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 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!

The first collaborative prompt has been updated with phase two! Nathan asked us to come up with some words, and now we see what they all are without having to scroll. Yay!

And Dana has given us  a new prompt: the Read Write Word. (Hilarity ensues?)