Read Write Poem #43:On the joys of sharing a dorm room

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.

Read Write Poem #42: Sign in or Register

Sign in or Register

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.”

It’s impressive

And no, I’m not referring to anything I’ve done.

I’m sure most of my regular readers (those not driven here by a link to one particular quote) are aware that, when I don’t lose track of time and freak out, I contribute to the Read Write Poem website as a prompt author and as a contributor of a monthly column on prosody.

Keep that in mind while I divert this post into a completely new channel.

Today was my one final for this semester, so I’m done with school for now. The last few weeks have been crazy with papers and research projects and portfolios, oh my! Top that off with corporate life and setting up website transfers and I’ve been distracted. As I was driving home from Iowa City I thought to myself “self, what shall I do to reward my survival and maintenance of sanity?” I responded: “Well, you survived at any rate. But you’re talking to yourself, so the sanity is questionable.” “Quite right, quite right. I know; I shall buy nilla wafers and frosting and eat nearly pure sugar (frosting with sprinkles, yay!).” And I ended up watching The Golden Compass, which I had bought some weeks ago (armored bears!) and which has been unopened. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the Nilla wafers and frosting. And then it still wasn’t time for bed-though it is getting close now-so what else to do?

Jumping back to the previous channel: A couple of weeks ago I had written a prompt to use jargon in a poem. I like to bring something kind of crazy to my prompts to get people out of comfort zones; I think we learn a lot about ourselves as writers when the net is taken away. What we write I think is more honest when the artifice of a long-standing style or theme is compromised. At any rate, I had not read the posted poems! So I rectified that. And it is impressive how creatively people have used jargon in poetry. I’d like to thank everyone for giving it a go. I only want to highlight one, because a line from it just stuck with me.

from Chemical Acrostic by watermaid

Entropy is an existential state.

Well watemaid, if my blog traffic ever gets back up, you may get some click-throughs!

Hopefully I can will take more time to devote this site and to my writing now that classes are out. There certainly should be a lot of catching up for us all to do.

EDIT: I have a lot of blog’s in my google reader and my blogroll is still gone, so I’ve added a link at the end of the sidebar to my google reader’s shared items.  It’s just a few things right now, but I’ll be adding posts from various sources to it.  If you’re interested in seeing what’s interesting me, that’s one way to get a glimpse.  Or you can ask.

resolutions

Read Write Resolve

resolutions

resolutions
to resolve
to re-solve
to solve again

translation:
the awareness
born of champagne
that we will always
make the same mistakes

Images seem really hard right now. As does quality. So, just because this is not stellar, don’t think the rest of the poets at Read Write Poem aren’t writing stellar poems. Some of them are, actually, talented. Go, read their poems about resolutions. Have some champagne, you know, that bottle still in your fridge.

Expect Longing / Residual Expectations

She’s a good witch!

And, perhaps unfortunately, I don’t recall enough of the Wizard of Oz to be really clever about that, so, please, pardon the inane cliche. Carolee and I were playing catch-up with this week’s Read Write Poem prompt, provided by Ceridwen, to work on a collaborative piece. It was an enjoyable experience and a tad bit tricky working with someone else’s ideas, but that also helped the poem open up in directions I wouldn’t have gone. (an aside: i hate the word “collaborate” and the derivative words. It does not have pleasant feel when speaking it, or when typing it.) Other people have collaborated and posted their poems over at Read Write Poem already, so check them out if you wandered here from elsewhere, and be sure to check Carolee’s site for her thoughts on this. This is the Carolee and Tom poem:

Expect Longing

Countdown counted out suddenly
face to face with tomorrow
drunk on imported champagne,
I look to you for a midnight kiss.

For a kiss, I ask, for lips
around this open wound, a tongue
to lap away my worry-words.
This new day tell me, tell me….

Tell me of tomorrow’s failures:
the resolutions forgotten,
the weight that will wait
to be taken from suntanned flesh,

the light I’ll waste with longing,
nights paced away in planning
as if lists and flowcharts led
anywhere but the bottom of the page.

For tonight, I’ll map my designs,
roll smooth, crisp blueprints into tubes,
wonder tomorrow how to stop the ink
from draining through these purple veins.

What mouth will meet these lips
blue with the residue of faded ideas?
What tongue will taste this mouth
rank with discarded promises?

You kiss me slowly then press your cheek
against mine. I look past your shoulder
at the other revelers, still holding
each others’ tongues and I am jealous.

During the process, Carolee suggested we each take the poem we wrote and use it as the base text for a “found poem” exercise. I took… well, most, of the words from the poem, played a little with capitalization and punctuation and have the following “gem” (ironic quotes here) for you all:

Residual Expectations

Down- sudden.
Tomorrow drunk
and a midnight kiss.

I ask for lips,
a tongue
to lap my
new day.

Tell me…
tell me…
tell me of tomorrow:
the resolutions,
the wait for flesh,

the light,
the longing,
the nights.

