fallen verses

If only work was optional

This week’s Totally Optional Prompt is “work.” With some decidedly elitist quotes to color our perceptions. I dashed off the poem below. The italicized lines are from “Chain Gang,” recorded by Sam Cooke, among others, and I am unsure who actually gets the writing credit.

Desire Stronger Than Steel

Oh don’t you know
that’s the sound of the men
working on the…

revolving office doors to ultra modern lobbies without chairs
swiping the building pass to pile in elevated sardine tins ready to roll the lids off and watch you get eaten
practice privacy in a public boxes while having conversations with wives and children and husbands and boyfriends and maybe three out of four playing solitaire or watching YouTube videos as long as the boss’s door is closed
double-tall half-caff no foam latte life free with a full punchcard
parking garage attendant knows your name like it’s Cheers, “Hi, Norm.”
Deadlines mean you work over the weekend so you can afford the life you’re supposed to have because you have a corporate job and commute to your 4 BR 2.5 bath finished basement in the suburbs while you see your wife with the socially acceptably kept to the bedroom sexual perversions just long enough to have the kind of sex summed up as: even when its bad… while she gets out the vibrator and you get out the tie rack
lather
rinse
repeat
office doors are all revolving and “in” one day means “in” the next

A Halloweeny type of poem

I think I should have been writing this earlier this week, so it would have been up all day.

La (Petite) Mort

Cocktails and house-beats,
we neck in the velvet booth,
disco-lights and candle-smoke,
sweat-sheened bodies
like stars on the dance floor.

On your lips I taste
the gin of a martini.
Through your stretched cotton camisole,
the smooth curve of your breasts
interrupted by your hardening nipples.

Your long-nailed hands in mine,
we pass through the crowd
and out the tinted glass doors
into the steel canyons of the city,
riding whitecaps to the door
of your apartment, keys freed
from your black clutch.

Every moment since our eyes
slid across each others
has come to now,
our bodies sliding across each others
with ever-greater skin-tingling
moments and kisses
onto the black satin sheets,
bared flesh ready and flush.

There is no magic
in the hypnotic depths of your eyes,
just hunger.
You lick your lips and offer
eternity in your arms
and as I penetrate,
you penetrate,
these shards of ivory
and an orgasm…
la petite mort…
la mort….

Before long, an expectant darkness,
the taste of copper and your wrist.

My eyes open to the alabaster
of your breasts,
skin cool, heart still,
but the passion…
no lessening of ardor,
nothing to ease the hunger
for your touch.

Only your gasps in the long night,
fucking on the marble slabs of biers
to show that we have cheated death
of its payment.

Only a deep bass more felt than heard,
my hands pushing against
your leather pants;
we are galaxies on the dance floor;
every moment in the long night
we drink ecstasy.

May much candy end up in your bag/plastic pumpkin.

“…suffering, and corn.” -Denny Crane.  Discuss.

Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues
By John Timmer

The use of Wikipedia as a source of information for classwork has been widely reported on and has even happened in classes taught by our own Ken Fisher. But this may not mean that Wikipedia has no place in the classroom, if Martha Groom at the University of Washington-Bothell has her way. Instead of letting her students rely on Wikipedia as a source, however, Groom has turned it into a destination for their classwork: in place of a term paper, her students were required to create Wikipedia entries.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review
By John Siracusa

I’m not going to quote this (it is far, far, far, too long to have any quote do justice) but suggest that even if you, as I am, are a Windows user, it’s worth reading the review to become aware of all the really cool technology Windows users may never see. And the icon below is funny.

Ginsberg howled, I’ll just speak softly.

The ladies over at Fertile Ground have asked for Poetic Mission Statements, and I admit, I don’t have one. I do not have a mission for being a writer or poet, I simply cannot conceive of not writing. As I go through life, through every day, I see things, events, experiences and I have to write about them. Perhaps its OCD, I don’t know, I have thus far avoided mental health professionals. I write because to not write is not an option. Even if it never gets “written,” I’m still in my head making verses.

