2010 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 28

If you're feeling worn out by poeming this month, don't worry: We're completing our fourth week of prompts today. Only two days left after today's poem, so dig deep and try to get those last few amazing lines.

For today's prompt, write a "what really happened" poem. Use a real event (or an event from a popular movie) and spin it in another direction. Or use an event described in one of your poems earlier this month and spin it in a new direction. Or refute something that was never even in question. Or just poem any way that you can, because we're almost to the finish line.


For our beautiful Robert

What Really Happened

They called at 3am
asking for the corneas

Can they go into the palace
with a candle
And enter the chamber
long shadows flickering down the stone stairwell
Can they follow you there a river
someone else rowing
the river stretches and disappears into fog
and your grey hair waits on its pillow

king

leave a coin
where the eyes were

for what you will see
you will need no complicated attachment
to the circuitry of the body
no opening and closing of your lungs
in mechanical time

your living eyes will still see
the flower - slow motion -
opening
and ribbons of traffic
tearing in the rain
and the look of love from someone else
to someone else

and for seeing I
loving you
will see more
in the liminal space of sleep see
I count for you sixteen layers of particulate light
like a yeast, living
inasmuch as moving is living,
shifting in separate layers
present
the present

eleven layers, maybe, electrical, no place
fantastic
miracle of particulate visible nowhere actually light

and my eyes are closed

and I could tell you about this
you would understand

the boat is oared
now without a captain
white subsumes white
nonshape swallows

shape

we wait on the shore
of course

looking
for all our might

i give permission for them
to take my voice
to give it to someone else who can't
cry out loud without it.

have them take my voice
i don't need it
to speak to you

from across a river
that is nowhere
you, still,
listen