I’ve caught your words in my mouth once or twice since you’ve been gone. They fall like sugar, dissolving into conversation, stirred past, almost before I have time to notice that I said them instead of you. Even past death you voice lives on.
The crack makes me jump, the sharp, snap sound of plastic pressed too far, finally splitting, shards splintering a firework of spiderweb lines scrabbling to saftey from the fresh edge still clutched in your hand. Then you look at me, like I’ve gone mad.
My fingers are wonky. Long, slender, but wonky. They start off straight enough, but seem to loose focus near the ends where suddenly they tilt off course as if there was a cat in the road or something. I think it’s a Forrester trait. Hands and feet not quite lined up the way they should be. The length is all Swin, though the blood ran short at the other end, with teeny, tiny toes more child than woman. Index, middle and fourth are all the same length. Even the little isn’t really little in comparison just a fraction shorter than the other mini sausages wriggling beside it. At one family gathering, we compared missing knuckles, stumpy thumbs and odd shaped toes to see who could call bingo with a full set of oddities. Actually, that should have been the name given to my family. I hope tonight’s poetic’s host doesn’t mind me using fingers and toes as my family trait in response to tonight’s prompt. I know we were only meant …
When the world shudders, I still seek shelter with you. I still cocoon myself in your arms and pretend that I am a child again. Knowing you will keep the bad at bay until I am ready to gather myself and face the world. I’m going to blame my other half for the lapse in memory that made me miss last night’s Quadrille prompt. He returned home with twelve Israeli Koi for the new pond in the garden so our evening dissolved into me staring over the edge of the water, trying to pick out any signs of their colourful little bodies after they’d been released.
A mouse can’t eat an elephant, not in one sitting at least. That’s what we can boil it down to, the basics of possibility in that everything becomes an eventuality eventually. When you learn to scuff the corners off time, it becomes something else. I like to shake it out as if it were a tablecloth on the front steps. Free the crumbs into the wind and see what grows when the tides settle enough for things to find a place. When I’m done I use the same folds to pack it away. No harm in that. Better than bending time into shapes it won’t understand. Hidden, it can’t do much but carry on as it was, idling the hours away, the minutes, the moments, the breathes. I wonder if time can waste itself? Perhaps the dark ages were teenage years, where getting out of bed seemed pointless. It was easier to let things muddle by without any real effort. Asteroids were an eraser but like any chalk board a few ghosts get left behind. …
Love is a dangerous serpent, if you learn how to knot it how to twist it back on itself until it resembles nothing of love at all, then you can weave a noose from the stands cut from your own heart and choke the life out of those who refused to take it when love was first offered. And now for our (optional) prompt. In her interview, Brim provides us with several suggestions for generative writing exercises, and we’d like to challenge to today to tackle her third one, which is based in the myth of Narcissus. After reading the myth, try writing a poem that plays with the myth in some way. There is something in this myth that has rubbed me the wrong way today. I think it’s the parallel between Narcissus being cursed for not returning another’s love, and the current climate where women are sometimes thrown into toxic situations where rejecting an advance is seen as an insult that should be punished.
With enough feet marching you can shake a city from its bed, rattle the window frames until they pop loose and let the noise in. There are thunderstorms softer than your rumble, I’ve watched them shiver quake at the sound of you roaring for the world to roar right back. My own politics pass on splinters, from all the fences I’ve perched myself on carefully, certain not to teeter too far over on either side. My love of balance looks more like apathy in honesty. I think that’s why I want you and not in a way where I lay claim or bed down or burn my taste onto your mouth, I want you like a life raft, because drowning can seem like swimming if you don’t notice the water rising. write a poem that involves rebellion in some way
Version One: Version Two: I’m still playing catch up with NaPoWriMo so here is my response for Day Nineteen’s prompt. It’s a similar technique to found poetry but instead of using a page from a book you salvage from a second hand shop, you write your own paragraph and then turn it into a poem. If you want to see the original paragraph it’s included below. The only issue I have with this prompt is that it doesn’t have much in the way of contrast as the prose I based the poem off uses quite poetic language. Part of the uniqueness of found poetry is that you sometimes have to work quite hard for the lines. As you can see by the first piece, it would be quite easy just to add line breaks and blank out minimal amounts of the prose to create a poem out of this. That’s why I had two attempts at it. The second being more vicious with the black lines. The blossom from the plum tree has melted …
Sometimes I don’t know I’ve left until I’m gone. It’s a choreography I learnt by accident, aware that the ghost of me is still sitting somewhere, that you might have noticed I’ve only remained in part. Fading out is a tricky habit to break, there’s no pattern to the way my limbs leave so I let myself go along with the easiness of it all. My toes already bare on another floor, I’m sure I must have left a clue somewhere that I was always waiting for the road to turn off. First, find a poem in a book or magazine (ideally one you are not familiar with). Use a piece of paper to cover over everything but the last line. Now write a line of your own that completes the thought of that single line you can see, or otherwise responds to it. Now move your piece of paper up to uncover the second-to-last line of your source poem, and write the second line of your new poem to complete/respond to this second-to-last line. …
If you don’t want to be asked to do something again, make an awful job of it the first time round. That was the lesson my father’s father apparently taught him when it came to household chores. It was the reason that his attempt on the lawn, a job normally reserved to my mother, has to be redone once he’d relinquished hold of the mower and she’d had chance to evaluate the outcome. It was similar to my Grandfather’s paint job of the kitchen in my Dad’s childhood home. The instructions were to leave two inches of each wall below the ceiling unpainted, so my Grandmother could do the edges with a hand she clearer believed to be steadier than the one she left her commands to. The result, was two inches of paint, on ceiling and wall each, while the rest of the room remained untouched. When my father pointed out that he didn’t think that’s what his mother meant Granddad responded with ‘Never you mind, I know what I’m doing,’ and besides the …
