fallen verses

This isn’t a poem, you know.
This is a splash of colour
(black)
on scraps of dirty paper
(suddenly valueless, green, 155.956 × 66.294 mm
when we give up the ridiculous imperial measurements
distributed with foreign government and unrepresented
taxation, which, it seems, we also need to
give up)
saying "thanks for being around.

"Thanks for being
constant as the cloud of
crows at stirling castle
or the voice in Ted Haggard’s head
(he calls it "God," but whatever).
Thanks for lasting
the same 65 million
as dinosaur bones
and not being calcified.

"Thanks for being
the bass line when I
was playing lead
and embellishing the melody
when I couldn’t strum
anything other than
c – c – c – c."

This isn’t a poem, you know.
This is my map of you
and where your bones move
softly through your muscles
and skin into my skin
and muscles and bones
so we vibrate at the same pitch
which is the pitch of grass
growing in a summer afternoon
reaching for the sun.
Shhhhh… Listen closely.

A response to Nathan’s Collaborative prompt #59 where poets donated titles and those titles have been used as the basis for the text of other poems. I didn’t use them all, I slashed them to pieces and added in more words, but I think that’s the joy of these prompts that we start with complete (or nearly) texts and disassemble and re-create in the writing process.  Definitely, if you have not, check out the other responses to this prompt over at Read Write Poem.

A Read Write Poem thing

This isn’t much of anything yet, a free-write a writing without goal or purpose. Perhaps a basis to later be Michelangelo and remove the unneeded. For now, just words:

Above, the stars are like a congregation in prayer, heads bent, taking no notice of our hands stretched across the empty space in the pew, hands stretched low against the cushion, hands reaching…

I mouth the words to some hymn. Some vocalization unrelated. I don’t hear the organ or the voices raised in some sort of exultation. I don’t even hear my heartbeat. There is silence, and the whisper of air as you inhale. What need for God when the numinous is close enough to be touched. And the hands, reaching…

But metaphor fails at this moment. The stars are just balls of exploding gas unimaginably far away paying no attention to the shy couple eating ice cream after sunset in the late spring. There is no  parish, no pastor, no sermon and the only hymn is the cicadas and the crunch of teeth powdering waffle cone. There is no metaphor in the hands. Two filled by elements of distraction, two remain untouching, unreaching…

And yet to dream.

Hobbyhorse, Hobbyhorse (A Paradelle)

Every letter in the preaching scribed-
Every letter in the preaching scribed-
Truths formerly barred, allowed by this recharter.
Truths formerly barred, allowed by this recharter.
The scribed truths in this letter barred,
Every recharter formerly allowed by preaching.

Imperfect results sent turbo up the chain,
Imperfect results sent turbo up the chain,
Flooding the inbox of the falsifier of records.
Flooding the inbox of the falsifier of records.
Turbo flooding sent up the inbox. The records imperfect.
Chain of results. Of the falsifier.

What is called a guide is astraddle a hobbyhorse.
What is called a guide is astraddle a hobbyhorse.
Replying to dismay, he had sportingly offered a refund.
Replying to dismay, he had sportingly offered a refund.
A called guide is replying sportingly to what refund?
Astraddle dismay, he is offered a had hobbyhorse

The recharter is astraddle a barred dismay.
The hobbyhorse guide is called, allowed by
Imperfect truths formerly in the inbox of preaching.
This letter turbo-scribed is a what? Results falsifier.
Every chain had records replying to flooding
Sportingly sent, the refund he offered up of the A.

The Read Write Prompt for this week was to use echolalia as the “hinge” of the poem. The wikipedia description of immediate echolalia seemed suggestive of certain poetic uses of repetition and it occurred to me the paradelle, as a form, seemed kind of echolalaic (anyone?). And, because I like to surprise myself when I write, I headed to WatchOut4Snakes and used their random word generator to get some “seed” words. Anyway, other people’s variously echolalaic or ekphrastic poems will be shared here.

Briefly, regarding the paradelle, they are tough. Not so much to write (unlike, say, a sonnet), but to write well.

Laughing in the Wind
after Rosetti

Still no one has seen the wind.
In these sepia photos the night
sky is the color of espresso.
Spring rains can be warm and gentle.
No one has really seen those either.

Still, no one has seen the wind.
Science, however, turns with the answer:
smoke. A trick that works in tunnels
but autumn remains stubbornly
unconvinced. Fire is too terrible.

Unless it is the incandescent burn
of passionate eyes. There is
velocity when falling,
even when falling in love.

