Monday Poetry Train #12

This poem seldom sees the light of day. I've never even printed a hard copy of it. I wrote it a few years ago while in a funk, in an attempt to remind myself that the foul mood I was in would pass as surely as the sun moves south in summer.

You all are welcome to snort. I do whenever I read this over when my mood is on the upswing. I avoid reading it when I'm down as then I hear the lines intoned as though by a parody of a maudlin King Lear. But when I'm up, I hear the King's jester chanting them in a sniggering cackle. Either way, I cringe.

At the moment, I'm hearing both their voices in a weird duet as the king hunches over the parchment saying each word as he scratches it down while his jester bounces upon his shoulders repeating them with caustic glee. As the king I would like to tattoo the words on the jester's own skin. As the jester I would like to blow smoke in the king's ear and watch it come out his nose in the shapes of the words. Or better yet, the shapes of the things the words signify. Looms, louts, harpies, tombs, snouts, song-birds, moons, mouths, hearts...

=====The Womb Of My Mouth

The womb of my mouth is gravid with doom.
The loom of my fate does shuttle sans boon.
Can life breathe for long beneath such sad ruin?
Will my heart soon succumb to the lure of the tomb?
How long will the harpies their dire rant employ?
May the rabid louts with their baneful tunes rout.
May they take their long snouts way off to the south.
And howl their foul taunts to the stony-faced moon.
Then, (maybe soon?) I’ll hear once more the fair croon
As song-birds at dawn sing out: "Bright day Ahoy!"
So my heart, cleansed of doubt, will look all about
And see in the light only beauty and truth.
Then glad hymns of hope will be born of my mouth.
And my soul, exulting in the shadow-less noon,
Will sing for a future effulgent with Joy.