Monday, October 31, 2011

IMUNURI prompt: Moving

Try this:
Write while moving.
Maybe you'll walk.
Maybe you'll dance, at home or somewhere people dance.
Maybe you'll swing in a swing, jog around the block, work out, or
maybe you'll move around the living room, stretching, reaching, rolling, as you hold paper in one hand and pen in the other, allowing words to come out of your moving body, moving as they wish to move, from a place that is opened by the body's motion.
Or maybe, you'll move the furniture, or move your home. This week, make moving your modus operandi.

keywords: moving, poem, your name

Friday, October 28, 2011

Baba & Zeda’s morning kitchen

asleep on arrival
and carried as luggage
in through the side door,
passing though a kitchen’s promise
during a dream of loud kisses

waking late to a yellowing day,
that smells like Saint Louis
always will: Baba and Zeda,
furniture with a generation
of living, layers of boiled coffee,
and now fresh-made waffles

in the house’s heart,
sun coming in,
dining room going out,
pantry storing downstairs,
laundry chute behind the walls,
and in the window, something
that doesn’t have a name:

curve-cut wood
that frames the light
into a design
I’ve never seen before
or since, the sign
of make it nice,
hold fast, make due,
rain or snow,
catch this prism of
I love you

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The beginning of an intervention

I know your loss has brought despair; but listen: you have friends who care

And wish to see you through this time of grimmest sorrow.

Grief’s dimmed your eyes and turned you thinnish, but love like yours won’t ever finish.

Recouping joy does not diminish—diminish, rob or even borrow—

From yesterday's passions that today have soured to sorrow.

      You must start living for tomorrow.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011


my mother took us to this cool park  where I (seen here) am playing on a stagecoach

Monday, October 24, 2011

IMUNURI prompt: a place you loved as a child

This week, write a poem or a short prose piece or draw a picture inspired by memories of a place you loved as a child.


Keywords: poem, childplace, your name

Thursday, October 20, 2011

What We Need Is Here

Riff on the last line of Wendell Berry's line "What we need is here" from "Wild Geese" (appears here: http://www.panhala.net/Archive/The_Wild_Geese.html )

...And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
~ Wendell Berry ~
From Wild Geese

What We Need Is Here

i.
If you told me in order to be whole I would have to become ribbons at the top of the prayer wheel near Cathedral Rock, always fluttering, rising and falling, driven by the wind, I would think first about the rainbow colors of the prayer flags and not how my clear prayers would be worn away to tatters by the oceans of air brushing me

ii.
Eventually, when all my letters are rubbed out, when all I am is the thought of threads, when I have been worn smooth, worn down, worn clear as bright sky and dirt granules, worn to nubs, I know more about sufficiency. I cease hungering for more.

iii.
Later still, my prayer flag bodies are gone to thought. Bodies of air moving. I am lifted and become the wind. Everything I am becomes this grace and grit, this clear soaring. When walking in today's zephyr on Horse Thief Mesa, I walk with the parts of what I've become - the prayers-words-songs become tatter-unreadable-wind that wants to touch all of creation: brushing, sanding, burnishing.

iv.
What we need is here. The ancestors and those-coming swirl me along, scudding and skiddering, the wind makes its pronouncements by moving juniper boughs. This is thought with motion. "To be quiet in heart, and in eye clear," I stop typing and move out the window, towards stars and caverns, where I can pause and take shape as air bodies.

v.
Finally, a l l l e t t e r s f l y o f f


for every banana

for every banana
peeled in pajamas
by a friendly samaritan
of a taxi-less reader
to the 4am flight
through lightless darkness
jacket over jumping
monkey fleece
we offer a loud:
all praises!


for every nectarine
savoured in sweetness
by a roving poet
with friendly mud-builders
through the windy mesa
and iron hot springs
in jackets of fleece
we offer a chordant:
all praises!

for each native plum
plucked improvisationally
by rollicking dog-lovers
with beloved painters
over treeline rooftops
with grins surcease
we offer an ululating:
all praises!

Monday, October 17, 2011

IMUNURI prompt: reply

REPLY
Write a reply, 
rejoinder, 
sequel or 
spin-off 
to a favorite poem, song lyric, 
or prose passage.

Please reference your original inspiration in your post

Keywords: poem, reply, your name

Thursday, October 13, 2011

MRE (meal ready to eat)


Collapsing



stomach

on itself



impatient for results



What will become

of lunch



when supply chains



if they

when it



Thursday’s layoffs



I’ll buy

more 15-year



ready-to-eats



2026

they’ll expire



by then we may know



Wednesday, October 12, 2011

On shooting insulin before you can eat (or five prompts for dinner)

Unzip the test kit. Uncap the test strip holder. Take a test strip out of the plastic cylindrical holder. Take out the pricker unit. Set the trigger. Lightly press the pricker on the finger tip with the least purple pinpricks. Release the trigger. Ouch. Tiny needle pierces your finger tip. Flinch Your red blood flows Slide your finger along the edge of the test strip so your blood collects on the strip. Use other hand to close tissue over the bleeding finger and press. Watch the meter for the number that is never good enough. Take the shooter insulin pen out of the pouch and key in the dose 16mg. for a higher carb meal (yes noodles yum). Screw in the needle point and press it against belly, push needle into soft stomach tissues. Press with constant pressure the protruding knob dial until dose has been administered. Pull the needle out. Yeah now I get to eat. (all this is actually in real life sped up real automatic and fast because who wants to wait to eat food.)

