Friday, July 29, 2011

Poetic Asides Wednesday prompt asked for an " opposite" poem here are several

A tiny be-curled girl
sits size placed
first row
first seat
first school
week finally
here
waiting
in new shoes
even underwear
stiff with newness
piano echoes a chord
dust motes float
in sun lighted shafts
silence ripples
as Principal
descends the
stage stairs
to stand center
aisle close
enough to
inhale her
talcuumed musk
the mothballed
antiquity of her
black skirt
her high neck
starched shirt
as forms
icicles from
dusty lips
under dead eyes
and the tiny
girl sparkling eyed
grips the seat
until tiny fingers
drain of blood
as she fills
with the sudden
profane possibility
seeing herself rise
in her
seat to smack
with her hot
damp hand
life into that
sullen,
parchment personage
threatening
promising
to obliterate all
excitement
vowing in bored round tone
to rip
all vestige of
individuality out
by the root
unless she is
stopped by a
tiny hand loosening


~
2. Haikued Couple

Intense, passionate
heart pounding at falling sun
world spins in beauty

Calmly collected
sees shadowed newspaper
moves toward dinnertime

~

Lightly Shadowed

In the sunshine
skipping
circles
barefoot
in the
fourth
summer
ever
sundress
flashing
pink hearted
panties
accepted
as invitation
by the guy
in the shadows
still hidden

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

5 Poems Inspired by Poetic Asides Prompt - Empty -

~ 1 ~
Spent

Every breathed kiss 
each for granted
taken embrace
I love you, I love  you 
I love you whispered
that last night of 
sixty-seven year grace  
grabbing bare shoulders
held hotly face to face
release pouring darkness
unrelenting into emptied space 

 ~ 2 ~
No More

Bottom of cup
Held straight up
All done!
What fun!
Life empty
Of complexity

~ 3 ~
M T

Marshall Thurgood
name inverted
still recognized 
for all he stood

~ 4 ~
The
overflowing
cup 
runneth
no
more 

~ 5 ~
Those Eyes

Brightly she turned in that sweet navied night
sparkling in her own reflected starlight

Turning, to him
with all that could be

Here beginning, at last, at last, finally
right here and now in his father's Chevy

Images of starlets soft in her head
turning toward love, meeting eyes glitter dead

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Sanded ... A Loneliness Prompt

Across arid endless desert
I walk in sand logged desperation
Aching for the lush light footfalls of hopeful
Horizon once my certain destination

In the empty space - a POETS UNITED "Thursday Think Tank" inspired poem

Tonight is not a night for loneliness
Yet here it is slipped between us as
I feel the empty space of where
You will not be when morning comes...

Thursday, July 14, 2011

WEDNESDAY POETIC ASIDE PROMPT – SOUND – 7-13-11 - 9 POEMS



1.      Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia
delightful word
if ever did I hear ya
clicking, clacking
quacking all that can be
dearest onomatopoeia
sound transcendent there to see


2.      Trill

In the glimmer, clammered
caw, in pennied rustle brilliant shimmer
sunshot whispered wistful gleam
crystalline, pure
solitary trill
trailing tendrilled chill
each vertebrae in turn
grazed as a cool fingered lover
shivering heart
swelling in wondered witness of
perfection's signatory


3.      BANG

BIG and COLOSSALLY UNIVERSAL
or
individually personally colloquial

BANG

starts
something
with
a


4.      First, Last, and In Between


First, wet, burbling, trembled inhalation
presaging that outraged-into-life-catapulted
wail

Last, sodden, deep chested, otherworldly gurgle
heralding that rocketing-into-shocking-dead
sucked-of-all-sound-silence

In between, simply noise


5.     

In sounds of silence
They whirled, tomorrows endless
Slowing as they heard



6.      The Whipperwont

Once upon a midnight dreary
Did ponder weak, and yes, weary
On the trilling of the whippoorwill
Whose promised joy sung out of
range, continuing others thrill, yet unheard
Desperately elusive still
In that midnight, chilled and dreary
Eyes reddened, aged and bleary
with the wait, the chase for joy, grown weary
Of the evasive whippoorwill



7.      On Satin

Come with me and lie
On satin sheets
Silent, satiate
Floating a single sigh



8.      Smack

In a clean quiet room
Locked within sanctity
Of self safe home
Cacophonous, the unexpected
Smack
Ricocheting rippled
Ever echoes


9.     

Giggles in the grass
rolling down the clovered hill
to the top again

Monday, July 4, 2011

In the Sauce




It wasn't the hard slaps, not even the one that pushed her tooth nearly through her lip, or the purple eye that turned yellow and light green from the hard back hand when it turned out his knuckles were bleeding.   It wasn't the mornings when he'd be sitting reading the paper,
relaxed as a big cat and suddenly turn the page onto something, a score, a statement, even once an ad for men's underwear and get annoyed and smash a mug of coffee against the wall.  No, the flesh wounds, hers and his, were easily iced, and coffee didn't stain if you got to it right away.  It wasn't even the aftermath of such times, when he'd sulk and blame, blame whatever he'd done on how much he loved her, or the tone of her voice or the way the
whole world was just unbelievably stupid. It wasn't the hours of tears,his head in her lap, or the way she had to tell him then,  over and over again, that he was really a good man and he should not buy a gun, or take a butcher knife, or stick his head in the oven, or jump off a bridge. After fifteen years all of it blurred into one monotonous familiar hum.   It was, after all,the sauce.  He said, it needed " something else" and she realized so did she.   









