PYRO-OSTEOMANCY

Desperate, desperate to know

Watching the fire’s glow

Bones cracking, crackling

Lining scorched skeletal remains

Once covered with fine skin and hair

Now used for another’s despair

As she anxiously studies the sketching

Gift born of blazing heat

The cause of her rapid heartbeat

And she sees a line in the bone

Like a six or a stone

A lover’s promise

She will not be alone

Picking up a staunch twig

Removing that bone

From fading embers

While she remembers

His passionate smile

And she thinks

All will be well…

© 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGES: Shang Dynasty Oracle Bone/Osteomancy Music

(only resin bone reproductions used)

52 (song-in-progress)

Sigh and cry

Over someone’s high

Because it’s all

Alchemy of the brain

Someone left it to melt

In the rain

Like some 1970’s cake

In a song

Yet all seems wrong

So why can’t we be happy?

//

Get out the cards

But not for a gambling game

Not to read ‘em and weep

Just an answer

Before we leap

From the high dive so steep

Swanning down into darkness

Of drowning water

Preferring self-slaughter

To a life giving no quarter.

//

Can’t fix everything that breaks

Even though your psyche aches

Bee Gees ask how to mend

A broken heart

Tarot’s 3 of Swords

Pulls it apart

Where are the cards

To help us start

A recovery from life’s stabs

All those bloody, bandaged jabs

Seared alive into scabs

//

Going back to basics

Find a collector’s deck of 52

Shuffle for a clue

How long will I be blue

I hold them in my hands

These famous bands

Etched on cards

The best of all our Bards

Distracted by their music

Most of all their words

Crying out like hungry birds

Why’d you leave me?

Where’d you go?

I love you so

But you don’t want to know

And I,

I must go…

//

© 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: Music Genius Playing Cards

FOR MY FOLLOWERS, FRIENDS & FAMILY

Happy Thanksgiving Day
This is important for me to say
Social Media is our folk hotel
Visiting daily, we share and retell

Showing pictures of our dog and cat
And our granddaughter the acrobat
Yummy recipes make me hungry
Love the chance to sign petitions about the bumblebee

Wonderful to hear about your son
Life is tough but they still have fun
What amazing writing and crafts so handy
Thanks for accepting our modus operandi

We huddle together when tragedy does come
It visits us all and we succumb
But having loving thoughts sent our way
Soothes us like a spiritual bouquet

So keep on posting and let me know
How life is, just say hello
Know I think of you although I don’t say
You’re always in my mind on any day

Love & Fun & Happiness to you and your Crew…

(c) 2018 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Tom Russell cover art for Folk Hotel

A MINOR/E MINOR MORNING

Fog has its own music

Sounding similar to the song of the heart

Kept secret and unshared

Until the Other hears it too…

© 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: UKULELE IN THE FOG

BIG SISTERS

(scroll down for YouTube videos)

My big sisters

Role models

Perfect physical beauty

With voices to transmute

The lead of life

Into golden gardens

Of hope

Proof of the divine feminine

Women can rock

With the best of the men

And although my path strayed

From the peace and love route

From the creative

Buried in an office

With bi-weekly paychecks

Medical

Retirement

Although I strayed

I somehow found the will

To teach myself what you already knew

Strumming strings

Writing songs

All for fun

And I look at you

True to yourselves

Aging

No cosmetic surgery

Just comfortable in

Your human shell

Divine inside

Continuing to create

Struggling and winning

Against age and disease

Willing to fight

Living another day

And your beauty

Leaves me breathless

As I gaze at my role models

My big sisters

Forever in my heart and mind…

(c) 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGES: Grace Slick and Joni Mitchell

YouTube videos:

https://youtu.be/5QAF2qF4wHU Jefferson Airplane (Grace Slick) Someone to Love

https://youtu.be/f7MbmXklj3Q   Joni Mitchell Coyote

INTENSE DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD (SONG-IN-PROGRESS)

My road once was a riverbed

So hard to get it through my head

Although shells poke out of the watershed

It morphed into a now-ancient farmstead

//

But so hard to proliferate in sandy soil

Sweaty involvement of those who toil

Flora silently struggling in turmoil

Earth defeating by strangling coil

//

So now the road is rutted and rough

Neighbors look neither left nor right, oddly enough

Our lives here are admittedly tough

But wouldn’t dare call anyone’s bluff

//

What is the mystery and melancholy of a street

Di Chirico painted the dreamlike retreat

I move through it with an irregular heartbeat

Within a life with memories mainly bittersweet

//

Where is the love promised once upon a time

No sense wondering since I’ve passed my prime

The clock slowed down, gave up its chime

And my mind is merely an internal rhyme

//

Sometimes I can sense your passion

There is definitely a mutual attraction

But will always deny my reaction

Because love is merely an abstraction

//

We’re all refractions of light

Looking different to each, is it right?

To some we look like day, to some like night

But rarely is it really visual sight

//

So I wind down the road symbolizing life

Rutted, rocky and sometimes filled with strife

Circular as stone or straight as a sharpened knife

Interwoven with noise or sweet sounds of a fife…

//

© 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: G. Di Chirico Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

ETA (SONG-IN-PROGRESS)

And you’re walking down

This crazy town

Playing an untuned guitar

And you feel so lost

Voice gravelly as frost

Going way too far

//

Here comes the wind

Must’ve sinned

Hurricane stalking me

Rain-soaked hair

Life no way fair

And yet I feel strangely free

//

Live Oaks uprooting

Thunder guns shooting

Lightning oh so frightening

Where to go

Motel’s a no-no

Apocalypse plague heightening

//

No stars to guide

Just want to hide

Mud soaks my boots

Dark of the moon

Need shelter soon

But an owl suddenly hoots

//

Lift my head

Don’t want to be dead

Fight the wind and rain

Struggling along

I see nature’s cruel song

But strength comes from pain

//

I’m gonna make it…

© Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: Hurricane Eta, midnight, 11-11-20

ANOTHER NEW BOOK!

My newest book is available in a Kindle or paperback edition. Of course, if you follow me, you have already read all the poems. But just wanted to announce it as a change from all the political and (for us in the Gulf of Mexico) hurricane news. Be well and safe…

SLINKING AROUND

Blue moon overpowering

Motion detector lights

Who goes?

Possums and rooftop cats

Pounding across the tin house

Reverbing as if weighing

One hundred pounds

Instead of fifteen

It’s Sunday and I head to

The closed post office

Good time to pick up the mail

From a box forced to yearly pay

P.O. won’t deliver down my dirt road

Hard for me

To pity

Workers so fussy

What happened to

Neither wind nor rain

(Nor rutted road?)

Can stop the mail delivery?

So many cars on the street

Under the 6:30 morning moon

But it’s first day of Eastern Standard Time

And technically

It’s really

7:30 if no time change

Mask and gloves

Sanitized in the car

Home and stare

At my computer

Realizing I’ve not only

Cut myself off from

Physical, flesh and blood people

Because of Covid-19

But also beginning to avoid

Online friends and family

As if I can catch their germs

They probably don’t have

Germs traveling through

Zero and One binary codes

Virtual infection?

What does that mean

About me

And why?

By now the moon is

Working its magic

Across the world

Where it is sunset

And the coming of night

The waning of pure light

And I grind the coffee

Shell the boiled egg

And wish for the end of disease

So I can shop and visit

Wherever, whomever

I please…

© 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: Blue Moon at dawn