"Pomes Penyeach" *

And doesn't The Throne of Psyche look pretty lying there?

Want to read more, to lodge a vote for my work and my publisher by claiming one for your own? The peddler's sack is here.

*Post title borrowed from James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.

No wonder he signed himself "James Joyce."

Below is a little gift for you--a rather strange gift. Earlier I linked to Paul Digby's video of the poem; it can be found on youtube. Links to prezi and video versions of poems (by Gary Dietz and Paul Digby) from The Throne of Psyche, review clips, and blurbs can be found on my website.  

***
Originally published in Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Reprinted in The Throne of Psyche (Mercer University Press, 2011).

THE NESTING DOLL                                                        

Once upon a time a little doll

Encountered demons in the woods near home.

One took the guise of well-bred traveler,

Smiling and chatting as he touched her here

And there, at last worming into her mouth

By cunning sleights so he could taste her soul.

At first the demon could not find the soul,

And he was roiling-wroth against the doll,

Sending her vomit, scalding her small mouth

With curses; Mama turned her out from home,

And Papa yodeled, “She won’t bunk down here

But take her thwacks and be a traveler.”

How cruel to make a child a traveler,

A ditch her nest! The black night of her soul

Expelled a single star; the demon could hear

It crackle, plunging like the tears the doll

Had shed when she looked back at Home Sweet Home.

Wrinkles were rock around her papa’s mouth.

The demon snatched the starlight in his mouth—

Then grief was in him like the traveler

They call the Wandering Jew, who has no home

And cannot die. The fiery drop of soul

Explored his throat and gut; meanwhile the doll

Kept dreaming that some girl would beg, “Stop here.”

Nobody did. The demon still could hear

Her words; in pools he must have glimpsed her mouth

Bewailing fate, although it seemed the doll

Was rubbish to him now, the traveler

Less than the tiny prisoned flame of soul

That made his mazy heart a hearth and home.

A demon’s heart is a queer sort of home . . .

Yet the star burned as brightly there as here

Or any place and had not changed from soul.

At times it whisked up to the demon’s mouth.

Perhaps light sought to reach the traveler

And knew when demon yielded to the doll.

When home was starlight singing in her mouth,

All powers burned to hear the traveler

And marveled soul was nested in a doll.