This " post-card" story was published back in February 2011

The Sparkle and the Shame

It was Mrs. Dayle who first gave me a term for the way I thought - "picture words".
"Look out the window and tell me what you see." Hands waved around the room, "the sky," "a bird", "the flag"... and then Mrs. Dayle said "I see red, white and blue, our country watching over us and our need to watch over her." I fell in love right then for the first time in third grade.
And so, when we were assigned a story I wanted it to be perfect, dripping with picture words for Mrs. Dayle, of the slate blue hair who perfumed the space between she and I with the soft scent of talcuum powder. Our assignment was to write a short story about a color. I picked blue of course in her honor. My father, passing by as I stared at the ceiling thinking, added that blue didn't always have to be a color but could be a feeling. I wrote a story about a little girl who was orphaned and missing her father on her birthday, "desperate in the 'slashing rain' to share one more cake with him" she cries herself to sleep, only to wake and find a sodden box on the front porch, when she slowly opens the lid there inside is a pink spun sugar cake with the words Happy Birthday Baby.
Mrs. Dayle read my story aloud and said that I had a 'rare talent'. Because my father had told me that a color could be a feeling I felt only shame as Mrs. Dayle's slate blue eyes sparkled, mine lowered to the scuff marks in waxed tiles on the school-room floor.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Poetic Aside Prompt - How Things Change - 12 Poems

Poem 1. 


That Girl

in bedazzled self splendor
she cross cat walked strolled
unaware of the averted glances-extolled
cracking volumes of thick tiny printed books
trailing endless margined rivulets into babbling brooks
mini skirted high heeled booted bespectacled wonder
in front of class after class each day
in the night Danskinned dancing the night away
taking what she wanted and only according to her rule
thought of everything but the epheremality of it all,
a strolling, studying, dancing, in besotted liqueur of youth fool


**********


Poem 2. 


The Suckling

Fresh from womb
feet untouched by ground
fuzzed silk spun
dreams of unfolded future yet to come
Particulars matter little, it is the transformation
as startling as the stretching of a man into a werewolf
A new mother's infant son into a man


**********


Poem 3. 


How things change

Slowly, incrementally, out of notice seen
Until nothing resembles anything that has been

Caterpillars in chrysalis
bursting forth to brightly silken winged fly
less ingenuous than the slow encroachment day
subtracting day until the day we die


**********




Poem 4. 

Change?

with a pop with a crash
with a sprinkle or a dash
can be major can be not
remembered for all time or next day forgot
some fear it, some race into its embrace
the only constant in change its shifting face

**********

Poem 5. 


Slow Coming

These two fingers
that tracked trails
of tears
these creased
and skin from bone
loosened fingers
slip the golden band
on his husband's waiting
waiting, waiting, hand
thirty year
engagement
ended
finally

finally

**********

Poem 6. 


Change of Heart

When did the pounding
of heated pulse
translate as anxiety
rather than anticipation?

When did lolling
cradled in soft cushions
translate as depression
rather than relaxation?

When did the trembling
of fingertips reaching
translate as illness
rather than passion?

When did the heart change?

**********


Poem 7. 


In The Ever-After Years


Long curls bouncing on her back
she runs in wide overlapping circles
princess on her white winged
stallion pawing
the velvet pampas of Papa lawn
her reign spreading endlessly
beyond the hydrangea'd snowballs
soft sensed smile in purple, pink, blue, blinking blur
her shimmering future
a given of endless
golden possibility
ribboning into the melting horizon
over the edge into the unseen tomorrow



**********

Poem 8. 


Love is Kind

Oft repeated that homily
of love being blind
usually related to the
falling into one another's
arms of one or another
whose passion has blurred
vision clearly seen by others

There is another sort of
love blindness that is kind
There on a hot summer week
in August I found it waiting
as my raven haired father
who leapt upon moving carousels
and swooped me into arms
and onto the ground
my raven haired father
smelling of turpentine
hands smeared with
cobalt, and sienna and
a palette of non-crayola colours
lay abed crisp white sheets
and I lay with him
in a magical space
of oxygen whir
and humidity
the others eyes
shrank when they
looked at him
seeing something
I did not see
as I rose on my
knees and sung
the song he had
taught me in childhood
strange song for
a child of three
"swing low, sweet chariot,
coming for to carry me home..."
singing high, folding my hand into
his, singing again and again
for eleven days and nights
in the steamy air of
sweet apricots
as he rid himself of
this pestering breath
and stepped raven haired
off the carousel

it took more than twenty years
for a moment when the blur
of love blindness cleared
and the muscle fell from his bones
and beneath my hand the jutting
knobs of each vertebrae
his thin robe
his thin arms
his thin silvered hair
For just a cruel moment
of some spoken clarity
Until returned to the
way it really was
in love
in kindness
my raven haired
father returned


**********

Poem 9. 

On the Edge

Impossible to hold in the senses
what memory recalls clear
the moment when a mostly
non-believing father
rose and looked beyond
into the something so
profoundly boundless
clear as though he stood
at the edge of a mountain
top and I just behind
his body blocking my
vision of eternity



**********

Poem 10. 


Changing It Up

There once was a guy from Toledo
Who once in New York knew not where to go
Should he cultured be
And visit the actual grand old opree
Or should he just find a hooker and image blow?


*******************

Poem 11. (haiku) 

in the cool clearing
open shutters welcoming
in the cool clearing


***************************

Poem 12. 


Sometime in the night

Sometime in the night
someone came up to my bed
where I had arranged
all my change next to my sleeping head

dimes, nickels, quarters, and pennies, even a half dollar, piled
loved the shining symmetry, the crystal clink that almost smiled

sometime in the night
someone came right there up to my sleeping bed
and stole all my change where I had it placed next to my sleeping head

replaced my shining pleasured treasure of incomparable tactile
with a limp, green, thin, paper - PAPER ! - five dollar bill


**********