verse

Turning

At the turning into Autumn

I miss you

the soft thud of my feet

my heart

on pine-needle gravel paths

through forest

criss-cross sideways

up the mountain

swagged like

tinsel on a tennenbaum

a quiet deer sometimes

standing there

watching my ungraceful gait

from its lovely stillness

cool water in a hollowed log

meant actually

a whole system of pipes

beneath the ground of this

not-so-wild place

but I suspend disbelief

bursting out and around

body-singing glory

of movement

it doesn’t matter

if my knees knock and

I don’t look like

an advertisement for Asics

moving like

a lover above and below

worship and own, be owned

mine, surrendered

the exchange of breath and air

only distance

memory

pulls and aches

but cannot break

 

Photo by Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps on Unsplash

rain like february

 

it came in the night

driving and thick

a vertical virtual

wall of precipi…

tation

–

wind rumples

through the eves

crunkling the cardboard

taped to my ceiling

“spielkiste”

from the last time

–

my spiders watch

from the opposite corner

of the room

their spindly legs

like stripped

upside down

umbrellas

–

dehumidifier hums

on 80%

carpets

still feel damp

–

the rains are here again

 

 

 

Photo by Anna Atkins on Unsplash

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. ?

Teeth: a family portrait

teeth

The new one’s teeth are new

Only seven have come through

His little cheeks so red today

I think another’s on its way

 

The big one’s choppers have no caries

But soon he’ll lose them all to fairies

I’ll be sad to see them go

He’s growing up so fast, you know

 

My fangs have recently been cleaned

The nurse was brutal and it seemed

far too painful – I was sore

So now I brush better than before

 

Himself’s pearlies gleam — no worries

Despite the years and years of durries.

Since it’s passed by DNA

I hope the boys’ genes went his way

 

There’s something so lovely about mouths

And the chunks of calcium in ours

might not look like Hollywood

Yet the smiles are very good

 

I’m giving National/Global Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo / GloPoWriMo) a go – write one poem, per day throughout April. Today’s prompt/challenge was to do a family portrait in poetry. I wanted to write about teeth anyway so it seemed to fit nicely.