transmutation (for One Shoot Sunday)

Photo prompt by Adam Romanowicz.

trapped in a shell
of dreams, the night careens
into an abyss–
the paradise of mollusks
unknown to stars

alien, Night
drowns in crystal tears
engorging shell hearts
layering an encrusted
stone

the sea lashes
the mollusks and turns
Night into strands
of sea spray
Night, the alien

grows eyes
globules of crystals
floating as froth
a veil to hide the birthing
mollusks

Night, the witness
in paradise becomes the sea
as heaving shells open
to let breathe the pearl
they birth

startled
in the blinding brightness
Night leaps and grows wings
springing off its eyes
jewels of sparks

an ocean breath
exhales Night back to dying stars
Night, the prodigal
now smithereens of tears
rain on cupped leaves

frozen as
bejeweled Dawn
on leaf strands
en-clasped like it were
its heart

a shell

Composed from a photo prompt by Adam Romanowicz and
posted for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry, the inimitable gathering place for poets and artists. Come immerse yourself, better yet share your work and your ideas about others’. Check us out!

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Shuffled seasons (for One Shoot Sunday)

photo prompt by Greg Laychak

The narrow aisle flows a river to a wall
Of white thought

What squares of light have no glow
On the surface of water?

Who spawns the flat bed of dreams my steps
Struggle to cover?

Imprisoned by air I breathe a stale paradise
Of jasmine blossoms

I hear the rain a hissing of limbs on trees
But the moon does not rise

Day ends at my door night turns the stars
Upside down

‘”Where is your walker?” “Excuse moi?” What tongue
Speaks in this land?

“You cannot leave without it?” “Why, who’s heading out?”
The grubs I picked wriggle

In my closed fist I am growing a butterfly
No one knows

In my bareness I feel drenched in dew my bones
Misaligned rattle

“Now let’s go back in.” “Who has left her?”
No one comes today

I draw a caul on the day withdraw into night
Retrieve what’s lost

The sign posts melt on the flowing river
My hair long undone

I shuffle the seasons: in my eyes autumn leaves fall
But cherry blossoms

Oh, he rises to me my cane I draw my arms a lover
Now my wings

Copyright (c) by Alegria Imperial 2011

Written with an image prompt by Greg Laychak for One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry, winner of the 2011 Shorty Award for the Arts, the inimitable gathering place for poets and artists. Share with us as we do ours your art or poetry and your thoughts. Check us out.

tsunami (a haibun draft)

What else but a surreal image? That’s how sizes and dimensions gape at us when Nature takes on our own nature of maniacal rage. An earthquake and a tsunami, for example, when men are turned into nothing but grit and as equally irritating to be winnowed out–if only Nature were like our eyes and hands that miss the tears along with the grit and spare some in prayer.

But sizes do not end where our span points midair or our eyes on walls of horizons. Dimensions spawn spaces blank beyond our knowing. What births in such depths and heights? Men have invented words to describe their fear. They brew these in inner cauldrons but fail to empty them out onto sand.

The steam scalds them at times, the overboil sometimes burns them. But dimensions distract them as they control what’s unseen, what heals, what’s scarred and soothed with words.

Beware do not build on an earthquake fault. As if the fissures may not crack elswhere. Leave the lush volcanic soil. As if men’s hankering for paradise can be tamped down. Live each day as if night were true death. As if, as if deafness can resist the moon’s whispers. Sizes and dimensions on sand only children can fathom turn out to be the truest picture. But even with a heart like a child’s men loses in his tangled thoughts a vision of sizes and dimensions, hence,

towers of sand
suspending stars and sky–
then come billows