Last Day
intimacy
the atomic language
I live along the edges
trying not to feel
what you feel
Its not even about skin.
It’s about seeing you
behind your fluttering
lashes,
hiding behind a you
stitched together
every moment.
I am a coward because
I can not bare
All that potential energy.
Did you say good-bye?
You pass me on the street looking like a city of millions
And I feel bloodied.
29/30 Word prompt, here are 10 words, use any or all of them in a poem, do not use any of them as nouns. OOOhh. Chromosome, nettle, pungent, harlequin, giraffe, pillow, iridescent, gossamer, throat, eclipse
Prompt 28? Traveling (a true story)
Northland
Northbound subway full of jostling angry rush-hour-February commuters, too much bulky clothing on and holding too many backpacks and shopping bags; Young people hugging the doorways oblivious because of hormones and headphones and old people without seats worrying about falling and about the future owned by barbarians; Steam coming off of everybody, sick or on the verge of “calling in tomorrow…”.
Loud speakers blast a garbled message of unwanted halts to service and the masses groan. Some people start pushing to make a break onto the platform where even more angry commuters are grumbling.
“THIS TRAIN IS GOING NOWHERE. THIS TRAIN IS GOING NOWHERE. THIS TRAIN IS GOING NOWHERE.”
The elastic tie on a teenage wannabe gang banger’s backpack hooks onto the button on an old lady’s belt and stretches for a few feet unnoticed before it pulls them both back. At first there is confusion and then awareness and a small pocket of six or eight people gently weave them towards each other and they begin to unthread the cord.
The old woman smiles and the young man smiles and we all smile at how random and surprisingly kind we are despite it all. The doors begin to close and the train begins to shudder down the track towards the tunnel.
We are all going to be late.
But we are all going to be okay.
Charlie challenged me to write about lying
To be believed you have to smile
My mother could run a white gloved finger along a shelf
And show it clean.
she
would always be believed when
Smiling
She called it a home.
As a child
Unable to smile
Unable to lie
Truth was a stone
In my belly.
But you know there was no stone.
Now I can lie.
But i still can't smile.
Day 27
all fragrance gone
dishes washed and put away
floor orange with sun
Prompt 27 Music
Billy Holiday’s What a Little Moonlight Can Do
Give me a long-legged partner
To dip and sashay
something sweet and soapy
Like Billie Holiday
Smoky air and a corner booth
A glass whiskey, and don’t tell me the truth.
I've been alone, I know I’ve got myself to blame.
Before too long I know I'll be alone again,
but for now
Let’s see what a little moonlight can do.
In just the right light I think I can love you.
Prompt 26: Write a poem that uses a language of symbols/ coded language, such as floriography or the meaning of fan placement. If that doesn't appeal, perhaps hide a secret in another way (acrostic poem or something similar).
Prompt 25 smell
He said he never had any time alone.
I thought suddenly of
The old man whose wife died
Who now often smells like urine.
How i would be trying not to notice while hoping my face wouldn't betray me and i could listen to him
Talk about his grief sympathetically,
And so typical for me
JUST The thought of an odor and I smell it vividly and i said out loud, "URINE!"
The man who never had any time alone looked at me like i was nuts.
Prompt 24.
I have been literally working on this poem for years. I think I've got it! I needed a title. Thanks to you Charlie and John Cale.
A Field of Stars to Light Your Way
There were the beaches of your youth
where you marked impossible feats in the cool
sand
that you tossed up in cartwheels,
piled up in castles
and burrowed under.
You built and destroyed and built again.
You shone with the dust of eons on your skin.
You
collected tales of seafaring folk,
like polished stones
that you shifted
in your pockets and carried home
Older, you watched the sky for storms.
You got a dog that barked at sea foam.
You never stayed long
then older still,
eccentric and wild-eyed
you climbed to the top of the cliffs,
and you cried:
“I lost everything here. Life was so hard.”
THE COAST with its cliffs jagged and worn
and rivers that spilled and mixed with the brine,
forests old before prophets were born,
all your kin, all your life, all your time,
all those who would have called you back
are gone and you’re
adrift
like a tiny raft lost in the ocean’s sway
alone beneath
a field of stars
a field of stars to light your way.
Prompt 23
Fear:
Working hard in utter futility,
getting trouble because I’m not paying attention,
being rescued, once again, by the
troll riding a unicorn
It’s my nightmare.
Geez.
Poetry Prompt #22: Try a terza rima!
Earth Day 2019
We were on this
really long road and we knew
we could always lean in a bit harder.
And given half chance dance
like fools on the sawdust floor of losses.
