Tuesday, January 1, 2019

SUSAN JOYNER-STUMPF



SUSAN JOYNER-STUMPF

PREMONITION

As now, I taste disaster on your lips
Wormwood permeates your feral tongue
Stings the tissue of my sensitive desire
I recoil, in blatant fear of your sulfurous power
Your eyes of venom-fire surprise
Seep through pores of languid reprise
Victim of these stars gone awry
Your embrace the scaling of winter’s touch
Our song that’s turned to eulogy, perfuse
Despair’s Iliad that reeks its muse
Upon my Soul’s acceptance to refuse
Delight of no hardened consequence to beg
The door of your heart invisible to endorse
Another storm to weather in my dying sun
I feel the shift, the arpeggios recant
The scythe that falls to its sepulchral remorse
This odyssey of an intermentive affair
Virulent vacillate of maddened air
Between each breath that freezes shocked lungs
Dreams can wither from their scab’s display
A writhing vestibule of its own malevolent accord
I the wounded heroine in your macabre play
And lost love your jeweled and bloody sword.
Copyright ©Susan Joyner-Stumpf ®




SPOOKY HORSE

I’m a spooky horse.
The New Orleans wind rushes and hurts through
The meandering Mississippi River, twisting its liquid
Bowels through the everglade of timeless time.
The air startles me ~ the Tornado in my own eyes
Fills with stormy tears.
I’m a spooky horse.
My heart skips many beats and panics
Its way down torture street on its cobblestone pain.
I am without safety beneath that Voodoo Moon on Bourbon
Street.
Esplanade wines its artery of Boulevards through my very
Shaky shadow . . . through its bedlam echo I cemently bleed.
I’m a spooky horse.
My emotions cost me too much.
I close out, hearing only the whispers of those who forgot to love
Or ask me to dance ~ now forever shall they weep near the Swamp’s
Murky edge, begging me back, flesh or spirit.
Spooky or not.
Copyright ©Susan Joyner-Stumpf ®




BIRTH OF A POEM

And well its rounded voice
The one that speaks to us
In inertia state
Dream state
Where there is no escape
When defenses are down
And the space between our
Eyes forget their wasted tears
When the rhythm in our chest
Resorts to muted hum
A whisper’s ghost undone
A calling ~ ~
The urge to create as
Vital and strong as the urge to crumble
It’s only the difference in what
Cripples you to solid reason
Or blatant insanity
Whichever feeds your glory
Something screams
In your bones
Louder than terror
And snaps like a twig in a storm
Feathering in its brokenness for
Righteousness
A sovereign whim of mortal gold
That whips you into submissive grace
Free falling
A song in the outcast of oblivion
A wake up call from some forgotten torture

And then the revelation, the enlightenment
Call it channeling; call it Dante’s Revenge
A pen is lifted from the tomb.
A poem is born!
Copyright ©Susan Joyner-Stumpf ®




BACK INTO EVERYTHING

Back into everything else we go
Call it what you will
Cosmic connection
Elemental as shared breath
The fine-tuned poetry of a harp
Weeping through the porous of our souls.
Our own voices the beat of a drum
Deep inside the earth’s primeval crust
Eyes closing in the shadow of an eclipse
We are the breakdown of inevitable rust.
Our footfalls in the forest
Just one more added mantra to the singing leaves
Majestic overlay of tenor in all that grieves.
What separates us from a blade of grass
A sunlit hue in a meadow’s deep ravine
We are the chaos of a terrible storm
The fraction it takes to smile, shy, serene.
The howl of a lone wolf on the cliff’s rocky edge
Scrapes the surface of our naked bones
Just when we think our footprints have no followers
We look behind and realize we’re not alone.
Back into everything we go
Eternal lights married to distant stars
Pulse of time and space moving through our existence
Massaging our mortality, defining, in
Every individual aspect, who we, as a specie,
Truly are.
Copyright ©Susan Joyner-Stumpf ®




HUMANITY’S LEGACY

Grander the vision optimal
The sense of us all
Our being as to
Perfect imperfection
A flower with petals drawn
To the open throat of waiting sky
Our quest of truth
In the heart of a conch shell
Or inside a lover’s seductive smile
We bask in the light shown
Not because we so much demanded it
But because like a gift, it was given
And so because of parallels
We can appreciate the cost of darkness
The bliss upon which rides
The spine of sorrow’s velvet equal
Gentle whir of words
Sometimes loudest when unspoken
Breaking into whimsical dance
Even when we fear tomorrow
Rain inside our blood-wept hearts
It takes a stronger courage to
Share our deepest scars once hidden
Drawn to cosmic~sequined interplay
Once ancient man was jealous
Of intangible stars
Now we appreciate the unfathomable distance
Because it defines who we are
What it’s like to be human
No mask to hide mortality
Open chapters our Souls to God
Protégés of his rapturous divinity.
Copyright ©Susan Joyner-Stumpf ®

SUSAN JOYNER-STUMPF



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