Monday, October 10, 2011

IMUNURI prompt: spiels on meals


For this week's prompt, try a thought experiment around creative writing and eating. You could
  • Try drafting a poem while hungry, before you eat a meal.
  • Try drafting a poem immediately after a satisfying meal
  • Skip a meal and write a poem
  • Try more than one of these and juxtapose the poems, or weave them together somehow.

labels: eating, poem, your name

by David Fleischmann

Saturday, October 8, 2011

I've got so much blue light

I've got so much blue light

I’ve got so much blue light
for the rain to fall through
  that my insides feel like they’re outside
  & not quite right
naked sinew sinker tight.

I’ve got so little summer left to shine
  through the fog
    that my pores feel closed & tight
shut down unable to alight
bare bone finger bite.

I’ve got so much straw left to rot
   in the fields
     that each singular haystack
yellowy black motionless pile
 of my skinless plight
has no sand on the beach  
nude ligament empty fight.

I've got so many chickens on Main Street

I’ve got so many chickens on Main Street

I’ve got so many chickens on Main Street
that the commercial neighbors can complain.
But realize folks, I do not keep roosters & their straw is fresh & clean.
They’ll eat the organic restaurant scraps left by people on their plates
& my chickens will not keep the 9 to 5ers up late.
They close their eyes when the sun sets over Half Moon Bay
& awake plenty early to make your breakfast eggs.

Friday, October 7, 2011

mmmm.....

I’ve so many

good wishes from

fortune cookies

saved in my home,

you’d think to see


diamonds and plums

in Chihuly

bowls in each room.

Reality?

Bowls by Ari


fill with pennies

and small apples

from our own tree.

Fortune’s simple

sugary crumbs


fill my temple.

My luck’s ample.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Learning the Drill

Adults always tried to peer into our heads,
tinker with what went on in there,
control our tongues. Only one of them ever could.

We had to see Him regularly. For our own good.


We went unwillingly, quivering in the car,
to a house that was more than a house
in a neighborhood nicer than ours.

The side entrance was guarded by a woman in white.


Surrounded by faded Highlights and expired Time,
we waited in despair, dreading our turn in that oversized chair.

The lobby stunk of formaldehyde and the tiny flecks of bone
that He scraped off people’s skulls.


First some stranger’s kid went in, then a trembling sibling.

They’d come out pale, shoulders tense, faces strangely drooping.

Most were silent as they emerged, which was less distressing
than the gas and gabble of those who spoke.


Mother made odd promises: milkshakes to the docile.

At home, we were too big for these childish bribes,
but here in His harsh light – eyes pressed shut, fingers twitching –
we clutched stuffed talismen no longer needed in the dark.


For parents desperate to decipher the content of crania,
X-rays were not enough.

He pried open our jaws and slid in a mirror,
then played a tune on the edge of our molars.


The shrill music of metal against mandible
echoed insanely from within our ears.

We cried out, but it did no good.

We cried out. It was for our own good.


And it was. They were right, of course.

We chew, true, to this day. We even learned to floss.

And, while He never did extract the truth,
no priest at confession ever came so close to our secrets.

Monday, October 3, 2011

(the great cycle:) the same things that make me whole will make me dead


they say the stars of all the constellations
when compressed onto the body
become the chinese medicine points and meridians.


so i walk with galaxies under my skin -
and i've already been told
dinosaurs in my brain and bridges between.


every construct and metaphor, ever leaf and twig,
snout and slime mold, cloud and fever
clings to the depth of my fibriles and forms.


i've got so much life in me, if i grin
the songs of creation leak out, a small
glamour of sculptor and reaper

whisps into flight on sound waves
of delight and dread. the same things
that bring us death make us whole.

the same things that make me whole will make me dead.


today, cedar boughs (my lungs) heavy with cones (breath),
the wind of what-has-made-me (the thrillion conversations,
with young deer and neighbor, magnolia and moth),

like a galactic zephyr, roll through my blood
and start me thrumming. a tuning fork
for stars unseen and seen, i start glowing and know

what brings us death will make me whole.
the same things that make me whole will make me dead.
which leads me to believe: this poem will never
end.



October 3, 2011

Image credit - thanks to Anonymous and their free fractal desktop image

Sunday, October 2, 2011

IMUNURI prompt: muchness

(C) 2002-2011 Michele Pred
so much 
paperwork.
admiration.  
tangled string.
boundary.


For this week's prompt,
complete the phrase  
"I’ve got so much ____." 

Make this the topic and/or the title of your poem.


Alternative 1:  Start with the phrase, "I've got too much ____."

Alternative 2:  Substitute many for much.


Tags: poem, muchness, [your handle]