Me Myself - March's first prompt

"I celebrate myself and sing myself." --W.Whitman

Starting with the assumptions that you are wonderful, fascinating, powerful, holy, magical, transcendent, beautiful, elemental, astonishing, famous, regal, central...

write a poem that sings yourself to the world.

You are telling the truth about the wonder of yourself, so there is no need to disclaim any boasts.

Sing yourself.

Everyone looks forward to meeting you


Contributors: Remember that commenting on a poem or poems fulfills your weekly agreement.

Labels: poem, myself, [your name]

the long stroke

(excerpt, 2/26/11)

what would a different
anatomy be like that honored
the body's wholeness?

my dolphin-flipper, swimmer stroke
arm-rippling-leg-kick
on the side that moves towards
ocean
needs reintegration

o healer,
help me reclaim
my flying swim,
my dance swing,
my shimmy shank shakeree,
my wholeness

Lucky Monkey Living Large (or Hanuman’s Propitious Parade)

Lucky monkey feeling fine,

swinging on a lucky vine.

Monkey never had a fall.

No, not really. Not at all.

Lucky monkey. Lucky he.

Lucky monkey. Lucky she.

Lucky him and her are dating.

Lucky her and him are mating.

Lucky wedding. Lovely spouse.

Monkeys find a lucky house.
Baby monkey makes it three.

Lucky monkey family.

Monkey eat and monkey sleep.

Monkey mouth is full of teeth.

Eyes and ears and limbs intact.

Monkey lucky. Monkey fact.

Lucky monkey go to school.

Lucky monkey use a tool.

Look at what you have become
with your lucky monkey thumb.

Lucky birthday chimpanzee.

Monkey friends sing loud off key.

Hungry primates very nice:
let lucky monkey eat first slice.

Lucky monkey sing hosannas
o'er organic-grown bananas.

Lucky monkey pick and choose.

Privileged shopping. Privileged foods.

Monkey neighbor hard to love.

Monkey want to scuffle shove.

No no, monkey go inside.

Make crazy neighbor yummy pie.

Monkey don’t like where you are?

Plane, train, bus or bike or car.

Lucky monkey take a trip,
vacation on big monkey ship.

Monkey job make monkey cross.

Bossy ape is monkey boss.

Yet monkey live in luxury:
holidays and salary.

Lucky monkey student loan.

Lucky monkey mortgaged home.

Monkey credit score depressing?

Even what you owe’s a blessing.

Lucky monkey monthly fee.

Water, gas, utility.

Flush and O away it goes!

Where it stop no monkey knows.

Lucky monkey hear the storm
on the roof while you are warm.

Lucky monkey crank the heat.

Take a shower. Rinse. Repeat.

Monkey gripe and monkey groan.

Monkey grouse and carp and moan.

Lucky monkey picking nits.

Speech is free where monkey sits.

Lucky monkey talking stick,
singing bowl and magic trick.

Lucky monkey you are free
to choose thy own cosmology.

Lucky monkey watch TV.
Other monkeys howl and flee.
Flood and fire, bombs and tanks.

Monkey bend down low in thanks.

Lucky monkey ergo sum.

Wherefore art thou? Boom boom boom.

Hear the tuba. Hear the drums.

Something lucky this way comes.

First world monkey don't forget.

First world monkey fortunate.

Monkey birth is game of chance.

Monkey lucky circumstance.

Gorilla, gibbon, lemur, loris.

Different monkeys sing in chorus.

Lucky genus. Lucky us.

To live at all is glorious.

Lucky monkey. Lucky me.

Laughing in a lucky tree.

Lucky monkey. Lucky you.

Remember that you're lucky too.

