Hello sweet old world
I’m too tired to think about
poetry today
poetry
In the middle of love
in the middle of love
in the middle of life
in the middle of London
what am I to do?
I could do a fuck-lot worse
than being
stuck
in
the middle
with you
We are in London for a dear friend’s wedding … Prompt: Because we’re halfway through NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that reflects on the nature of being in the middle of something. The poem could be about being on a journey and stopping for a break, or the gap between something half-done and all-done.
Vader
Darth Vader is scary of course
But can he fight a lion with The Force?
Maybe he’d do the lion a favour
And help make dinner with his light sabre
I was honoured to be the featured participant on NaPoWriMo today for my London Ghazal. 🙂
Today’s prompt: Because it’s Friday, let’s keep it light and silly today, with a clerihew. This is a four line poem biographical poem that satirizes a famous person.
My 5yo son helped me write this one, he’s really getting into rhymes lately!
Photo: http://www.slashfilm.com
Coffee?
coffee converging in conversation
pulls page-long pathways across procrastination
files of fiery photons like flying foxes
inklings, darlings! ideas, sparking
alighting at an allied assignation
thinking, darling, of
a car ride with cousins cocooned in comfort
very like visions, varied yet uniform
of factory windows fitted with fliers from
inside, darling…
oh, how my heart soars, unfolds with
sudden secret solace in solidarity with those who sleep–
their heads held high in the wind while
their bodies bode safe below–
darling. sweet.
Today’s GloPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem that explicitly incorporates alliteration (the use of repeated consonant sounds) and assonance (the use of repeated vowel sounds). This ended up being a bit of a style over substance but, although it sounds like a bit of a nonsense poem, there are real ideas in there, I swear. Mystery!
Stop bop
Thoughts churring, whirring, lines of text unspooling
that god damn Irvine Welsh story stuck
again in my head when will it come right
no one cares about a Sydney goth take on
Trainspotting anyway you idiot but
everytime I try to put it down, I can’t
When will I, when will I… stop
Sad and anxious and my clothes
are getting tight and I thought
exercise! But the wrong lane in the pool is
an elastic band of swimmers pulled too taut
or bagged out loose and saggy like the fat guy’s
stomach as he churns by making me
panic and there’s nothing so much like
drowning as not swimming well
When will I, when will I… stop
Walking home I wondered
If I can story and drink and poem
and retain my sanity. I don’t mind telling you for a minute there
(OK maybe several minutes) I considered
I’d better pause the poetry but the obvious answer
is to thirst myself more carefully
When will I, when will I… stop
My heart sank at today’s prompt: The Bop (see below) because it seemed too difficult and I’ve been struggling with my poems and my other writing lately, on top of various other life-happenings! But I read the examples and the Ravi Shankar one reminded me of my old fave, Frank O’Hara: Poems about the desperation-but-ordinariness of everyday life. And I found, as I did in last year’s NaPoWriMo, sometimes the best poems come from what seem impossible prompts! I really enjoyed this one. It’s nice for me to step away from rhyme and go with rhythm sometimes.
The prompt: the Bop. The invention of poet Afaa Michael Weaver, the Bop is a kind of combination sonnet + song. Like a Shakespearan sonnet, it introduces, discusses, and then solves (or fails to solve) a problem. Like a song, it relies on refrains and repetition. In the basic Bop poem, a six-line stanza introduces the problem, and is followed by a one-line refrain. The next, eight-line stanza discusses and develops the problem, and is again followed by the one-line refrain. Then, another six-line stanza resolves or concludes the problem, and is again followed by the refrain. Here’s an example of a Bop poem written by Weaver, and here’s another by the poet Ravi Shankar.
Photo via: http://pyxurz.blogspot.ch/2016/05/trainspotting-page-3-of-10.html
Gouache
colour to create a cocoon
wind spider webs of words round
the loom
add glitter and a mirror
so you’ll see
what’s truly meant to be
with music, film, clever lighting
overlaid
like reams of gauzy, tie-died muslin
an Egyptian mummy
paste it thick
with paint
then
scrape it all back
lay it flat
isn’t that a portrait?
I think I spent more time farting about with online photo editors to get the pic than I did writing this poem! You can tell, right? Today’s prompt was to write a poem that’s a portrait. Mine is a rather narcissistic one informed by my other writing struggles today. I’ve been throwing words on pages, only to scrape them off again… see if it looks right… not yet… sigh.
Bad fairy
My Faerie Queene is Carabosse
I somehow took her mantle
Bad fairy-witch by whom we lost
Our beauty to a spindle
For what use mine her blonde airhead
When I am clever, dark and cruel
Tho she may wish she stayed in bed
When she meets the big-prick fool
Who blunders in, destroying slumber, makes her go to school
Today’s prompt was as follows: Because today is the ninth day of NaPoWriMo, I’d like to challenge you to write a nine-line poem. Although the fourteen-line sonnet is often considered the “baseline” form of verse in English, Sir Edmund Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene using a nine-line form of his own devising, and poetry in other languages (French, most particularly) has always taken advantage of nine-line forms.
I don’t know too much about Spenser’s Faerie Queene and I think I flunked out on the iambic pentameter. But hey ho… I’m thinking about fairy tales and darkness and why not follow me on twitter @Carabosse !? 😉
Happy Birthday
a beautiful girl
with flowing hair
who came from my hometown
forgot
I don’t speak her language
unexpectedly
she has another name
randomly
although I mentioned Lisbon
forgot
my dress was from there
we all talked about our children
and she
had told her sister about me
flatteringly
for a moment I
forgot
to be angry
or even sad and
lonely
what did she say
forgot
(ich habe vergessen, aber ich verstehe meistens)
she goes through life, ich denke sehr
differently
to me. And yet… und doch… we have so much / wir haben viel
similarly
and I just remembered I
forgot
to sing happy birthday
Today’s prompt was to write a poem that relies on repetition.
Rage
bled my rage into a bowl
then held it in my hands
to throw against a wall?
what good is all
this blood in boil
I don’t understand
I’m off prompt today. Had a bad day. Rage is possibly my most difficult emotion to deal with. How do you? As a woman (and probably as a man, but I can’t speak to that), we live in the world of outrage. But what about just plain old-fashioned rage… if anger is an energy, how do you harness it without causing pain and destruction? Is something always burnt in that fire? Is it worth it? Is it inescapable? I don’t understand.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Skirt
1. The only decent thing you own. Can be appropriate for almost any occasion
2. A uniform. A way to disappear
3. Coveted. Searched for high and low. Discovered. Too expensive. Maybe next month
4. Too short. She was asking for it
5. Jean Paul Gaultier – skirts for men – catwalk excitement
6. Heat. A dragon’s breath-waft of warm air trapped in a dark cave of material
7. An ocean at night that froths and surges around my legs as I walk
8. A long velvet one. On a day when everyone else looks summery
9. Flapping on the clothesline. Inside out. Slashed lining. On purpose?
10. Last time I wore this… oh
11. An old friend. I am most myself in it. Even more so than if naked. Cannot imagine life without
12. The witch in a fairy tale. Maybe she is secretly the heroine
13. Hides the dirt. There’s a lot… I never wash it… If skirts could talk
Today’s GloPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem that looks at the same thing from various points of view. The most famous poem of this type is probably Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. Mine is a slightly tongue-in-cheek take on Stevens’ far more sophisticated poem! Aaaannd we’re back to the goth theme 🙂
clairevetica 