Dying In Laurel Canyon Poem by Diana Thoresen

Everything is sickness and weakness with Ingmar Bergman.
(Charles Bronson)

In this hamlet, Death is a warm oven:
It has always been open like space
No trace is left of amethyst clarity
And the labored breath still lives on
Inside the Dyonisic offerings of flowers

Blue life lines and brittle blue walls,
All tragically festooned with the sun-lit
Palladian words. Neptune reigns here.
A touch of the streets once spiked
The blood for a student Bel Air prince

Until a vigilante shooting star fed
Him warm tea instead of mother's milk
How do you say blue in Lithuanian?
And can Houdini conjure the mesmerizing
Bright pink of a cold beetroot soup?

Time is a slippered murderer clad
In soft and noiseless emu feathers
Ever shifting dunes of morphine dreams
Sidestep the peaceful lull of Baltic waves

Or was it those sea witch voices?



Harmonized and crystallized, the music called

Forth the purple splendor of old gods

Who relish the vaulted blood of Ben-Hur

On All Hallow's Eve...

The pain of living in a Roman war galley



Is metastasizing through the blue house

No sun gods come with healing water

Enter Death with a fistful of ale; the fluid

Camera cuts with the hissing and the teasing

Of monosyllables: now the young must die