Yoga-turiya

standing on my head
in an impossible rain
of sinew lace

outside multitudes
dash in reluctant light across the gash of time
stretched like Michelangelo’s man
in the cross of the wheel

brown & yellow & dipped
in wax & lime
& gold seal & amber
scented caresses left to grasp
in bodies reposes
right in effortless clasps
behind necks of gold & diamond
rings of bones dense
wrapped in spiders silk

as I lay with the black barn cat
& tears newly wet
with the next breath’s desire
to shine in the moon’s corset
of grace.

valentine sugar

stepping out under the sky
on the morning of loves noticing
(as if only this day is)
out of nowhere from winter's den
the sun is a warming stream
of valentine gold, slathered torrid
all over this banquet of snow.

last night
a team of only ten degrees cracked their wind whip
now my front door is a narnian wardrobe
i step through
immediately too hot in my jacket,
ratcheted to stillness two strides out the door -
listen....
the hunkered ice beasts
two months worth of stubborn
and tearing the snug off the roof,
are trinkling and lithe,
dripping songs into the gutter
which my ears barely believe
orpheus' xylophone ballad
sound balm of liquid water moving
through such long white expanse of ice
almost as heady
as the newly arrived mud patch,
two palms worth of wet earth
smelling like everything it is possible to miss.

the maple trees stretch and pulse
their sweet antifreeze jostling up
pushing last night's dream skinward
(i walked through all our woods touching trees
each of them with holes of fountaining sap)
so today is the obvious morning
to tip tap the old metal spouts
just like generations
of bright tired new england farmers
sliding on sled runners behind heaving horses
to bring that sugared blood home.

let's seize this february thaw moment
and boil the ice right out of it
until all that is left is a jar of simple riches.
we know
the fierce fight of february will return
but for a moment, agape thawed the world
and i have the candied proof.

Pigeon in three breaths

I don’t care if you call me
A rat with wings--
I’ve heard worse.
We gutter dwellers, so misunderstood
I wish I could claim crane,
or lion,
or, Shiva help me,
a Warrior,

but some mornings I have
to curl my bent wing to my heart
and bow down
to the fact of this,
taste the tar as if it’s nectar.

What if you find that your power
animal is an earthworm,
a crafty trilobite,
a small black ant carrying
its dead brother back home?

We imagine grandeur, but the god hands us
a broom and says, here, now this,
And this.
This time around
you are the soiled cousin
of the angels’ white dove,
flying donuts
around that holy spirit,
laughing

Poetry Yoga

Write a poem that flexes you, that stretches you in some way. Arch like a cat or curl like a swaddled baby. Lie down and be dead. Let the poetry restore you to center.

Write down the words, but the words are not important, they are only the footprints of your pathway or map of foot positions to becoming more limber. What does a diagram of creative flexibility look like?

If it helps, take a yoga position before, during, and/or after writing this poem. Feel welcome to take inspiration from one of these yoga asanas (poses) or create a new one:

• cow, peacock, locust, cobra, lion
• mountain, tree, triangle, warrior one and two and three.
  
• monkey, puppy, dog, camel, dancer
• boat, plow, bow, bridge, lotus.

Breathe deeply. Stretch. Welcome to your body temple. Be.

"Early yoga treatises state that there are 8.4 million asanas, of which 84 are the best and 32 the most useful for the health of [hu]mankind." [Source]

Prompt tags: poem, yoga, [poet's tagname]

PS - If you feel inspired, consider submitting a poem to the Poetry of Yoga call for submissions, which has an online submission form, March 1, 2011.

Land& Sky- Neuropathic toes

I cannot see down
I can barely feel neuropathic toes
then
I glance up & see
the moon in transit
& am left holding
the scissor to a pink rose

Between two bellies

Between two bellies—

sky and ground—

white scatters:

birds in space

in space-wrapped collection

like bits of memory

like bits of me

or the holes

punched from paper,

bouncing confetti circles

for the afterhours cleaning crew

to remove—

or the white scatters

of plum blossoms

dropping such relief

to the sidewalk

as the tree had been hit

by a backing truck, ouch,

and we weren’t sure

it would flock white

with the rest

of the plum trees on the block.

There are not so many birds,

but uncountable,

and the bellies of sky and ground

are as large as I can look

at them,

as large as I can see.

