Sonnet Inspired by the Oxygen Concentrator: Ocean Home

I was with my mom writing poems and the sound of the oxygen machine dominated our poetic silence. Here is a poem inspired by an oxygen concentrator, a sonnet also, so for me, doubly completely different.

Ocean Home

Seahorse glides to glittering bottom
where float, like ships in space, long velvet rays
softly, darkly zooming in abysm's craize:
stately descent to Neptune's tomb.

Imagine the sultry depths filled with gloom,
mermaids with fangs guiding our kelp-filled gaze.
The looming, lurchless, steady downward laze
into the lapping gravels-- velvet, subsumed.

The mesmer of oxygen concentration
is a different kind of submarine.
Our bronchioles are round fish in a roundly swarm.
They love pure breath as culmination:
A voyage in darkness. Or are lungs
and ocean depths secretly bright and warm?

The View, the Ride, this Home Inside

Between Dr Suess and Human Design,
I woke up this morning feeling just fine.

My mind had been racing as minds often will do,
it had gotten all tied up, frustrated, and blue.

My mind was saying, "Watch out! You must!
"If you don't control where we're going, we simply might bust!"

Sometimes I suffer my mind being Queen
and I a lowly subject, her demanding I clean,

"Clean up this mess, the mess you've made of this life.
You simply must listen and take my advice!

"We wouldn't be in this mess if you'd surrendered to me.
And now look, it's as if you are stuck up a tree.

"You've no way out now, you're out on a limb.
You must listen to me, I'll guide you back in."

But something in me felt, "No, don't buckle under!"
It was a still clear sense that filled me with wonder.

It was if as it said, "Just wait and you'll see,
things will unfold, although quite differently."

So I waited, just me, just as I am,
waited one...
waited two...
waited three...

~

And wow, did things happen!
No one else might have noticed anything happening, you see,
because it was all happening to everything while inside of me!

Within what once had me hopeless, confined, and upset,
things disappeared, effortlessly shifted, dissolved
and before I knew it, I felt again resolved.

So the moral of this story, if moral's the word,
"Find the type of knowing that lives in just you
and don't buckle under until you have That in view!"

For the Queen or King of your mind will certainly have other plans,
but plans are not made of the living stuff of life.
Life is being lived as we relax and find ourselves, even admist strife.

And, anyway, my mind really has something important to do!
She's just not here to run my life, she has her own significant ware,
there is creativity, unique awareness, inspiring insights to share!

~

My still clear knowing, the one that is true,
lives in the listening tissues of my body and is ever new.

I celebrate that today with the help of this poem,
as I recognize on shifting ground that within me, I am Home!

Reader, thank you for reading, for rhyming with me.
And may your own ride finds its unique vitality.

Thank you Dr Suess and Ra Uru Hu,
the gifts you have proffered have opened up this View!

"Junk Drawer"

Revised...


I saved a couple coals from a significant fire. Some unusable keys
remain on photo keychains, freebies from Las Vegas weekends
long past.
Boxing gloves rest on top with “HITMAN” written on them in
Sharpie.
The gloves float
on old journals, several tarot decks, a box stuffed with at least
a thousand fortunes from cookies,
some mushroom-shaped ceramic stands, a banana-shaped pipe
for pot—
I have two cubic feet of such things, each with an invitation to
wait here.
Even the motes
settled into the bin’s bottom corners
have their stories.
This is what I call a junk drawer.
The one near the kitchen is the utility drawer with its markers,
tools, pushpins, flashlight, scratch paper and keys.
The keys are the telling detail: those in the junk drawer have lost
their doors.
I don’t know why they’re still around. This may mean
it’s time for the ritual. With a junk drawer, you have to visit
every so often, recommit to the objects you’ll keep.
You have to adjust
the collection you retain to guard your secret identity.
With a trashcan on hand, you redraw the boundaries around
those miscellaneous matters of trust.
Maybe some you save for your son or granddaughter.
It’s poem-like, how you must
decide what to abandon and which things to contain in their rust

Something different

Happy turn of the year, IMUNURI. For this week's prompt, throw yourself a curve ball. Try something you don't usually do or something you have never tried before. Write your poem in a different notebook—or a different language. Take a perspective you never take. You can go in many directions with this. You could write a poem called "Something Different," or write a poem about how there is nothing new under the sun.

You might put yourself in a space where you've never written a poem before and then write a poem there—on a Ferris wheel, while stuck in traffic, in total darkness, on the comments page of a political website... Or your direction may be subtler, such as trying a poetic form you've never tried, or writing in rhyme when you hardly ever do, or writing in prose.


Consider sharing your process in the comments section after your poem.

Labels: poem, different

"And now for something completely different."