The wind itself remains silent.
The wind itself explores all surfaces.
Realize, however, that the wind
is, itself, something to be explored.
Like silence. Like love.

Dana challenged us with a collection of words. Since I am never one to ignore a dropped gauntlet (er.. except the 30-40 prompts I didn’t do), I used that list as the basis. It took a few iterations before I found something that started working for me, and that is what remains above.

I didn’t use it, but in the wordle image the phrase “science turning tricksy” stood out to me. But it’s tricky like a mischevous god not tricksy like a con man. At least not true science, but you know what they say about true scotsmen.

Actually, being a pretty damn strict materialist / rationalist, I have enormous respect for science and the paradigm it works under. I don’t think it’s tricksy at all. I think Art is tricksy as all get out. And that is o.k. too.

A Pin Worked Loose

Tatterdemalion slink into depleted villas,
each step chasing memories deeper into
these antiquated courtyards.

Here are artifacts which nobody recognizes.
They remain untouched. Visitors, focused inward,
do not notice them. They tarnish, fade, rust.

Outside, civil guards scream obscenities.
Someone has posted Lorca’s broadsides
believing both duende and Andalusia are omnipresent.

Somewhere else, meditation resurfaces a lost “I.”
In that same place a girl is born. An old woman dies.
Later, the process is repeated. And again. And again.

In an open notebook are words brilliant but forgettable-
tenuously held together scraps called verses.
The page is a pin worked loose- the center holds,
but a breeze carries the frayed edges out of sight.

It seems such a waste to let those words stand alone on this page. Especially when so many of them will be repeated from piece to piece, each a playful rehuffling of context and content.

Tatterdemalion is a word I have only encountered previously in a Terry Brooks novel: Knight of the Word. It was a magic creature, animated by the spirit of a dead child, built of scraps. Similar to its real definition in an essence. Tatters, the ends, fading, decay. I also think it echoes the essence of this excercise. We all started with scraps and are putting them together.

Most of my poetry is written in a first-person perspective. I edited to remove the “I” from this poem. It seemed, to me, the “I” was too strong an identity for the poem to hold. The “I” was too complete. So I deleted it.

I’m curious to see so many other takes on this arrangement of words. See both what words get used most often and how their meanings change from place to place.

Additional information: I wrote the majority of this poem while listening to James Blunt’s album Back to Bedlam. Judge as you will.

Check out everyone else’s responses at Read Write Poem while you’re at it!

Remains
For Sue

As if the wife
of a terrible king,
we file past
in the obligatory line
of a state funeral.

The beheading was not
in lieu of divorce
or to birth a republic
but the result
of the decay and
calcification
of your carcass.

Do you see us,
the common people,
as we shuffle around
your dais?

Do you see us
as the littlest ones
shriek in terror
and hide behind
the never quite
fashionable slacks
of their chaperones?

You do not
because your casket
is bulletproof
and transparent
and just on the balcony-
there.

If only the Soviets
had gotten hold of you
before the first
flaking scales fell
and like Lenin
you were taken
for a special bath
and your terrible
countenance
gazed complete.

Would there be
the wrinkled lip
and sneer proving
you are kin to Ozymandias?
Certainly we look
upon you and despair;
though what works…
what works…

Hm. Well, I call it a poem, and since the definition of poetry is so vague, what I say goes, at least on this corner of the internet. I must be among the few people not fascinated by dinosaurs. I mean, sure, they are old… and big… but so what? Are they interesting? I guess so, but come on, Jurassic Park was all about Samuel L. Jackson. “Hold on to your butts.” Now I’m rambling and soon, I foresee, it will become (more) incoherent. If you didn’t come from there, go to Read Write Poem and see the dinosaur poems by other poets. Oh, and since there may be people unfamiliar, Sue is the T-Rex skeleton at the Field Museum in Chicago. Just in case.

Silence is so much stronger at night,
As if the day has noise just from its light.
Flick the switch and it becomes a tomb
and the sound of a heartbeat is cause for fright

Silence lasts so much longer at night-
the wind is unseen, but still felt
on the skin and dimly dead leaves take flight.

The day is full of noise and of light.
Prattling voices crescendo in the distance-
I shut the window, close the drapes and hide.

The clearest silence is found at night
And I keep my house open to its echoes-
Oh your voice, your voice… No. Only the quiet.

But then the day is noise and a shifting light-
I wonder how to trust something so inconstant.
Inevitability calls for surrender. There still might…

Yes! Twilight carries victory and the silence of night.
I wait though it may be an eternal post
At this border of worlds and of lights.