But now
things too terrible to bare
stop up our mouths with unimaginable sadness
or break open a lifetime’s worth of curses;
It makes no difference
as we gaze into the maw
standing on this precipice
we thought we’d never reach.
Prompt 21, Day 22
Shelaugh at the Picnic at Golgotha
I folded the blanket after the picnic
where we watched them die,
the bodies torn from their crosses like streamers after a party.
Bag-ladies carted them away,
crying and cackling like sea gulls.
I have explained to my children
that a man of social conscience died,
a man who took the side of the poor,
man who,
like a stand-up comic
out of jokes said:
EAT ME
and the crowd was hungry.
I heard his god made bread fall from the sky
but you had to be there on that particular day
to get any.
I worry about my children.
In the pond near our house
Tadpoles and carp once teemed;
We saw a large fish rolling on the bank
with a smaller fish stuck in its throat.
The children were all laughing.
“It tried to eat more than it could swallow!” they chimed.
So I asked them,
“Which fish would you rather be,
the one being eaten
or the one choking?”
“That fish there.” my youngest said,
pointing to the middle of the pond,
as smooth as glass,
no fish to be seen.
Day 21
Kinda all over the place this weekend so not sure about the prompts, not using my keyboard for arthritic hands either, excuses, excuses, but here is DAY 21. I also read this at Be Brave on Stage, where I met Charlie! so not original today…
One Hundred Word Poem
How many words does it take to end ten thousand days?
Remember when we would talk until dawn
and you would yawn and I would say
"I should leave" and
you would say,
"Stay"?
Between our first
and this
there were so many
I lost
count.
Now I say: "My heart feels like ice cream spilled on hot pavement".
You say nothing.
Silence is where you're going and I am left.
It can't be counted like your last two words
but it can be divided when the door slams
after I beg you, "don't go".
Poetry Prompt #20: TMW. ("That Moment When.")
Day 20, missed a day...
Nature doesn't nurture YOU mankind.
"Chartreuse!", scream the green tendrils
insinuating into concrete.
"Patience and persistence
are mighty weapons.
Your conceits are fleeting you slumber-butts!
Plants RULE!"
Poetry Prompt #19: [Redaction Poem.] Like an erasure poem, but show [redactions in brackets.]
Prompt 18
A Winter's Tale*
Crushed pearl
was used to give the stone the look of living
a miracle to bring
the king to weeping,
But what else could she ever be
to be so mourned?
to bring the king, to this:
"She's warm!."
*Even though it was a boy dressed as a woman, dressed as a marble statue, it was still the same old "she's never beyond suspicion until she's dead and can be turned into a fantasy".
It is this that makes it so brilliant, this piercing of veil after veil, and Shakespeare’s understanding of the objectification of women to their peril.
Day 18
Haiku for APAD (not the prompt)
waking to the blink
the miasma of terror
the cursor awaits
Day 17
This is for the writing group next week, the homework was 4 lines, 5 words each line, written by cutting a pasting the previous poem I put here:
Get up off the metaphysical
And float in the miasma
You were born too late.
Dead poets litter the floor
Prompt 17
Write without it
there for your safety
go beyond Hang over the edge
feel the oncoming train of possibility
it won’t kill you
just make you
bleed.
Write
without it.
there for your safety
go beyond Hang over the edge
feel the oncoming train of possibility
It won’t kill you
just make you
bleed.
Poetry
All over the floor
Get up off the metaphysical
gravity and float in the miasma
FUCKA FUCKA FUCKA FUCKA
You are alive
Too Late.
Dead Poets.
Too Late. Too Late. Too Late.
choo choo chugga chugga
chugga chugga
chooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Day 16
The last time I saw you was by your east coast
Sitting in your living room after a fight with my husband to get there.
I remember I told you the truth
But only after you’d passed out drunk.
Our partners and our children were sleeping in the next room
While manic moths danced against the window.
A year later Jinny told me you’d drowned
And I still wonder should I have woken you?
I belong to a writing group and today were given an assignment to use Marg Piercy's "Tree Top, Tree Talk" method to write a poem. 1st 2 lines location, 2nd 2 lines conversation, 3rd 2 lines more description and the last 2 lines a question.
This is a poem about a friend that I have been trying to write for years. the limitations of the form really helped me to cut away all the superfluous stuff and just get to the point. I am happy with it. As for all the stuff I cut away I think I should write a story.
Prompt 15:
Awareness Haiku
I open my eyes
to opening everywhere,
owing everything.
Prompt 14
You were
The original
Hot chick
In my life.
The one I wanted to be friends with
because you made random things happen.
Who inhabited fantasies,
No, that wasn’t it, not really,
More like
You Inhabited the place
where we could all be cartoon characters.
