fallen verses

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alright. As it turns out, two days away from the blog, and now, many many posts all at once. <shrug> I’ve done a bit of redesigning of the blog, switched to a new theme, cleaned up the sidebar a tad bit. I hope everyones browsing experiencing is made a little bit more enjoyable. I have also used that experience as impetus for my inaugural Read Write Poem prompt poem. The prompt was to write an American Sentence, a la Ginsberg. So far it looks like almost 50 people have. By which I mean there are almost 50 comments as I write this, not having looked and /or counted, I don’t know how many of those are unique individuals, how many people posted more than once, how many posts are comments and not poems, etc., etc., ramble. The prompt for next week is by Jill who wants to torment us with yummy goodness and poems about food. read write prompt #2: eat, drink, write a poem
And so, with as little ado as possible, an American Sentence*

playing with style sheets is not quite as much fun as playing between sheets

*Though it occurs to me, any sentence I write is American**, but the relation to 17 syllables is a bit iffier; however, I am a big fan of compounding - gotta love those colons and semi-colons and comma and conjunctions but hate the splice!

**It also occurs to me it would be really cool to call American Sentences whatever the equivalent would be in Japanese.  I don’t remember enough to think of it off the top of my head.  And Dave is right: “Memo to Ginsberg: /writing haiku in three lines /IS American.”  But in quoting him in one line have I destroyed the message????  Oh, the insanity!