Spices of the Heart

On Tuesday, we had another of our "Tweet Parties" (poetry jams) over at TweetSpeak Poetry. Five of us participated, and our moderator, the famous @tspoetry herself, used lines from Rodale Publishing's Herbs and Renee Loux’s Living Cuisine throughout the jam to prompt, encuarge and stimulate. The final, edited resulted is posted under the title of "The Walled Garden of Spices and Herbs."

The jam lasts for an hour. I participate as both contributor and editor-to-be. So I Tweetdeck open and set up to search the #tsp hashtag, and Twitter open, and Word open so I can cut and paste contributions essentially as they happen. It's multi-tasking at its most breathless craziness, but it's also great fun to watch all of this unfold. Later, I go back and edit.

This morning, I sliced out my own contributions from the jam, to see if they could stand on their own. I think they do, but the lines resulted from a lot of interaction and back-and-forth, so this is more like an individual poem infused with group contributions.

Spices of the Heart

My heart pours bittersweet, hot.
Piercing, shredding golden chambers, golden ventricles,
Golden heart once crowned with bay,
Now tattered.
A taste of cloves, a taste of laurel, a taste of death.
Upon the path,
Atrampled leafy crown.

The scent of chilies, red hot,
Assaulting the smell sense;
The scent of heat, the scent of sweet, the heart of gold.
A mortar, crushing smell,
Crushing heat,
Crushing life,
Grinding fever,
Grinding cloves,
Grinding hearts and crowns.
The grinding turns all to powder,
To shift with the wind,
To move to the skies of cloves,
Of walls,
Of laurels.

The warm aroma of spice and cinnamon
Blends with laurel and cloves.
By the wall, set in thyme,
I sat,
Tired from tending
My garden of the golden heart.
Too little time to court,
To breathe the cloves,
To wear the laurel.
Yet my untended heart of gold waits by the wall.

I cannot wait;
My heart awaits,
My heart awakes from a cloven slumber.
He touches a cinnamon cheek,
A tongue of chili-red lies, of bitterroot taste.

The dove wings on,
With a glance backward
For a brief moment of thyme.
The dove soars above the field of spice,
Brushing the laurel,
Aiming for the sun.
Left by the dove,
The field of spice,
The golden heart,
Pulsing though shredded by the clove,
Left by the wall of thyme,
It lies with the laurel crown.
A love as hollow as a blade of chive,
A love snapped by the cherry sun.
Do you still tend my love,
My golden heart,
My heart in the walled garden?

A hidden prize, buried in leaves and bare woods,
The smile of the dove
Casts a faint shadow
Upon the field of spice
And the garden of golden hearts.
A fleeting glance left for the field,
The dove glides away to heaven.