Tonight-
smooth.
Wonder.
Don’t stop the ink
from draining
through these
purple veins.

Meet the lips
with the
residue of ideas.
Taste the mouth
with promises.

Kiss me.
Slow.
Look past,
revel,
hold each other
and I am.

cadavre exquis

This weekend I had some friends over for a fun evening. I made mousse (tricky bastard, that), my brother-in-law brought some of his wine (very tasty stuff, that) and we did a bit of the exquisite corpse parlor game. It’s going to take me a little while to clean the images up and post them, but here are the texts we came up with.

The sword glows dark in the
night
Breathless, Waiting, until I can no longer
See the scarlet night
disperse the wine. Forsooth young master
You happen to see flowers in the
gutter ball was the end for him, for now
he.

Brilliant like a hawk in the noon
sun beating boldly upon the shaven scalp that
silhouettes the sky with grandeur and
spaciousness
Simply can’t fill the
Void of shallow darkness awaits
me. Me I am. I am me. You are you.
We forget to pull the plug. the bathroom flooded.

Someone must have unplugged the
sun, home of the fire. Burst forth burning
the last emperor of japan, a silly, silly
man bag of power was the gift she
hoped to be the one whom everyone
loved
Never again. Never again. Never again.
Never leave, never stay, always lost, always
afraid.

And lo, he laid the bare goat
upon the last stair, a clear
slipper feet travel over coals of
hot nights, wild nights, do
it
Damn it to hell. take your bull and go
home; the place I will always
find yourself. Find each other Find love.

In the beginning, there was fried cheese.
Then, you wouldn’t believe
it was a dark and stormy
night. Shattered stars on the horizon’s
wings are all you can eat so have yourself
beer is
good.
Have it your way. Suck it Trebeck.

As the dawn of twilight begins to
set the table up and leave the
house
Decrepit. Flipped and Flopped. Left out in the
rain. It puddled around my shoes, so I decided to
jump around, jump around, jump up, jump up
and the following chickens crowed.
be-kau.

The Read Write Poem prompt this week is to do some collaborative writing. I imagine most of the posts that show up over there will have much more intention applied to them.

Acqua Alta

Read Write Novelly

This weeks Read Write Prompt from Christine was to hack apart the end bits of some chapters from a book and use them as the basis for a poem. I picked up a copy of The City of Falling Angels by Jon Berendt, and I won’t mention what words I used because most of them got revised out of the poem. I took a different tack with this poem, and didn’t use first or second person pronouns. I’ll be honest, it feels weird not to use them, I almost want to change the whole thing just so there can be an address, but, I shan’t.

Acqua Alta

Beneath trumpeting angels, a faded
yellow splashing in this spring’s acqua alta,
it’s residents prepared and softly laughing
at the tourists in salt-ruined shoes.
Soon the Palazzo Barbarro will crumble,
sink into the insistent, hypnotic tides,
bastion of terrible beauty, coral reef to be.

City carefully level with the sea. A masterpiece
of engineering’s failure. The opera houses,
and the museums, the cafés and piazzas
laconically gather the last dust blown across the
Mediterranean before it reaches dry land,
idle as tired children catching snowflakes.
The little drowning angels of marble
will blow their trumpets as
Neptune’s kin blow conch shells,
battle for the souls of fishes.

The Making of a Poem #2: Sestina

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.

---

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.

---

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

Read Write Poem #3: Sparkles

Three pieces

Sparkles

Your wedding ring doesn’t shine anymore.
The diamonds have no sparkle;
the white gold has yellowed.
These months in the box,
unseen.
Do you sparkle these days?
Shiny purse, shiny shoes,
honest smile for the clerk
and leaving.
Though cold, the world sparkles.
The moonlight on ice.
Or the sun.

The Polka Dot Witch tried to bewitch us all with a whole “three” thing (very Macbeth, that). It was a very good idea, and you can go here and read other peoples’ responses that are, probably, much, much better.

Read Write Poem #2: My Green Fairy

Food (of sorts)

Jillypoet left us this week with the instruction to “cook up a poem.” Prompt #2 at ReadWritePoem was to write about food. I may have stretched that idea a bit. If you’re interested in reading other poems about food, be sure to check out ReadWritePoem this week. Next week, we’ll be writing about pieces.

My Green Fairy

In memory, I can float you on the back of spoon.
The metaphor should be obvious,
I always loved you mixed with six parts water.
Flying to a fantasy land was not a hallucination,
not just. It was a whole reality like Neverland
but I couldn’t hear the crocodile ticking
until the alarm was going off.
I would have fenced all the guards of Venice for you
and I thought I got off light
when all you wanted was a sugar cube.
Trick was, the cube needed to sweeten you
is larger the known universe.
Not even my ego makes up the difference.
It’s a bitter swallow, failure, and proof the mix isn’t right.