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NaPoWriMo 19.1: It's a Hungerful Life
“No one’s a failure who has friends”
Sure Clarence, ring that bell,
But what hunts me is that second part,
that lethal, unforgiving qualifier,
and I’m no George Bailey.
Joseph, I want to be,
Zuzu, I want to be,
But there’s no
Building and Loan
Anymore. Just
building alone
in this hunted,
lonesome field
of dead-end soul,
endless, forever.
Over such distance
screams
shatter.
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i must not stir the pot. stirring the pot is the notifications-killer. participation in the discourse is the little-death that brings total activity obliteration. i will face the bad opinions on the internet. i will permit them to pass over me and through me. and when they have gone past, i will turn the block button onto their source. where the discourse has come from there will be nothing. only i will remain.
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NaPoWriMo 18.2: Neither To Be Mine Again
Sappho, I see you
forswearing honey
in conversation,
It’s 500 BCE,
your many lovers sitting
round the fire, agape, awestruck.
Looking on, have to admit
I am too. I don’t
see why you must
rid yourself of sweet
buzzing sibilant words as
they rise, tantalizing tongue
and rapt audience alike.
Does it make you sad,
this honeyed self-theft?
Do you not dare lie?
Poems slip honey-sweet, telling
truths when I obscure the real.
So vivid, pointing out deep
authentic pockets
in my fakery.
Hands write the unseen,
the unheard, ridiculous,
unfathomable. But it
sure feels real, don’t it?
Floats down leather tongue
so thick you could choke.
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NaPoWriMo 18.1: Sunspots
It’s kind of hard to say what I might be
if I weren’t me. I worked hard to get here,
why yearn another form, another time?
The past is full of perils, the future
is unknown, and nature’s brutish shortness
does not appeal at all. No, I think I’d
zoom out from all that stuff, see all the things
millenia of life can bring. I’d burn,
glow fusing atoms, brightness lighting up
the darkened cold, pull defining boundary
space amidst raw infinity. I’d dance,
a billion years, then die, a nurtured system gone
but birthing newness in my death, I’d smile.
Sweet flaming mother, cradle in the depths
I’d draw my children near and hug with light.
I’d spin them round the room to hear their cries
“One more, one more!” oblige ten billion times
Till age and sunspots end that loving grasp.
#napowrimo#original poem#poem#poetry#poets corner#poets on tumblr#writers on tumblr#glopowrimo#original poetry#poems and poetry#writers and poets#poemsbyme#poems on tumblr
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GloPoWrimo 17.6: A Rumor, Three Dots, Ugly
Partial credit to Derrick Brown
How do I even start again, begin the
new life I have despite this cruel design?
I’ve heard that you and him, shacked up, broke in
to her home, and smelled a rotting thing. The
foul scent did not seem to derail the stars
in lovers’ eyes, what I need to know is
this: why blackmail him into this if the
man you really loved, despite sniffing same
pungent smell, was truly, deeply mad in
love with you? What, we ruined lives with our
suppositions? No, it’s your deceitful hearts.
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NaPoWriMo 17.1-17.5: Two Song-Based Poems I Like And Even More I'm Meh About
As Long As You Love Me
At the extreme (EX-TREEEEEMEE!!!!) end of the cassette age
two hyper kids scream-belt Backstreet Boys
into Barbie karaoke mics.
They won’t hear Toxic for another three years,
Backstreet was never Back to them,
in this backwater bit of boonie
where bluegrass is king
and Natalie Maines reings supreme,
but Britney and the Boys are real as the tape
that plays, LOUD! as we sing louder,
spinning out in song till we hit the hard frame
of the little couch in the playroom
and collapse in laughter.
Mock serious confessions of love
to piles of air, saying we don’t care,
as long as you love me.
As long as this stays.
San Cristobal
I found religion in you
(Song, not island)
After angstily losing life,
Searching for foundation,
I came upon you, antifolk hero,
sum of bluegrass past, punk present.
Poet of the borderlands of my being.
Guitar chords resounding,
I don’t wish I’d never gone,
because without going, we’d never meet
and I’d never find the strength.
Years later, at Quaker meeting,
I still find religion in concert halls,
shitty venues, great ones,
I see you there, and the crowd
echoes your voice as one:
I’m home.
Breakaway
Kelly, Avril, you never told me
that it would be so HARD
When your voice, your words came belting out
of the Princess Diaries 2 DVD
our family must have watched
till it was etched in our irises.
Riveted, I was seen, and saw,
Longing for the wrongness to end,
too scared to pray it would.
I can’t forget you, early days
This break doesn’t mean I hate you
This taken chance will remake me,
But this change is not an ending,
Simply a finding of where to begin.
