riotheclown

I have been writing a poem a day with a closed group. It has been a great exercise. Some of them are better than others. This was poem was written on day seven.

Day Seven
Quilts become stories
independent of dynasties or holy empires.
With heads bowed over needles
stitching hopes and secrets that survived in fibers,
there was no permanence for women and slaves who by law owned
not even what was thrown away so
in anonymity they threaded their lives and economy into art.
Surviving because they borrowed from every incarnation each cherished scrap
While threading a different history, a history that included them;
Undaunted by fashion,
And reaching for joy.
Because empires fall and art becomes fatuous
but quilts become stories.

This is a link to Gee Bend Quiltmakers.
http://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers
Check it out. They are the true artists.

I love old quilts. Those that survive show actual hand stitches and reference all that went into each stitch, not just the thread, the fabric and the time required to do the work and there was always so much work they had to do; quilts that survive also reference true artistic genius.

Day eight
the prompt was to write about earth as 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 number 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 lonely”.

Day nine
prompt was to write about "the writer's desk"

Oh WRITER'S desk,
with your
stickers of the spice Girls that she cannot scrape off,
and desktop computer she doesn't know where to take
warning her of unimaginable punishments for having an inauthentic version of Windows
AND sitting beside it the new laptop she can't talk about because she gets faint when
she thinks of her credit card debt.
The NEW version of Word seems to mock her
with its phoney concern and encouragement like
a relative on suicide watch, overly cheerful greeting
"Welcome back! Pick up where you left off?"
You are NOT a "writer's desk".
You killed the writer with your expectations
your blinking accusing cursor
that wakes her in the middle of the night
"ASSHOLE ASSHOLE ASSHOLE"
just fuck off!

Day ten
not from the prompt

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 10
The prompt was, first kiss

My First Kiss I thought
there was never anything
ever before THIS

Day 11 (For Alexander McQueen)
not sure what the prompt was but I watched the docu on netflix

Give me enough time and I'll start a revolution"
When the divine speaks through all tooo 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 drin at its shores,
Frenziedparticipants in his beautiful and terrifying show

Day 12 Black Hole prompt

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 tht mattered
collapses into the nonreflective
singularity of
WTF

Day 13
prompt was something about what you thought a poet was when you were young or something like that, it went on, the prompt did and I could see the person already had a poem in mind or at least an agenda so I just took some of the word in the prompt and moved them around till I got this. I think it is my best this month.

when you were young

before
you could
write
a poem

you were a poem

Prompt 14

Prompt: 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.

"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
In an awesome river
And we the hungry mob drink at it's shore;
frenzied participants in his beautiful and terrifying message.

Day Eight, prompt: spring cleaning magic:

I shake out all the missed opportunities
Beat the rugs, dank with obligations and routines,
Open the windows and let out the dreams.

There will be no evidence
of what might have been.

I keep the house clean.

Trying to Remember What He Never Told Me

Peaking on peyote while I watched the sunset
he might have killed me had he known I was high
and yet
He put his hand on my shoulder
and stood with me
the orange light filling the room
filling our eyes
mine with pupils black and wide
imagining we could
reach through time
to find a father for us both.
***
He wrote the word "Hands"
neatly in white pen on black paper
beneath a photo of himself and my brother
tying knots on a porch;
my father teaching him to make a snare
a moment I envied to this moment
a moment I never had
because I was
a girl
a problem
until I ran from the house
like a madwoman or a whore
or just all the wildness that he feared.

My father's gloves
seemed small when I put them on after he died,
turned them inside out to find the truth and found nothing
and though he thought he was still that frightened child
hiding under his bed for days and days after his mother left
after his father died
after his brother hopped the rails and his sister went wild
after the town bachelor took him in
and everyone whispered when he passed by
after he made himself hard
after he learned not to cry
I was smaller when he punched me in the face.

I don't want those to be the last words in a poem about my father so

I will end with these:
I found
another photo,
an indigenous girl,
beneath neatly written in his hand
"Foot--cousin" (Blackfeet)
this
his only reference to
the mythology of a difficult life,
a story as heavy as cast-iron pots
swinging from a hand cart during a long walk.

Prompt two: Inertia?
If no poem comes is
there a place it didn't
come from and can
I go there? Please?

Day Two
Cast Iron
My brother's wife was taking his cast iron pots to the donation bin.
Everyone in my family was taught that you had to have cast iron pots and
you had to keep them forever
god forbid, some disaster ended you
and they were lost until a bunch of
archeologists could dig them up.
Even still they'd be good,
just needing bit of scrubbing and seasoning.
No one outside our family
can understand this
need to hang on
to something so
impossibly
heavy.
or why we tell a history hidden behind a patina of alteration
So we conspire.
I tell him I will go to Value Village
and buy them all back
—give them to her for Christmas—
adding another chapter in the mythology of our persistence and our resilience.
Laughing, because that’s what we do.

