A-Z Challenge, B is for Benny, April 2, 2011

Hmm, there seems to be theme developing here, if you can develop a theme in two posts. This is an illo for my children's book, Benny's Favorite Color and features Benny with a peacock at the Zoo.

I am not officially playing along with the A-Z challenge because I am not always available. But here are the first two posts any way.

Of course, I have a poem for the letter B for national poetry, by me:

Broken Bridge

Remember sleep, that trickster, laughing,

bright with moonshine? She draped curtains

of widow gossamer so thick over your face

that you inhaled her tiny hourglass of toxins.

She flung you into flights of unquiet silence.

Remember sleep? You walked through walls.

Sometimes, her light shone green, her detail etched,

complex and compelling. You saw hemp ropes with every fiber

shadowed against the checkered metal and concrete

bridge floor. Ropes piled like snakes on a bridge

that ended, like all your bridges, suspended above the middle

of a churning river. Sometimes, you flew. You flew.

Bridges dangled over open space, snakes of rope coiled

on their decks. You tumbled into snake pits, snakes slithered

in the henhouse, wrapped around the hen-hot eggs, wound

around your arms, your neck. You wanted to escape

or you wanted to rescue them from cold, heat, people attacking

or animals with fangs bared. You wanted to save them, you wanted

to fly with them though the aqueous air of their underwater caverns.

But all your bridges broke, hurtling you into space. You fell.

Over those bridges, toward open water, men swarthy

with rage, brandishing cutlasses and terror,

chased you. You turned and ran through complex mazes

of alleys and abandoned buildings. You were always trying

to accomplish something you couldn't quite remember,

something urgent and important. Understanding eluded you,

like sleep eludes you now. You fell.

Over and over, you fell off cliffs, tumbled, twisted,

a shrieking rag doll, waking before you smashed

on the jagged rocks. You'd read that if you died in a dream,

you died forever. No wonder the trickster abandoned you!

In the waking world, they'd find your body

curled in the womb of a dark invisible Persephone.

You believed in death until you died, again and again,

and woke, and woke again, and woke again

through onion layers of dreams, not sure which,

if any, was the waking life you’d come from,

the life you thought you remembered.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

The formating is wrong, it's supposed to be in six-line stanzas. My A post is here.