What might I say

when I go back inside?

The air is cold.

Gregarious birds

look like freedom to me.

I’m longing for something

to click into place,

for all the pieces

to flock into a semblance,

into the picture

of resolved sense.

forecast: snow

the sky is a dilated
microscope
of the white
bell
caps
singing
in
moss
this
morning.

they come
exquisite,
a fresh
breath
each
time
of
first
milk,
planted
some
fairy
time
long
ago,
the
homes
of
scampering
night
spirits.

dew,
that
evanescent
visitor,
glamours
cloud
and
moss
this
day.

when
they
predict
snow
we
now
know
they
are
not
talking
sky
they
are
talking
about
these
otherworldly
visitors
of
brightness.

Remembering it’s February

I saw my mother last night.

The whole family was walking to a wedding
when I realized I’d left home without my shoes.
The yellow polish on my toenails had almost flaked off.

I hurriedly explained how I had to go back
and dashed off without kissing her goodbye,
even though she’s been dead for five years
and I only see her on special occasions like this.

Then I accidentally stole a car and woke up thirsty.

Spring came early this year,
although I’m beginning to suspect that’s her favorite trick.

She comes early every year and then ducks back down to the bar for a while.

She stays just long enough for you to believe her caresses again,
waits until you’ve stepped out to meet her in a short-sleeved shirt
and then – bang – you’re on your own again, baby.

Yesterday the sky was grinning and the plum trees were full of blossoms.

Finches – I think they were finches – were hopping through the branches,
dipping their beaks with disbelief in white flower after flower.

Then the wind remembered it’s February and sang in the treetops all night.

This morning, waking again into mourning, the yard was so confused:
bare limbs shook and shivered in icy gusts
and the walk was covered with drifts that would’ve been snow
if I was a kid and two thousand miles away.

Snow? No, just the punch line to a cruel joke
where two early bloomers end up naked,
a pile of white petals around their ankles.

After a shower and two glasses of water,
I was alive enough to start making sense of it all.

The wind. The car. The wet flowers and my mother.

You’re on your own again, baby.

Land and Sky - Prompt for week of 2/14/2011

Glance down. Then glance up. Write a poem about what you see and how these views relate.

If you're feeling adventurous, imagine both the land (or sea) and the sky are parts of you. What is your inner landscape like right now? What does it tell us?

Here is how Basho, Japanese poet from the 11th century did it:

A Wild Sea

A wild sea-
In the distance over Sado
The Milky Way

This week's keyword tags: poem, landscape


by Jos Law:

Slapdash by Lauren Ari

by Lauren Ari

Jay Today

Freedom feeder.
Brusque, beautiful,
ambitious Jay Woman.

Pushing myself
brusquely
out of nite wrappings
into jeans.
Out to Sweetmilk's
feeder &
Nature's dark art.

this new burrow is surprise laden -

discoveries by the hour.

the floor creaks here especially

and look at this very small key

left in the back corner of a closet.

we are unfurling each other,

this old house and i.

today i noticed

the sun reaches the bony winter lilac by mid afternoon

before ducking behind the neighbors barn,

glowing it's strong ridgeline an even hotter red.

we are humbly unpacking our hearts into this place,

invigorated and undone.

i find my grandmother's script in front pages of my books

and turn to a dangling tremble -

we pull gut memories from cardboard boxes

hoping we are enough,

unpacking casually as if everything were new or normal

but we know it's not, we know everything is old

and goes backward as much as forth.

i wish i had portraits to hang

of every person who has called this home

since some wide hands in 1850 visioned and made it,

or a long lilt of voices recorded

each of them stating their name and something that

they ever so love.

now

checking in one last time on the night,

standing with the dogs on our 3 foot pack of snow

in -5 degree crisp and under such startling whirl of starfire

serenaded by a yip howl chorus of coyotes,

i imagine what plants will find us

bursting from every nook around the house

when the snow pack finally melts,

floods the basement and moves on,

bright coded messages sent

from decades hence.

