napowrimo

Neural pathways

As I slope up that bone-colour concrete path

sticks and gumleaves and sand

the scent of the bush – lemon eucalpypt and banksia

alone for the first time in days

home but not home

that smell in my eyes maybe because they fill with tears

or I’m thinking of him trapped inside delerium

grey-green and olive green and agapanthus green and black-burnt trunks with

small explosions of scarlet tongues and creamed-butter ragged tulle blossoms

following paths I’ve never run before

the warm air holds me safe and not too hot

thinking of how I heard he quietly saved his son once from a precipice

the way you do with family, unhesitating, sure as a heatbeat

those old trees stand tall, smooth barked and guarding

not over me, their roots luxuriate in more ancient soil

can you ever reconcile

a life, a mind, a body, a soul

or illness

or just keep jogging on

 

Day 4 prompt was: to write a poem that is about something abstract – perhaps an ideal like “beauty” or “justice,” but which discusses or describes that abstraction in the form of relentlessly concrete nouns. I found the example poem by Amy Tudor in this piece so moving I guess I tried to mimic the style, I think it worked well to focus on trees and flowers etc.  

I might not be able to link to the prompts each day as I´m mostly working via smartphone at the moment so cutting and pasting and link making is a bit of a faff… but you can always check in to http://www.napowrimo.net

Band names

Matchbox Scrubland

Out of the Tree

The Hab Spaß

In the Dark

Unicorn of the Apocalypse

Year Nine

Suitcases

Lollipop Bears

Umbrella Mustard

First to be Free

The Undoing

The Wealthy

Pink Meridian

Googlefathers

Make pay while the sun shines

The Take Aways

Lazy Nachmittag

Prunetoast

Missing Skin

He’s right, you could go on forever…. Today’s prompt was inspired by the GloPoWriMo interview with poet Peter Davis. As he indicates there, his latest book is rooted in endlessly writing ideas for band names. Today, the challenge was to try this out yourself by writing a list poem in which all the items are made-up names.

Blurs

we’re all

bleeding into each other

blurring lines and…

and blending with

cries

of pain and…

and love

my nose on

your face

running

a new race

as cold indifferent stars

look on from

above

It’s Global Poetry Month again! The prompt is a love poem… I was thinking about genetics the other day, and how modern life means we’re all merging our gene pools. Which, in a way, is the ultimate act of love. I am travelling so this jet-lagged piece is meant to be read in a sloow “Yellow/ ‘Oh Yeah'” voice to match my treacle brain.

The Spinning Ones

Photo: http://bookdome.com/fiction/Grimms-Household-Tales/The-Three-Spinning-Fairies.html#.WQXN7PmGPIU

once again I rally them

my shining ones, my friends

she tells me that in twenty years

we’ll still be laughing til there’s tears

and magicking the world aright

like we did those moonlit nights

she says that I can let it go

permission to go slow

something I can’t grant for me

but when she speaks, I obey

she sometimes tells me I’m still Jerry

always missed, do not worry

invoke me with my name

on lips, in heart, the page…

and so we go around, around

casting spells and hauling found

fortunes, jokes and sparkling things

while endlessly the earth does spin

 

Today’s prompt was to write a poem about something that happens again and again (kind of like NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo). When I get down, my wonderful friends pull me up again tirelessly.

This is the last day of April and the final day of GloPoWriMo. I made it! I’m going to take a short break and get back to you shortly with a poetry-month wrap-up! 🙂

Photo: http://bookdome.com/fiction/Grimms-Household-Tales/The-Three-Spinning-Fairies.html#.WQXN7PmGPIU

Absolution

A woman on the street was circling, circling

her shoulder bag dropped down around her waist

she had spittle on her mouth

a frail and old person

scraggly white hair, a stained windcheater

broken,

and yet I was too afraid to help

bad possibilities zinging through my mind

of being hit, attacked, screeched at, misunderstood

at the heaviness of a human body collapsing on me in relief

the time it might suck from me

I walked by

with tears in my eyes.

doesn’t absolve anything

lazy coward me

she stopped circling, the spell broken

by me?

no way to know how the light gets in to a fissured mind

I told a friend later and got upset again

silly, scared me

still hoping for absolution

which she gave

‘you’re a kind person for even noticing. You wouldn’t be crying now if you didn’t mean well’

but I didn’t care enough

I could have given her a tissue to wipe her face

‘did you even have a tissue? I bet you didn’t even have one on you’

I just shook my head and sighed

the secret shame of soft, 3-ply folds in my bag,

putting me to the lie

knowing they were there all along

just like

the least I could have done

was

offer her one

 

Off-prompt for the penultimate day of NaPoWriMo! 

Photo: https://unsplash.com/@raffiklopes

Skeltonics in the closet

everything is shrinking

or is it just my thinking

something about drinking

haven’t got an inkling

maybe Skeltonic verse

is par for the course

guess we could do worse

don’t call the hearse

yet

that Hemingway cartoon

crashed like a lead balloon

did no one see

or do they all hate he?

but I got 320 followers

so could not be jollier

and

with two more days to go

in this NaPoWriMo

think I’ve done O (K)

and to finish will be yay!

 

Day 28’s NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem using Skeltonic verse. Don’t worry, there are no skeletons involved. Rather, Skeltonic verse gets its name from John Skelton, a fifteenth-century English poet who pioneered the use of short stanzas with irregular meter, but two strong stresses per line (otherwise know as “dipodic” or “two-footed” verse). The lines rhyme, but there’s not a rhyme scheme per se. The poet simply rhymes against one word until he or she gets bored and moves on to another. Here is a good explainer of the form, from which I have borrowed this excellent example:

Dipodic What?

Dipodic Verse
will be Terse.
Stress used just twice
to keep it nice,
short or long
a lilting song
or sounding gong
that won’t go wrong
if you adhere
to the rule here,
Now is that clear
My dear?

This year’s poetry month has felt like more of a challenge to get through than last year, with my other writing commitments bubbling away in the background, so I thought I’d just go for rather silly doggerel today.

Not actually sure if it’s skeltonic or not.
Think I usually write like that.
What-ever. 

The image is a detail from one of  Sir John Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland illustrations I grabbed off the internet  … I think those pics are royalty-free these days anyway. ?

To write and to rewrite

 

Why sit and admire

Hemingway

it’s not just the lines and lines and lines of

shining, razor prose

the way potato mashed through the tines

of a fork in Africa

while a man who hunts a lion

shows himself a coward

-I know I’m not that

because

I gave birth two times

something he could never define

and 

rearing them

takes nerves of steel sometimes.

Last year I thought of Rollins

and in some ways they’re the same

these hyper-masculine, clear life-purpose,

tough, take no shit,

big-game giants

can I

feel myself aligned?

go, rewrite

 

Off-prompt for NaPoWriMotoday. 

Richtiger Inhalt

 

the small room of my mind

is closed for maintenance

today

 

Today’s prompt: write a poem that explores a small, defined space – it could be your childhood bedroom, or the box where you keep old photos.

I have wanted to use this pic for ages! The sticker says – correct inside, wrong package. ha ha ha … might be more like the other way around! 

Medieval manuscripts

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I saw the little figures
looking cute and medieval
elaborate costumes, so delightful
an ancient ritual
marginalia in excelsis
hello summer!

I wasn’t too sure about today’s GloPoWriMo prompt: “to write a poem of ekphrasis — that is, a poem inspired by a work of art. But I’d also like to challenge you to base your poem on a very particular kind of art – the marginalia of medieval manuscripts.” But then I went into town to see the preparations for Sechseläuten and realised I was looking at this stuff IRL pretty much.