I think I even drew you,
Teetering on
Some precipice I didn’t include
And you stayed like that
In my mind
with all the potential energy
of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie.
So when I saw you getting out of that massive truck
Outside the diner
Thirty years later
I didn’t recognize you at first.
But gradually,
Some gesture or shrug or glint around the
eyes and
you took over that woman
sitting across from me,
and then in that moment I could also see
that you saw me, the chick I was
and who I'd become
and we were done.
Prompt 14
Old Friends
There once was the idea that
a person would spend the first twenty years on learning
the next establishing themselves in some way in the world (family, social activism or commerce)
and the last twenty in contemplation, in some cultures in a monastery, walk-about, or in a cave in a wood, like a witch or a Bodhidharma
and then drop dead at sixty.
Now few people die at sixty, and they can be any age beyond, even one hundred.
Some get easy, delighting in the world.
Poverty,
reduced pliancy of all sorts
and loss are not the same for them.
Time becomes a companion that opens doors to everywhere.
When you meet them you can see
from birth to death
they aren't afraid,
they are like a needle
that can pierce all contexts,
and they laugh
at confusion,
especially
their own.
They have room for you.
But some get stuck
like the friends who
tell anyone in earshot
how much everything sucks
and who wrecked the world for them
and how cool they were before they got old.
Prompt 13
when you were young
before
you could
write
a poem
you were a poem.
Prompt 12!!! Black Hole
First,
a sensation of being sucked into mud
while simultaneously being crushed,
then,
on the other side of the peer edit
you find yourself senseless
as everything that mattered
collapses into the nonreflective
singularity of
WTF?
Day 12
My Father
At some point he gave
me the book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”
Saying only, “This is a sad and sweet story”.
I can’t remember how old I was, maybe fifteen, it was on the best sellers list.
It was sort like the time he watched a sunset with me
So incongruous, I have to wonder if I imagined it.
That book changed me but it also made me
Wonder about my father.
He through strength of will alone (as the story goes)
Forged an impressive career and overcame great limitations
And never asked
more than
that we should bare-knuckle our way through life
the way he had.
But I made him cry once.
Me, so small and insignificant
I find that hard to believe too.
When I left home
he gave me a set of cast iron pots.
I didn’t even know where I was going live,
It was that nuts.
Prompt ten haiku
My First Kiss I thought
there was never anything
ever before THIS
Day 11 For McQueen
"Give me enough time and I'll start a revolution"
When the divine speaks through all too human flesh
So fragile and temporary
Without cauterizing all the wounds
inflicted on the artist's heart,
The message bleeds out
Becomes an awesome river
And we the hungry mob drink at its shores,
Frenzied participants in his beautiful and terrifying show.
Day Ten!
I don’t want to think about it,
manage mostly to forget and,
besides,
nobody else knows.
I look good enough, I smile and I'm fine.
You know I always prefer clothes with pockets and
when i get nervous, well,
I hide my hands
and there it is,
my fingers slip around it
dried to a hard stone
and soon I’m dissolving in shame
enough to rehydrate a desert.
But you say
that’s just me being dramatic.
You’re fine too.
This was never your heart.
day nine, Writer's Desk Prompt
(sorry for the swears)
Oh desk,
with your
stickers of the Spice Girls that I can not scrape off,
and PC I don’t know where to take with its warnings of
unimaginable punishments for an inauthentic version of Windows
AND
sitting beside it
the new laptop I can’t talk about because I get faint when I think of my credit card debt
or hurt when I remember how fast the sales girl dropped me
when I wouldn’t buy the service package,
my buyers remorse blinking like a cursor: ASSHOLE ASSHOLE ASSHOLE.
With The new version of WORD that seems to anticipate my failure,
The overly cheerful greeting “WELCOME BACK! Pick up where you left off?”
Like a relative who has heard I’m depressed.
You are not a writer’s desk.
See her there on the floor?
You killed her with your expectations.
FUCK OFF
prompt 8 Write like an Alien
Polar Bears, Buddhas, Kittens, Sleeping Babies, Homeless People, Flowers Opening, Atomic Mushrooms, Sunsets Sun Rises, mass migrations of Birds Fish Mammals, Insects; a billion tiny wings, pictures spinning each picture the cover for a volume of data TOO MUCH DATA. A billion references full of an unfathomable numbers of words, each thought a note in a separate symphony... discordant at times and sweet at others, sensations in this body that he can no longer bare, this body made of Earthly awareness, this body flinging to the walls his costumed unanimity, his cosmetically altered personal loneliness, his desire for connection and inability to connect.
I am alien. We are all alien. We are so unbearably alone.
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