Wet silos

Wet silos

black ink
scraped across the screen
then
red ink

“I can see clearly now”
singular images
two distinct colors

silk lifts to reveal
wet silos
juxtaposed
screws and compasses

masculine building blocks
coupled silhouettes.

IMUNURI prompt: write something!

This week: unprompted

Write to a prompt you missed from a prior week;
write something to any subject, style or process you choose;
or take a week to percolate ideas for future posts


keywords: poem, [your name or tag], [the keyword that goes with the prompt you choose or else "unprompted"]

“Flos Ferri”

Calcifying seals the joints
between you and I,
and
aragonite solution
crystallizes in rarest gem forms
unseen for centuries
in our hearts.

We must dance out the calcium
and protect the gems.

Sometimes we must break
the calcium with a kick,
and sometimes the aragonite flowers
break loose, too.

Let’s not spend
our little time
debating
which is weightier:
loose joints
or stone florets.

What’s dance is dance;
what’s broke is broke.
We go on across the floor.

(wrote this while dancing...)

for the niece: tod-zilla, at the hayward japanese gardens

skittering like four hands traced on paper,

doubled,

unfolded into eight spider legs

all knees and ankle high

she scampers

kicks rocks into the rock garden and off the path

until the lantana blossoms become a sudden

point

of

fo

cu

s

in the ray of sunshine

in the nonlinear line

of life.

let me be thus beholden to air

and the movement of glee

skoochyboogeying

until the sudden sunshine from cloud

seizes me in freeze of

frieze of

stillness

like turtles raising necks to bask

in the golden sun like their yellow and black geometry of skin

beneath the husk of their dome

let me be this wanton, this quick,

this slow, this whole,

this free

11-6-11

Scooter Cascadia

For Richardson Bay

I’m going to spend the next part of my path
away from you. Farther away. It’s not
my choice. There’s good in it, but I’d rather
stay near. While I surge in and out on BART*
you’ll keep languishing in your endless bath.

Some extraordinary day when it’s hot—
it may be years from now—I’ll come across
the bridges to walk with you and visit
about those days and these days. Eight years passed
in your embrace, breathing your marshy breath.

When summer comes, how will I not miss you
in the city with all its distractions?
Union Square swamps with shoppers and tourists
making each day’s commercial commotion,
but there may be days or weeks I forget

the surge and suck of water in motion
though, so close, the bay kisses the ocean.

*Bay Area Rapid Transit

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

Lipstick Junkie Ripoff

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