Day Three
When I was small, I thought
“pass me the honey honey”
or the “sugar sugar”
was how you asked,
so I didn’t know why everyone laughed
my first time away from my family.
Even now, in my head
there is the honey honey and
the sugar sugar
but I don’t say them aloud.

Day Five
I wrote a poem today!
I didn’t even let it rise in some warm and safe place in my brain
I just coughed it out
Or drank it down
Or shook it free
Or, or, or…geez.
maybe it wasn't very good but it felt really good.

Day Five
Winter, the air was as dry as unbuttered toast.
Ice formed from any moisture and hung onto any thread.
Children were bundled so if they fell
it would be face up
so they wouldn’t suffocate,
their identities unknowable behind scarves and hats pulled low.
Until a Chinook
when they threw off their stiff winter clothes
and ran in their socks and shirt sleeves
in yards of mud,
no, not ran, but hopped
like new little toads with tails abandoned,
this way and that,
with the randomness of joy.
And when it was over
they came home dressed in other children’s winter clothes.

Day Six
Not Haiku
Sometimes when I'm riding my bike
a fully formed haiku will pop into my head.
I swerve and then recover knowing
that
by the time I get home it will be gone,
drifted off on the wind
to seed the mind of some poet
who is more righteous and unencumbered
by things like
gravity, velocity and time.
And often while I put away the groceries
I find there was a coupon*
I forgot to use too.
fuck

Day Seven
Quilts become stories
independent of empires.
With heads bowed
women
stitched hopes and secrets that survived in the fibers,
There was no permanence for those who by law
owned
not even what was thrown away
so
they threaded their lives into this craft.
they borrowed from every garments incarnation each cherished scrap
threading a different history, a history that included them;
Undaunted by limitations
and buoyed by the joy of expression.
Empires will always fall and all art becomes fatuous
but quilts become stories.

Cast Iron Pots

My brother's wife was taking his cast iron pots to the donation bin.
Everyone in my family was taught that you had to have cast iron pots and
you had to keep them forever
god forbid, some disaster ended you
and they were lost until a bunch of
archeologists could dig them up.
But even still they'd be good,
just needing bit of scrubbing and seasoning.

No one outside our family
can understand this
need to hang on
to something so
impossibly
heavy.
or why we tell a history hidden behind a patina of alteration.

one pilgramige or another
possessions of the fallen passed down the line,
iron pots clanging.

So we conspire.
I tell him I will go to Value Village
and buy them all back

—give them to her for Christmas—

adding another chapter in the mythology of our family's resilience, and iron.

While Riding the Bus

I READ A POEM
where an advertisement should have been.
I got very excited and
I looked around
nobody else seemed to notice.
They were hanging on to poles,
looking at their phones,
or
if they could see through the mash up of bodies and bags
looking out the windows.

The words were what I would have said,
maybe they were mine
for it seemed they fit right in my brain
like eggs in a nest
like a hand in a hand.
I had no pen so
I sent myself a text.
It read:

dionne brand--i have been losing roads to light on

Midway, Canadian National Exhibition:

Stroller pushers

and sticky handed candy floss flossers.

Ring toss tossers,
Swing the hammer swingers

Show-off muscle builders,

and "Try again to win the giant panda for your pretty gal" geezers.

The spin-around ride riders and

the roller coaster fanatic-ers:

The first time and next time and "never again"ers.

The "Guess your weight" guessers and the "Don't you dare" darers,

The bump into-ers and the "Watch it!" accusers.

The tummy aching throwing-up-ers
Cry-baby mommy worriers

The "going home now" goers,

The let go of balloon losers.
AND

One big, red balloon
as it gracefully

floats away.

Unrecorded

Once she wrote
with the sharp edges of her being
about the lines of her labor
the gardens of her hopes
and the fruits of her knowledge.
Strands of her hair were carried away by birds to make nests
and her feet made paths
that would lead you to safety.

Then
The Fire
The Famine
The Pestilence
The Wars
left her only with
Seven names for herself and all her sisters.
Sentenced as the cause
her story was reduced
to being a man's rib.
She was worn smooth and small as a pebble.
She curled like an apostrophe
in a sentence
describing
HISTORY.
The only proof she was ever an author
woven into nests and buried
in unmarked graves.

No Trees Grown Yet

It was called the “Golden Mile of Industry” in the early 60’s. There was the junkyard where you could watch the cars getting crushed and then a bit beyond that the train tracks and then the factories.

