Obsidian’s Edge 3

7:00 am
Breakfast

1

Yesterday,
I sacrificed a chicken.

Unborn,
it lay within its calcium cocoon,
dormant,
a volcano sleeping deep beneath thick snow.

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Tap, tap, tap,
the silver spoon bounced
off the hairless shell:
a sudden crack,
a spurt of orange blood.

Today,
I tap with my silver hammer
on the grateful grapefruit’s paper skull.

Silence.
No movement
within the honeyed
comb of pith and cell.

2

High in the church tower,
a hammer blow falls on an echoing anvil:
the cracked bell lurches into life.

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 Rooster crows his thick rich cocoa rico:
blackened torsos of fire-roasted beans.

3

Squeezed orange, racked by the inquisition,
its pale yellow robe spent and exhausted;
wasted disc of a worn-out, decadent moon.

4

  Naturaleza muerta:
the orange expires on the table.

Still sticky its carcass,
its life blood is a sacrifice:
thick, rich, golden liquid,
as fierce and sweet as
sunshine on a branch.

5

   Tabled motion:
my hand reaches out.
Arthritic fingers clasp,
but cannot hold
the golden glass.

6

The tequila’s wrinkled worm
tickles my fancy.

Grasshoppers
fried in garlic
no longer make me squirm.

7

Two Tigers
rage in my head.

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They crave mescal
at this hour of the day.

15 thoughts on “Obsidian’s Edge 3”

  1. Who knows? Our school eggs were cooked in batches of about 60-80 in a huge institutional pot. Getting a good one was like winning the lottery. In those days, for me, it was “none with my number”!

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    • Don’t blame you. This, from another unpublished manuscript.

      Boiled Egg

      two dozen at the bottom of the pot
      as hard as rocks
      two dozen at the top
      liquid beneath the fresh toast
      used as blotting paper
      to mop them up
      and there, somewhere,
      in the middle of the pot,
      hiding like the prize number
      waiting for the winner
      in a national lottery:
      the perfect egg.

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      • My dislike is the result of eating lunch with friends at school. A friend always brought a hard- boiled egg for lunch. One day she said, you know, one of these days Mom is going to send an uncooked egg by mistake, and when she opened it, the raw egg went everywhere. I always wondered if it was coincidence or a stupid joke.

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  5. Thanks, Tanya. Chipped and sharpened Obsidian was turned into the knives wielded by priests and executioners. Hence standing at Obsidian’s Edge has a very specific and not too pleasant double meaning. Then, I guess we are all walking some form of tight-rope anyway!

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  6. I am loving all your Obsidian pieces. They are so appropriately named by that dark, but transparent in thin pieces, volcanic rock. There are so many rich layers going on here – so much to enjoy and ponder!

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  10. Very interesting, Roger. I won’t ask if you are a ‘big-endian’ or a ‘little-endian’. To wax so eloquent over breakfast…. wow. I’ll never see breakfast again without some attempt at poetry.

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    • I, Sir John, am a Big-Endian; that way, there is always room for the tea-spoon that I wield. My Fair Lady Clare, however, is a brutal executioner and lops the top off her boiled eggs with a knife. This may well be a key difference between the Celt and the Anglo-Saxon.

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