haste without hesitation

for D., who unwittingly donated the title


my friend says they like haste without hesitation
but how can i know my tongue knows where to go
which flies to grab and which flower (word)s to birth
if I don't stop and ponder the meander in the river
the giver gives us daily. what would it be like to
be (like a disco ball or worms in the ground)
multiply present, continuously in motion,
representing by embodiment the sinuous continuous
life verve of the multiply intelligent world?
not needing to conjure or configure but rather
consistently composed and having it all together,
illuminating or making more conditions for life?

or rather,
perhaps we already are.

slapdash - Magnoon Moon

plum blossom pink Egyptian airspace/daffodil yellow slapdashes from Berkeley to Portland/Gulliver travels the hieroglyphic internet/Abdul barks back from the magnoon moon/ hail the people beneath the stones

hum

Wide hum thrum
sternum purrs, om old cat
My legs, torso, heart,
Feel the pulse
of blood stream stone silence
the way in the way
through the way forgotten,
re-membered through bone, not brain
through skin and tones
breath calling you home
calling you
home
where ya been girl? Kept a pot
on for ya just in case
this family of tones, vibration of this
simple thing yes
you can have this yes you can
be no need to everwhelm them
from the place they’re calling from

One Fast Sonnet Later

"One Fast Sonnet Later"

Eisenglass tips. pantyhose rips. You count
to ten, and ten, and ten again. Babies
born, fourteen deaths. Empty bassinets bounce
between yesses, nos (nose) and all the maybes.
Well (Stone) people mimic the throes of rabies,
and the Sum's Sum never loses and ounce.
This is how (why) we love and fear the zanies—
always prepared (ready) to caress or pounce.

One fast sonnet later, turned one-forty
trying to grasp, lost in definition
assignment speed, patterns of woven yarn.
My prayer is this: so fast (predicted:) the tsunami
no time to lose count in the solution
and every crystal thread torn (breaks) into shards (shreds).

imagine that

you're flying above the clouds in the agonizing light
of a halo on the brow of a bullet-proof dove
bearing an olive branch straight for Noah's Ark
you're a blue lozenge cooling the sore throat of the sky

and i'm sitting here in the hail storm lonely as uranium
a piece of cast-off fiction yellowing on the street
one of the drowned ones spinning in turbulence
a swollen appendix about to rupture

I like to imagine us combusting all reason
praying in unison, prying the future apart

This Week's Prompt - SlAp DaSh

What if someone were holding a timer and you only had 75 seconds to write a poem, a kind of 50 yard dash with poetry, a kind of slap-dash. This is your week for shimmy-shimmy improv with word locutions. Brave the waters, race out under the disco ball, go all out. Hurry, right now, type it and hit the button "post"!

From Orlando Gonzalez Esteva, In Praise of Scribble (translated by Peter Bush, 2005):

Scribbles are the lianas of the forest of our selves. 
Clinging  to them, the primate still in us frolics free.

Keywords: poem, slapdash, [poet's tagging nickname]

60 life rafts

i tried to write a poem
that rhymes and spans
the monkey bars of complex
construction, times itself
by perils of scansion, but i failed.

as not so long ago, i flew off
the pull up bars
and found myself awake,
270 degrees away, facing
up from the ground to
the bold shout of bluesky,
body longly splatted
in rough sand. i'd fallen off
the structure that was meant for play
-- how it nearly killed me.

i know words can kill
me by how they've saved me.
even in this brief time together,
by the warming flames of
comradely diction,
storm-tousled metaphor,
and by how the hummingbirds
that hold our words
keep flying:
your poems are preservers.
you are weaving, pens as needles,
a durable raft
of creation
with every stanza committed
to the possible.

it might seem that since the poems
are online, that they waft in a virtual wind
that dematerializes the heft of them,
but don't be confused.
i have grabbed onto them at 3am
as have you. we have floated
safely on these words.
i have exercised my emotions
of surprise, gratitude,
revulsion, appreciation, anger
as these have brightly colored the durable
fabric of these poems.
i have been reminded how to be alive,
how to breathe, how to stand
at portalways of possibility
and walk courageously, traveling
into new senses with now-old
friends. whether lit by
light brights, baking sun,
or hidden in trees, whether walking
as faery folk, via birth canals, or by eating lemons,
we arrive.

birthing these 60 life rafts,
we craft a flotilla of peace,
a haven for all the people
whom poetry has saved.
praise be.