The neighbourhood, slightly higher in elevation, was not built up yet: there were no trees. Fences were just the loose wire ones put in for free by the developer and so from my bedroom window of our little post-war-box-of-bliss I could see the sunrise glinting off the tracks, the junk yard cars and the flat factory roofs.

The single-story factories with their loading docks were abandoned on weekends and behind them there were just some stubborn farm fields mostly gone to scrub. In the back roads, behind the houses all made of tickly-tacky, a kid could ride her bike uninterrupted by traffic, long and fast enough to get winded.

Saturday I’d watch happily as the sun’s first rays reached my bedroom window, looking forward to a day of freedom with my friends, Mark and Myles; digging through the bins outside the Bubble Gum Factory and the Dirty Book Factory and challenging each other on our bikes to take the loading dock inclines vertically, without wiping out.

If it rained we’d head for the big sewer and sheltered in its mouth, chewing on the hard lumpy discarded wads of sugar and blushing as we passed the books back and forth, trying to make sense of the passages that contained any words we recognized as naughty, like “bosom” or “manhood”.

We'd spend the day like this until the sun began to set and then beat a path to our homes on our bikes as fast as we could, racing the streetlights to get there before they could turn on and cause us to suffer the obligatory spankings that were required of good parents or worse, being "grounded".

Exhausted and happy I would fall asleep, still dirty above my ankle socks.

Sunday would be the day for scrubbing it all off and dressing in an itchy dress for church. That wildness gone I would shrink to the size of a quiet child who did nothing but sit with hands folded in her lap, not even swinging her legs that hung from the hard bench, nor singing with the congregation because her voice was "bad". Instead, head bowed, pretending to read the words like my sister, mother and father, not offending God's (or at least my father's) ear, while others happily sang shrill and loud and yet escaped God's wrath.

In bed whenever an airplane passed overhead, I imagined it was God reminding me that he knew what I was thinking. I was often thinking bad thoughts so I would be terrified, wrenched from the revelry of imagining a life that was very different, one that didn’t include my family. I would pretend that the sound of the transport trucks passing in the night were waves on a beach. This was such a successful method of lulling myself back to sleep that when I took a babysitting job one summer away from home when I was twelve, at night I pretended the waves crashing on the beach were actually transport trucks passing my house.

If a place could be a person or visa versa, I sometimes feel like a small crack in pavement that has been run over repeatedly, but sometimes too, if I am honest, I am a kid riding her guts out, full tilt on a back road, breathing deeply the joy of freedom.

We were supposed to write about a place that influenced who I am today. I admit that wasn't what I was thinking about when I wrote this. The neighbourhood and I have changed but writing this made me think about the dichotomy that still exists in me, that wildness that is now mostly tamed inside and what I show the world.

I got nothing after the title of this post.

The Smashing Mirrors Buddha Dog Walker

Once she looked in the mirror and it said, “You’ll never kiss Leonard Cohen now”. She’d just gotten married and her husband was smoking a doobie with his best friend in the living room and she was crying in the bathroom. Her life was over because she’d tried it all and now she was done. She was like an appliance that met his required specs. He admitted that at first, he thought her lips were on the thin side, but now he thought they were okay.
Years later when she was in the hospital after a radical hysterectomy for cancer she had a small mirror that she used to draw her self-portrait. She would write notes for her children around the picture like “I love you” and “remember to look after each other”. The face she drew was not hers, it was of terror. It said “you’ll never see them grow up”.
He brought them only once to see her in hospital, the youngest, six months, sat next to her in the bed and gently touched her face; the other two kids crouched on the floor, fascinated by the rubber tube from under the sheet that was attached to a bag. They were fascinated when some urine went around the coiled tube into the bag.
“Dad said you’d have presents for us.”
When she got home she couldn’t find herself in her reflection. She’d look and only see a mask. Her husband would say, “When do I get my wife back?”
All her efforts to be the same failed. She felt held in the mouth of a monster and feared what she might do to escape from it. Then she found Soto Zen. Practising felt like constantly falling then getting up, or being so bored dust became elegantly diverting. Gradually she found she wasn't so afraid anymore.
On the pivotal day, tall windows splashed pools of light in the monastery. It seemed everything reflected positively her choice. She could feel with her bare feet the warmth left by the feet of the monks on the wooden floors as they silently hurried along the halls. There was a long mirror where she’d checked the folds of her robe. Looking at her reflection, dressed to take her postulate vows, she’d smiled.
Now, years later, her eyesight is poor and the mirror still berates her “you look like your mother with your fucking Irish face. Hey, Lenard Cohen is dead now, and soon you will be too but no one will remember you. Oh and EVERYBODY HATES YOU. The dog loves you but he`s an idiot.”
She glances in the mirror looking for any food stuck in her teeth then dresses and takes the dog for his walk. She remembers to pick up his poop. As she does this she recites quietly:
This is as the boundless sky,
A lotus flowering above the water,
Stainlessness is itself this mind,
In this awakening,
We stand exposed.

