17 October 2015

Lioness

                                                                                                    poems....w.i.p.

                                                                                                             with thanks to Octavia Butler
Vince Ballentine 2015 ig: vballentine99

They don’t know.

  Who? 

None of them.

Lionesses all, we know:
Lonely we race savanna down
For blood             for meat
For ourselves       to be found in a kill of love.

He hunts, too, for her, but it’s not the same.
Protect
Provide
 Profess
And thank goddess.
And yet, still     it is not the hunt of love lioness makes:
a firestorm silent infinite roar: she plays in danger under a sun of her own tone-
a danger, a threat, a vulnerability of not owning her own heart -exposed under hot noon-
But feeding it        feeding it always:
                                              the need
                                              for meat.
A blood bath for her soul that returns it to the gaping open-heart                of her solar plexus.

A long and winding Pleiades into the extraplanetary focus of another
galaxy….
Standing on the black paint of sky
because black is never black. It is always
red
green
purple
blue.
And there is a green in king’s eyes…
But it is an orange in queen’s.
Because earth warms, and rages in earthen races,
While his violet night hunt is cool as a sprint, and the purple road is paved and smooth and cool
in the black-green night,
a racing around the edge of stylized, cut, and known cliff's edges, while
Hers guns into a heart of darkness.

And then there was a wait,
           a pause
                        a taking in of breath
And a silent holding at the edge of the road where the gravel meets
The bare edge of the black top rocks
that tell of a strange kind of civilization at the edge of the world,
Where lioness hearts are still queen,
And king’s rules are yet unknown.