A perfect example of that is watching television tonight. An event during “Brothers & Sisters” lead me to writing the poem below. It inspired a line which led me to start composing and thinking, “gee, this might work as a villanelle and I am totally masochistic enough to try to write another villanelle.” It was easier the second time around to think in terms of repetition and rhyme, and I think it turned out better than the first one (for the especially curious, here). I think I’ll still stick with free verse, but the more formal writing I’ve had to do for my class isn’t as bad as I usually expect. I don’t think I’ll ever be a sonneteer, but maybe one or two.

Click of a Latch

When the door closes, you fall
to your knees, head held low,
and you stare unseeing at the wall.

In the sudden silence, the sudden pall,
your mind jumps but cannot know.
When the door closes, you fall

and indecision is like a plane in stall.
Reality now unreal as they go,
and you stare unseeing at the wall

as if there were answers at all,
but no. This past unwanted, so
when the door closes, you fall

and in comparison you see how small
you are in your life: a supporting role.
You stare unseeing at the wall,

slumped in the cramped entry hall
and watch the one you love coolly go…
When the door closes, you fall
and you stare unseeing at the wall.

Jessica of 9 to 5 Poet fame has begun a new online journal, Asphalt Sky.  She is accepting submissions through December 31st, so check it out!

…and I cannot bring myself to even bother with homework.  It isn’t fun.  Comics are fun.  XKCD:

So, even if that is readable (it isn’t for me), click the picture, go to the page, read the mouse-over text.

Also, musings on building “one’s own personal “global microbrand”” with accompanying picture:

That’s fun, too.  Calculus? Latin?  Not so much.

Yes, I get it…

Shakespeare is really famous, and he wrote Iambic Pentameter. As have many other really famous dead people. And some less famous living people, but they’re not as relevant to the brief digression / discussion here.

At least I can say the poetry writing class I am taking is inspiring blog posts if not the most excellent of tom’s poetry. Quite understandably, it is based on learning the hunks of word-metal (i.e. tools) residing in the poet’s toolbox. Happy things like metaphor, types of language, form, metrical systems, etc. And some small amount of workshopping from peers and black ink scrawled uncomfortably across the poems I write solely to fulfill the assignment and not from the greater poetic experience I enjoy. That was a very long sentence, perhaps I should have broken it up, tossed in a line break or two, cleared up what I meant, introduced fewer concepts, and so on. It is probably a good thing my instructor does not read this blog (or, at least, I don’t think he does…). The rage, the rage… is really tame.

This weeks assignment: fifteen lines of blank verse. For the uninitiated, blank verse is unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. Yes, fifteen lines of daDA daDA daDA daDa… Sort of like the sound of my head hitting the desk repeatedly while I attempt to tortuously twist word choice and syntax to fit those ends. Was I successful? I might think so, you might think so, I very much doubt Herr Instruktor will.

Just Passing Through

Just passing through, gray road to NYC
ticks by in mile-marked monotony,
these cypress pines the only green around
for days, a truck-stop maze, we wander out
into a coffee haze like dawn, inhaling
tailpipe tar, a snowflake’s star; not far
off Eden’s Island neon adverts say
an IHOP twenty miles away is lunch,
the bar next door a Harley’s rider’s break
from shirt and tie, a weekend’s ride the soul’s
scant income, Volvo traded, parking pass
negated, he won’t stop ’till Sunday, home,
his pressed suit hung like fate; defrost set high,
I’ll trade the sky, this view, this you, preferred,
your brown eyes wide, the city’s lights ahead.

I have added a read. write. poem. section to my blogroll which has links to all the people participating in NaBloPoMo as part of the read.write.poem. group. If you are also participating in NaBloPoMo, or want to, and “heart poetry,” check out that group, started by Ceridwen.

Now I just need to get all of those blog links added to Google Reader so I can keep up conveniently through one innocuous web address…

Also, please note, in that read. write. poem. group, I posted a totally awesome write-up about syllabic verse. Go! You will probably be disappointed, but that’s life.