All posts tagged: fixed form

Fox In The Hen House – #DVersePoets

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Their heads bob like drinking birds,of course, of course, of course.Necks pulled up from their collar bones.I have never seen throats so openas when your snout is at their jugularthe gleam on bright white teethmasked by sheer magnetism. Tonight’s quadrille prompt had me a little stumped to begin with. Then I started writing about iron filings, got stuck fifteen words in, and wrote this quadrille instead. I even got to bring out one of my own sketches to use for the feature image.

Unspoken Confession #DVersePoets #PoetryFormNight

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Did you hear me say ‘I love you’ last night? when I left the kiss of it on your skin and curled my hands into claws oh so tight wondered who led who, into all this sin. Wondered if sin was what we’re really in then lost the edge of my thought on your lips found it again in the dips of your hips, tried to tell you, that you were everything the only one I trust when this mask slips a lover, a partner, my rock, my life spring.   Tonight’s form challenge is a Dizain. A ten line poem with ten syllables per line and a rhyme scheme that follows the pattern ababbccdcd.      

Between Tides And Hurricanes

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Caught I clung inside you. Pendent between each aching inhale. Cautious you might breath out and send me spinning upwards. A helicopter seed whirling away as if I’d never been there, the hollow I’d leave unnoticed by you.   These were never wing, they were always sails. Filled up with questions I asked myself, to keep my feet from touching down on lands unfamiliar, filled with strangers like me always pulling at something unseen, pretending they knew love. If you want to know more about this form of poetry then check out Colleen’s handy post on how to write an Etheree. I’ve not come across them before, though the form reminds me a little of Fibs which are great fun to write. The two words for this week’s prompt were ‘Mystery’ and ‘Attraction’ so I went with ‘pulling’ and ‘questions’.  

NaPoWriMo – Day Twelve: Crewe

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Lined up like tin soldiers, the railway houses don’t change much. Those narrow, red faces with wide eyes that keep watch on the crisscross of streets, their pockets of green tucked away with their tangles of washing-lines, and wooden sheds squeezed in between the weed clotted fences. It’s the sort of place where noise bounces down avenues and lands in a garden not its own. Music might be just as easily from a park you cannot see for grey roof tiles, as the radio downstairs. Wind carries laughter further than static. The train line plays hide-and-seek between the buildings. Always behind the next fence, darting beneath your feet, slinking away between the mishmash of warehouses not yet reclaimed for renewal. In the same way your nervous systems fizzles beneath your skin, the tracks hum and rattle from corner to corner. In the thunder of carriages the words loose themselves. The statement, ‘I was here first, this is my town, I am the heart, the life giver, the cradle it crawled from to sprawl its way …

NaPoWriMo Day Twenty-Three

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So today it is 400 years since Shakespeare’s death. I absolutely adore Shakespeare and have done for a long while. One of the first dates that the fiancée and I went on was to watch a live screening of Macbeth, directed by and staring Sir  Kenneth Branagh. It was utterly brilliant and the setting they used, a de-consecrated church, really added to the production. I also have the 2015 film version of Macbeath downstairs which I’ve been trying to make time to watch. I think today would probably be a good day for it. For today’s NaPoWriMo prompt, we have been challenge to write a sonnet. An apt prompt in view of the significance of the day. I have tried writing a sonnet before and it’s not a form that I find very easy. As someone who doesn’t tend to use rhyme much I feel like too much of my focus goes on getting the structure right instead of the poem. But, I have managed all of the other NaPoWriMo prompts and it is Shakespeare’s …

NaPoWriMo Day Fourteen

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Taken By Shadows This thing carved you out of yourself bit by bit, shaking us from your mind like loose change to spin and skitter away from the person we knew. And when it crept up on us and we had to admit, that perhaps you were acting somewhat strange, but it was already too late to bring you back. There was this stranger, this woman instead of you, and somewhere behind us you’d slipped through the cracks.   A San-san for NaPoWriMo Day Fourteen and also for the Open Link night at the DVerse Poets Pub. For those of you who haven’t seen the tag ‘sharetheorange’ on twitter, Christopher Eccleston has taken part in a video for Alzheimer’s UK to raise awareness of what the disease actually does to the people who suffer from it. It’s not an easy topic to talk about, and as someone who has a family member with Alzheimer’s, talking about it reminds me of how hard I try to ignore the effects it has had on my family and I. You …

Walls and Doors – Haibun

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The first thing we taught each other, was how to close doors in the other one’s face. How to stack the bricks just so, mortar the cracks, keep the lines level. We built walls out of words. Pressed the letters into each other until the house buzzed with noise and it felt as though the walls were full of bees. We learn the strings to pull. The chords that yanked out the anger, snapped the calmness. At night, when the neighbours slept we would hammer out brittle songs on instruments we’d forgotten how to tune. One night I broke you. Left your pieces on the living room floor and watched you stare at the splinters I’d made of your hands, your face, your heart. When you reached for me, I couldn’t remember where I’d put the key to my door. Once, I wore your clothes, tried to make them fit my skin better than my own. When I started writing this piece, I fully intended it to be a work of fiction, but I think …