On the joys of sharing a dorm room

The whisper of skin on skin-
Lines of moonlight cast
through the blinds
tickling the curve of her back-
The fragrance of beer,
cigarettes and latex.

I don’t think they can see the scowl
as I put in the earplugs.

This was a response to Carolee’s prompt to “watch” something we’re not supposed to see. Incidentally, at the top of the window in which I worked on this I had typed: “GAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!! I cannot think in verse!” Check out the other people who have taken a look!

Note: I’ve never shared a dorm room nor watched anyone else have sex. One of the joys of the arts is imagining situations. “Write what you know” can be rather limiting sometimes.

I read An Abundance of Katherine’s by John Green today. While there are many things I could say about it, I will only say that it was very good, and I recommend to people who like to read things with plot that are not predominantly about disrobing.

Anyway, after I read the book, I was click-click-clicking around the internet, watching some Brotherhood 2.0 videos, then checking out the NerdFighters forums, and the list of recent forum activity had at its top a post “Your First Kiss.” There are 45 pages and 535 replies in this thread!

I read some of them and was planning on going to bed, but then I was thinking about that myself. My first kiss. And many of the kisses that followed it.

My first kiss was not too different from many other peoples’ first kisses, I imagine, save, perhaps, that I was older. I was seventeen, had just graduated high school, and had just started dating a girl I had done theatre with. We were on a date, I took her home. Outside of her door, she stood two steps up (she was rather shorter than I was), and we kissed. I later wrote the poem below about that experience, but, aside from being my first kiss, and therefore one of the most memorable romantic experiences in a person’s life, there isn’t much to be said.

Between then, and my last first kiss I don’t remember many of the kisses at all. My last first kiss was very early in the morning after having been out all night with the girl I later married. I was dropping her off at the house she was house-sitting and we were in my car and it was really, really great (though, with her, they were all really, really great). Then, after she got out of the car and went inside, Faith Hill’s “This Kiss” came on the radio. Serendipitous, I thought.

I wonder if it’s strange that I don’t remember the first kisses in between. I think the answer is no: The first one was important because it was the first one. The last first one was important because… I wouldn’t have known it at the time but it was the woman I loved more than anything who I later married, so it was very special. The rest, now, are just kind of there. From the perspective of those relationships, did I feel the same? I can’t remember, those were all quite some time ago.

I also wonder if it’s strange I don’t remember my last kiss. I also suppose no. After all, I didn’t really expect it to be the last kiss while I was involved in the kissing, thus it wouldn’t have been remarkable as an occasion to be remembered….

Goodnight

We stand outside your door
try to say goodnight
while we wonder if anyone is watching
The wind speaks softly
in return your hair dances
pirouettes on air’s imaginary currents
You step close
We meet
I am shattered into the moment
like glass being broken
Shards of me fall
leaving only my lips pressed to yours
Eternity comes and goes

Goodnight

And that is a peak inside my head at midnight on a Sunday.

EDIT: I just want to add a quick two things: (1) the first kiss was actually before I graduated high school, not after, oops; (2) and that was spring of 1998 and the poem was written in February 1999–it’s not a recent work.

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It’s a static-crusted world:
constant interference from the streaming
24/7 into our minds
which are as alterable as wikipedia.

The data in the table is corrupt
and we need to reindex;
we have forgotten to back-up
emotions. Memory is salvageable-
it is watching television without color
and we soon bore of it.

Attention is the microtransaction of the mind.

Sign the check,
enter your pin,
wait for the confirmation email and continue.
Always verify the information is correct.
No one can retrieve you
if you have lost
the password.

One thing I’ve always struggled with in my own mind is whether it is appropriate or not to contextualize my poems. To explain them. A dictum from most critique I’ve done is that it is best to not speak at all, to not provide answers: ultimately, the poem stands on its own in some journal or some book and that’s that. However, I feel that viewpoint neglects the benefits of the medium of blogging. Here, we are not limited by page count. We can collect information and hyper-reference and cross-reference, and probably do other compounded-reference words that I don’t even know!

This poem was written in response to two things: Jillypoet’s read write prompt (you can read others’ replies here), and a snippet of lyric from the song in this Brotherhood 2.0 video. The lyric that prompted this has since been removed as I opted to not write a love poem. I think perhaps I write too easily in that genre. So, a departure, a deviation, one of the damn few poems I’ve written this year. In case you happen to be curious (and I still plan to work with it, probably in some sort of love poem) the lyric that I “caught” was: “As in a mirror, dimly.”