Friday, April 4, 2014

PAD - 4


For today’s prompt, take the phrase “Since (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: “Since the Last Time I Smoked,” “Since You Said Please,” and “Since When.”


Since Noon

I have been two of me.
One drank Vietnamese coffee.
One went straight to bed.

One started a poem
And the other

Thursday, April 3, 2014

PAD 3


Location

how do you wait for it?
how do you open yourself to it?
where has it been 
or what?

The poem has been out all night.
It sped off when it became clear
I had no intention of attention
sometime after midnight and I, in bed
with an old lover, was only within his arms distance
in no way listening 
for another whisper
another reaching
another dark highway

and so the poem, spurned,
spun out off the soft shoulder of the slick levee road
and broke into all its letters
and its sense to itself was lost
and hurt

but there was the moon

and the moon binds us
vowels to sounds
arrangement to sense
difference to satisfaction

and before dawn the unloved poem returned.
It emptied itself in through the window
slept in jumbled phrases on the couch 
covered in the mud of the world, shivering,
home (I think) belonging there
next to a splay of white carnations
some brown or browning
some still full and soaked with moonlight

Or,
the poem, another perhaps,
was flour in a jar then
nothing, not much,
held, contained

powder white

In the dream I call out for her.
The location is a giant warehouse and the color slips
from warm-bright to grey.  Cool greys.
No one is there.  Though she is, somewhere.
Pallets of shelving and plumbing and parts stack up
high overhead, leaning, and I call for her.


This could be death.
This could be a poem.
Or a message.

The world waits in the dark for color,
for water, attention, use and order, reorder.
A kiss. A saying of words.

Placement.
Designation.
Context.
Care.

It waits 
to be called into.
It yearns to call back from.

His skeleton pulls mine closer
as the earth turns in such a way
that sunlight enters the room and puts things where they go.

And from somewhere comes a sound of gratitude.
And from somewhere comes an image for a poem.


Wednesday, April 2, 2014

PAD - 2

For today’s prompt, write a voyage poem. In my case, we’ll be driving along the Gulf of Mexico, but a voyage can happen in a variety of ways–even on foot, or psychologically. Heck, the process of writing a poem is a sort of voyage all its own. Happy poeming!



Perch

One needs to be in a different space
And move through it.
That is a voyage.

In my case, there will be ropes and luffing sails
And, seen through the luffing sails, great walls of
electric blue ice.

I try to prepare myself now for this
by noticing,
as I aways do,

great shears of my life falling away 
sometimes, as I pass from room to room.

and icy waves that rise and reach
towards me, for me.

They don't get to me - perhaps - 
so much anymore
though the same walls fall
and the same waves reach.

I perch on a mast above my life.
And, safe enough there, 
watch the days slip by below
as if they were landscape.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

PAD 2014 - 1




  1. Write a beginning poem. Today is the beginning of this challenge. It’s also the beginning of April. But there are so many other beginnings: Beginning of a relationship, beginning of school, beginning of the rest of your life, and so on. Pick a beginning to write about.
  2. Write an ending poem. Often, though not always, beginnings come as the result of an ending. Sometimes endings are cause for disappointment, heartbreak, or numbness. Other times, endings are celebrated. Capture an ending today.



Well.  Well.  Trying to do the yoga challenge.  The painting challenge.  The PAD Challenge.  The carryonwithmyhecticyetemptylife challenge.
What I like (and don't like) about these is that I have to do them FAST.  That as a disclaimer.
I have six minutes ...




Projection

I am beginning to see it
myself on a sheet of ice
how I will look around myself, horizontally, 
as if that is how one best looks around oneself,
but, even in thinking of it, 
I know there will be other metrices.

It will be my job to internalize those.
Or to externalize those.

To assess new things anew
and make a mark 
Like every other mark

That will never last
nor matter

but will have been.

I begin to see how the arctic wind
will blow snow
over where
in the future

I will once have fallen.
And, also, gotten up.
and looked around
and found myself

still somewhere.