Carry On
I’m 16 again,
listening to the radio
on a drive past somewheres
I’ve been a thousand times.
Getting stuck in a creepy van with 6 people
six high-schoolers, for 30 minutes? Yeah,
angst central. I hate Some Nights (the song,
not the album- though little one, it’s much better
with the prelude), and We Are Young doesn’t yet
feel my own. So when your gentle piano caress
careens out of nowhere into my waiting ears
it finds a blissful emperor’s welcome.
And then- layers adding themselves until
a vast city spawns in my temporal lobe.
Bagpipes?- those madmen! I must
Follow them wherever they go,
My life is worth living.
I’m not a fuckup,
I’m just a girl
No one’s ever gonna stop me now.
Aw no,
They’re breaking up.
Welp, guess they were stopped.
Just Dance
Gaga, I feel you.
I suck at gran jetés,
pas du chaux,
sashays.
A traveler without a guidebook,
bereft of fundamentals.
Yet when your music thrums
I do them anyway, else
with militia-grade insistence,
my dance teacher will force me
nonetheless.
Yes, I’ve had a little bit too much-
Utterly unready, useless in this
We breezed through positions
why am I in front of this scathing mirror
without a barre to my name?
Gaga I love you baby,
But I can’t do this anymore.
This moment scares me.
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GloPoWrimo 16.2: Salad Soliloquy
What acid’s one which mortals may consume
And saves thieves from the perils of the plague
Yet ruins, spoils honeyed fruit of gods
Doom of the Romans, Hannibal’s good friend
When made pure loses color and the fruit?
It’s vinegar, the spoiled runt of wine
That nonetheless some value has possessed
In ancient days, and balsalm-types have flourished
Until Napoleonic days destroyed
The noble’s wealth and fortunes by a sale
Which gave that land Italian secrets cheap.
Oh that my heart stay wine, and cease to spoil
And yet I fear corruption haunts us all
One day I’ll burn the hands of those I love
A caustic, bitter drink rightly despised
Oh may I guard this sightly pearl well,
And not dissolve by Cleopatran wrath
A fortune in the minds of those I love
I guard you, oyster’s child, and hope to see
My choice of goodness, not of infamy.
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NaPoWriMo 16.1: Spring in the District
In the morning stillness,
the crawling vine winds through
the cool, refreshing stone building.
The humidity today is pond-soft,
and you slip into it like a delighted frog.
Tulips waft succulent pollen,
golden beads of beauty.
As day stretches with honeyed languor
towards the warm, embracing night
a dove gently coos the hour.
Why does leaving feel like dying?
#napowrimo#original poem#poetry#poem#poets corner#writers on tumblr#poets on tumblr#original poetry#glopowrimo#poems and poetry#writers and poets#poems on tumblr#poemsbyme
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I see this & all i can think of is a morbid version of "Escape (the Piña Colada Song")
A husband and wife unexpectedly meet in the same spot, both trying to bury a body
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GloPoWriMo 15.4: Lot's Wife
(prompt asked for a quotidian-formed poem, so I made a conversational prose poem that only occasionally waxes lyrical)
I salt the oyster mushrooms, so they taste richer and more succulent and occasionally I wonder, “is it her?”
Oh, I don’t think it’s entirely a punishment. Sure, salt can imply barrenness, but also, let me tell you, those mushrooms were TASTY. And hey, if salt loses its savor, what is it good for, and all that.
But nah, if it was her, she was pretty tasty.
You know, sometimes we all look back on things we shouldn’t, y’know? Sometimes we inadvertently see the face of God.
Like those patent leather Docs I could’ve used that money i used for electrolysis instead. I can shave- but I kinda can’t afford not to be stylish at concerts. The humiliation!
Or that time when I kinda sucked as a person, frankly. I have scrupulosity OCD, so yeah, I need to hold myself accountable, be better than I’ve been and all that.
But sometimes my brain goes “you’re still the literal antichrist, you should be crystallized instead of her, she should be seasoning an omelette with you.”
And a vengeful God sees my rot and condemns me to burn for millenia and I am chained alone, like a kid in a closed store forgotten by her parents who assured her that they’d let them out, but they never did.
And the kid’s utterly alone and everyone else has gone to their divinely-made homes, and suddenly the wall of TVs doesn’t look so friendly.
And she’s so SMALL and the appliances are so LARGE.
It would be fine if someone would even just break a chunk of salt off of me, but I’m a lone byword by a burnt city, the city of my own damn iniquity.
A city of cold steel grills, excess mocking me, dead Sears Sodom skeleton dessicated, nothing to throw my heart into, nothing, just an eternity of mall corpses.