It is a ten week workshop and you get a professional to edit your story and then it gets printed in an anthology. Yeah!

I am going to use something I worked on a long time ago and see if it suits. I have to have a draft by May 1st. I hear really good things about this group. My friend Jen got me in it. She has been earning a living writing for an on-line mag. She has a wicked wit, is very smart and has been an "inspiration" though she would kill me if she knew I said that. :P

I did post yesterday, but I forgot to post here. I posted to "Quilting is My Addiction" my blog at Wordpress. If clicking on the link is just too exhausting (believe me, I get it, I have lost entire mornings chasing rabbits down the link rabbit hole) you can just read it below. I didn't put the links from the post in it, you have to go to the original if your are interest.

The textures
of the many distant lives I waved goodbye to
are measured and added to the quilt,
warm in this winter of my life.

This is the only poem I have written about quilting.

I am not sure where APAD started. It is not always source of great poetry, I have a hard time writing anything that I would not be too embarrassed to share, but it is a fun challenge. Live Journal has several writing groups, most notably Brigit’s Flame which has moved here to Word Press, check out the entries, join in the fun. If you don’t write poetry you can use APAD to lead you to discover the works of the many wonderful poets the English language has been blessed with (many of them still alive!).

Or you can switch it up to be “A Picture a Day” or “A Painting a Day”. The internet has become a very visual medium. A picture can be a poem. Check out this post and see if you agree.

Breathe in
through your nostrils.
See death dance on your
tear soaked eyelashes
Taste it in the back of your throat
when you try not to gasp,
feel it churn in your belly like loss.
You thought it was life that you are all about
but it's not.
Now
breathe out.

In the true spirit of A POEM A DAY I arbitrarily decided to chose the first poem I could find in a box of journals I keep in a box in the back of storage. This was not anything I wanted to share but I made up a rule and decided to stick to it.

A poem a day has a sort of recklessness about it for me because I prefer to work and work and work a poem, like a dog worries a bone, except the dog is more successful and usually quicker. So to have to come up with a NEW POEM everyday for a month seems CRAZY. It isn't even about how long the poem is. Haiku is the hardest. I can work on one haiku for YEARS and still rewrite it.

No, I say hats off to all of you reckless drunks. Drunk on poetry I mean!

going to sit all day in front of a blank wall

Coming to terms with
where I am
and
who I am
is hard.

Sometimes it is everything except those two things that has me
running around and doing this and that
even thinking I'm pretty hot
smart and something more
than everyone else
and definitely
more
than
this breath in
and
this breath out.

But in the end
those two things are the only things that matter, I mean
IN THE END END.

This breath in
and this breath out,
in between
where I am
and who I still am

I am
still where it's hard
YOU KNOW?. coming to terms.

</I have been with flu/cold all week and missed a few important things, like the subway at my stop is closed today and I can't get to my zen sitting on time and the other is that A Poem a Day started two days ago! So the three I posted today are not original, but this one I never published so its sort of new. Well, enough! I have to get a move on if i am EVER going to get there. "What's your hurry? I am late for doing absolutely nothing! i>

Less Than Super LOVE

I found myself falling.
Before this
your eyes: luminous blue skies
and then
the head long tumbling into flights of sighs,
lashes kissing clouds
And then,
yes I still want to be friends,
I never saw it coming
my final undoing,
the uncaring ground.

If I could have had a skin
transparent and yet impenetrable
like superhero armour
(that still let me fit into that
skinny dress)
I would not have made such a mess.

I could have held it in.
if I had that kind of superhero skin.

This Road
There are moments
that open up like a big bang
and you wonder how your skin holds together,
they are too terrible
or too wonderful
for tiny
mostly-water-filled skin-bags like us.

But more often
there is this long, long road that you find yourself on.
You look towards the beginning and the end
and pull your sweater a little closer
and tell yourself it’s a lie.

i am transitioning to old people comfy apparel. my jeans that I bought for "fat days" and working in the garden are my new constant go to jeans. Turns out my best jeans and my kidneys don't actually like each other because the waist band runs slightly south of the waist and hits my tummy in a place that it doesn't like much. That said, my new favourite jeans actually are a bit too high on my waist and when I sit catch my ribs but WHO CARES cuz I can wear a baggy sweat shirt to cover the top of them AND unbutton the top when I sit down.

Voila! A new aesthetic.

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