York

we do not tend so much toward dream.           I cling to the briars
in the briar patch             the metal fence with prongs
parethesizing my snowed-down garden.     Pricking fingers.

Cornflowers are blue I believe
as is the sky             come tomorrow.
Eye whites are nearly blue              when one comes close
in combat             the field of war or peace.

They skip arm in arm like little girls on the great playground
drawing circles in the snow with their shoe-tips.

O the dream world leaves the sadness behind
almost.         Not quite.       I dreamt of you last night
walking out on me in the library

of gloom.              The library where soon
shadows will fill the windows            in a stock exchange with light.




Improvisational Ballet
 

Of course they come for all of us.
The proponents of world wars & Waterloo.
The hippopotomus has massive jaws         that can crack the ribs
of any airplane.       They come for each of us
as we lean into the airraid jangling            our hands cupped open.
The Hangedman from tarot twirls on the horizon
with the dual face of janus, spinning.
                 Some speak the book of names
other the tree of life.            What of the graves
piled               one atop the other
in places without name?       I am afraid
there is nothing to be said.
It is all an improvisational ballet
over a field of ice.             I called my father Daddy
but it was a different Daddy        than the one you know.
                                It was a different tree
blooming yellow in marina summer & early forsythia spring.




The Invention of Fire
 

Of course, the torch was dipped in lava
roiling down the valley lilts
& fire was stolen.    Not a vestige of air & ether
Not the revelation of mythdom
But a purchase from the earth. A dollar in the pocket
of the great pole dancer
Her velvet thong.         & the wheel was a fluke
a cougar's hairball      roiling down the valley lilts.
& the work of oxen was revealed.
             Fire & wheels & death
preceding life.        A purchase from the earth
From the great medical table.
At the corner of fifty & Front there is a building
where Hendrix made of iron leans back
as his groin plays electric guitar.
I remember meeting you there         to listen
as I tasted your spit at the back of my throat.
Your not strange      you said        but special.
But my dreams I said
But my dreams.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore lives in Upstate New York with her husband and daughter. Her work has been widely published, and radio or blogzine interviews can be found via Google. She has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best-of-the-Web. Her books Memory Rituals: an Army of Suns and Enough Light on the Dogwood also can be found via google. More work can be found on Carolyn's facebook site. She has two or more books forthcoming in 2012.