Friend

You were clear. I had never met someone,
adult or peer, who meshed with her living
so purely. I called myself Banana-
Man, and you accepted. That’s why playing
with you was so fun. You dressed as a crone—
and became one. All our make-believing
was simply making. No hesitation.
We blurted without fear of mistaking.

Once we even tried to play serious.
It was a blast before we went brittle,
left the highway and broke just a little.
One of us raged, the other outrageous.
We passed one stormy night. But we are us,
so it’s no surprise we came full circle.

Mermaid's Lament

Not so very long ago
our songs would intoxicate
even the most resistant sailors,
lure them to the deck rails
where we would seduce them with
our kelp-filled gazes,
our luscious metaphorical breasts,
persuade them to abandon all,
to leap into our outstretched arms
and endure forever the icy waters
for the thrill of our embrace.
But now the great ships pass us by
and hardly one sailor in a thousand
will stand at the rail to gaze,
and those who do take photographs
seeing only seal skin, whiskers and blubber,
and call our songs 'barks'. 

Ferry

Breathe
Yes,
Hurry up and sleep, we need
the pillows
A liminal start three nights
in a row, remembering
my Ruby slippers, clicking.
The way home is easy,
but somewhere back and back
I forgot the cradle
of my diaphragm,
its rocking

Now, my pedal to metal,
I can barely pause to tell you this...
last night I remembered
that crucial thing I’d forgotten:
my third arm,
or that I’ve always spoken Cantonese,
or that my flute master
is still waiting for me, twenty-three years later,
in her mahogany parlor
It slapped me awake, bright and insistent,
then hopped back onto the ferry, disappearing
with all of its rigging, into the mist

Across the night sky,
my mother rises
at 3 am, stumbles around the house,
every moment, now, a ferry she has just missed
trying to remember what she has forgotten,
crib sheets tucked into her sleeve
with the names of the children
who cracked open her rocking pelvis
seven times,
this boat too, taken back
downriver, this life, an overripe berry,
dissolving, on the tip of her tongue

This Week's Prompt: Imunuri Round 1 Riff Harvest

Congratulations, we've crafted, provoked, and birthed over 60 poems!

As we bring the first Round of rousing writing with Imunurians to a close, plucked up in Autumnal Equinox 2010 and finding closure as Early Spring '11 next week greets us sweetly, here is an invitation for the final of writing in Imunuri Round 1 to be a praise-song or riff and inspiration. Write a poem sparked by a line that someone wrote this season. Or name some favorite lines. Or put favorite lines together in a new poem. Here's some picks to spark you, or dive in and pick your own:

"Sometimes I cough up a ziggurat built by germs,
a fever of tribes who all try to breathe and burn."
From Daniel's Poem "Lung Ghazal"

"Singularity becomes disentangled
and simultaneously also conjoined."
From Janice's Poem "Simultaneity Disambiguation"

"Bow to the stone people. There is a seat waiting for you. Take it./
Put the Spanish moss on top of your head. Not a peep from you."
From Cicada's Post

"check your blade for sharp up against the sun
any dull bit, too wide to splice light,
will glint and sparkle and needs attending."
From Pandora's Poem "A Sharp Remembering"

"This is not an island
of sirens, witches, giants, storms./
This is a place,
alone, to wait."
From TK's "One Stop from Warsaw"

"stir me, furnace of stars, see through my dense and transparent center.
generate something that shines in the night of me
opalescent, generative, possible."
From Scooter's "Coreshine"

"Walk across town barefoot
in search of the burning bush.
Gargle with baking soda,
brush your cat's teeth.
Wait for a moment when your heart is quiet,
then grab a pen and paper
and quickly scrawl"
From Ed's "How to Write a Poem"

An alternate prompt would be to write about this Imunuri experience. How you changed or grew or something you learned or realized. A new direction or insight. Let's raise our praise songs for this fabulous adventure!

