fallen verses

Change up your Sestina line length (a Read Write Poem prompt)

I feel kind of bad that it is my prompt up over at Read Write Poem, and I haven’t posted a prompted poem! So, this changes now. I have been shirking many, many things these last few weeks, lots of family activities, travelling, end of semester nonsense, blah blah boo hoo. I do hope to spend more time writing and interacting with the blog’o'poetry updating more frequently than I do. This is my RWP poem, and #2 in the Making of a Poem series, this time a sestina. Terrible nasty form, that. dreadfully long. On the plus side, I decided it didn’t need to make sense (yay surreality! and yay wine for making it not seem like a bad idea!) so back to the random word generator and, bam, half an hour later, this monstrosity.

For the RWP prompt: My line lengths change from poem to poem, often mid-to-short, but it is more unusual for me to include very long and short lines and break them into stanzas. Hence, the strangeness of this.

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Sestina

The edge of the crack, shattered earth falling away, an abyss
large enough for you and me and all of us. What choice
have we in this matter? What is left when the gap between personal
and professional, private and public, is no larger than a bedspread?
And the man at the teleprompter, purveyor of every script,
removes this- what need for creativity?- removes this burden.

You are a burden
deepening the abyss.
I scan the script,
see if the choice
of the bedsspread
remains personal.

One on one with the interviewer, a clown-face with which I am personal,
I wonder if she feels her personality, her switched-on-ness is a burden.
Give me the closed room, the cream skin of her body nestled in a black bedspread.
Even if she’ll be another headless body falling with me into the abyss
I would like one night, and another, maybe a week, to have made a choice,
or at least to think it was free until retroactively written into the script.

An elegant script,
serifs feel personal,
classic choice
and no burden
for printing. The abyss:
ink-stained bedspread.

It need not be ascetic, a life of perpetual answers. Perfectly tucked bedspread
(bed always made) it says so right there on page 87. Did you forget you script
today? We have rehearsal then filming. Today, you’ll be skydiving in the abyss.
Yes, it’s underwater. Technicalities. You really shouldn’t take this so personal,
it’s a dangerous scene and due to contracts enduring safety is no burden.
The stuntman contracted to fill your life is already on the way. Good choice-

Acceptance. Choice
of quilt or bedspread.
Never a burden,
accept the script.
Alone, it’s personal,
our own abyss.

Beside you under the bedspread, at the bottom of the abyss.
Pages of the script torn to make room for one meager choice:
one hefty, but gladly carried burden, accepting you is personal.

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For next week, Christine has given us a novel prompt. Sounds like we should expect some interesting poems next week.