Fuck, I don’t even know anymore y’all. Let’s have some more salted mushrooms. This whole allusion was a bust.
These things are really good fried. Just don’t think about the burning.
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GloPoWriMo 15.1-3: Postal Poems
(couldn't choose one, so you get three- stamp inspiration below)
Tin Can Mail
Christmas, 1982,
Special delivery!
I scrawled your letter,
Packed my heart on a container ship,
my soul in a cookie tin,
and went with the last of the mail.
Elated, may you
throw your canoe over the cliffside,
somersaulting-swan diving down to greet it,
row it up as the cans rain down,
and hear my tiptoed footsteps
in your island home. Cracked Sphere
Let me break open
like the Soviet Union,
let my geode gem heart
fall open to fields
of amethyst,
khyber-crystal ruby,
rippling agate,
icy lapis.
Riot of color,
play of light,
stir and,
awake! Puppy Love
Catboyfriend, doggirlfriend?
Unlikely romance,
in heavy rain,
they wear their love
on soaked shirts.
Dried up at home,
fur fluffed down,
cat comforts,
smiling serenely
all the while, as she
sees lover’s evening anxiety
evaporate.
Punk lovers,
break the system,
dance in clubs,
sing duets,
embrace,
and never stop.
#napowrimo#original poem#poem#poetry#poets corner#poets on tumblr#writers on tumblr#glopowrimo#original poetry#poems and poetry#writers and poets#poemsbyme#poems on tumblr
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GloPoWriMo 14.2: Laurel, Hell?
I can believe it.
Gnarled grasping fingers,
flowers laughing “foolish
child who dares enter here,
you cannot tame us.”
Fragile withered appearance
Hiding hardy beguiling ancient strength.
Bracken fronds pulling down, down below
To the forest floor, as it grows dark, darker
Color swallowed up in crawling roots
On your belly you will crawl
O vile serpent, man.
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GloPoWriMo 14.1: Oh What an Awakening, All Hail
Beyond yonder hill,
beyond the mountains, stony secrets
beyond time and
beyond belief, I roam,
beyond care or want.
Beyond the bended river’s course i went
beyond, always further,
beyond, to renewal,
beyond, to light,
beyond, to neighbors,
beyond, to friends,
beyond, to difference, every return from
Beyond bringing vestiges of a past gone altogether
beyond.
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GloPoWriMo 13.2: Too Deep
(In which the writer tortures the meter in a ghazal)
When does one know that they are in too deep?
What does that turning gyre spin too deep?
A drizzling day, news on the stoop, tossed down
A death, their life stretched way too thin, too deep.
A writer in a Scottish castle spews
Sheer venom, “This nation’s sin? Too deep.”
Report due back to governmental seat,
the cutoffs to kids’ medicine too deep.
A good man with a blind spot shuns his friends
The cost is sunk, and the ocean too deep.
Report and Scottish writer cross the sea
Fuel raging fire, the hateful din too deep.
Well, Phoebe, this life must be lived, ‘midst fear.
They can’t take joy: You’ll never grin too deep.
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GloPoWriMo 13.1: Stuffed Shark Saturday Morning
Rest in zesty morning sun,
linen-fresh beginning,
cloud-soft spout of rain,
Soft shark plush at my elbow
under sea-dark covers.
Gift of ocean, take my hand,
listen to that fan, humming, thrumming
like my nightstand’s cards,
shuffle-slow start
as sun rises,
lethargic.
Watch, I’ll
make us waffles
as tulip sweetness floats
through the air and I’m filled
full up to brim
with daylight
#napowrimo#original poem#poem#poetry#poets corner#poets on tumblr#writers on tumblr#glopowrimo#original poetry#poems and poetry#writers and poets#poemsbyme#poems on tumblr
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NaPoWriMo 12.2: Announcement
I managed both prompts
in one, so there'll be no more
poems today.... SIKE!
#napowrimo#original poem#poetry#poem#poets corner#writers on tumblr#poets on tumblr#original poetry#glopowrimo#poems and poetry
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NaPoWriMo 12.1: For the Intercession of St. John the Steel-Driver
The world is a series of battles
Against latter-day steam drills
And oh, I have not the courage
To lift the nine-pound hammer.
Mr. Henry, lend me your strength.
Eyes fiery, sweat pouring,
Total purpose one’s being
Let me beat back the void
Tempting vale of mechanized death
Swing, swing, swing that hammer
Arms more than pistons could ever be
Brain and brawn unified to crush
The weight of the smogstruck world
Let me forget alienation
Or die trying.
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