Keywords: poem, riff

(thank you, door)

Lung Ghazal

Eighteen thousand times a day, I breathe in and burn
without ever questioning: “Why breathe in and burn?”

I’m too busy to ask silly questions—or to
take a moment to thank the sky. Breathe in and burn.

Some days I feel cellophane-wrapped, crazed to inhale
for gasping, as though two flows vie: breathing, burning.

Sometimes I cough up a ziggurat built by germs,
a fever of tribes who all try to breathe and burn.

Or maybe out the window, I see white herons
in their patience as they hunt, eat, fly, breathe and burn.

The substances that sustain us all kill us, too.
The factions of ours bodies fry, breathe in and burn.

The tasks we take in coming to vibrate are to
oxygenate and oxidize: breathe in and burn.

My name is Ari, and I’m addicted to air.
Let’s all share a collective sigh, breathe in and burn.

breathe deep

in the sucking depths at the tickertape
of my lung sacs, the little bitty ends
that are like clouds on mountains
inside me

in this interchange where the soup
we walk through daily
turns into little cup holders
and cups of air in the soup
of my blood

at this little cash register of oxygen
a convenience store counter where
product becomes energy
(and people buy cheetos relinquishing small
green spotted cloth squares)

at this matrix
of creation,
where we make peace with our ocean origins
no more womb-gills to replenish us
in this ruddy suckup
inward, i acknowledge
my defiance of ocean origin
and my terrestrial, upright
upstartdom

with this deep breath, i praise my defiance
my land-living, earth-stalking strangeness

and my body glories as it
passes the little coffeecups with lids on
of prana at the corner stores overloaded with
micro super grandes of air
carrying them through the blood
to the thrilled cells and
their vitalizing membranes

this is a coffeeshop of air
i cannot resist,
not too picky, shade grown or organic,
pastoral or cityfumed,
a requisite addiction
life-giving, animating

this

deep

breath



Scooter Cascadia

Request

Pardon me, ma'am. Would you mind too much
if I took one deep breath
of your fresh laundered blouse
that smells so sweetly of the sea?
Or if I buried my nose into your damp hair
so recently rinsed and shampooed
and clinging to your neck in lovely ringlets?
I've been standing in this crowded commuter train
for three long hours now
in tight black shoes
with nothing to read but
a red computer manual
and could use a little reason
to live.

This Week's Prompt: Deep Breathe

My friend Noël coaches me to write in shorter sentences, that to read the writing of run-ons is like listening to someone speaking who forgets to breathe. It is exhausting. Only unlike conversation, we don't know they've stopped listening to us. They just close the book or click on a different link.

Let's use this week of Sun moving into Aquarius to breathe in the water-bearing circulation of the air realms.

Artwork by Melanie Weidner - Listen for Joy

Write    about    or    write    as    if    

                 spaciousness    and     breath     

         filled   the    lung  


    of    your    voice    

         and    

            the    breath   of    your 

                       pen    -    How   can   

                           your    writing   


                               billow    

              and      breathe     deeply? 


                                        Tags:      poem,    breathe

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."

Quiescent Bless

Morning rain, rose mist for face and spirit,

morning, sitting with all that has come before

open to quiesence of self, bless self seen,

bless, touch, and cherish all self unseen.



The cycle of work, support, listening, attending

to all those needs, finding a voice for someone

else's words and vision with care and respect,

this is coming to a close; there are soon endings.



This past work calls for blessings, needs cherishing,

as do I, that self, pining at quiescence, still bleeding

of misbegotten wendings and woes. Now

touch heart and ground, lay it down, close.



These years in the making, years seen or honored

by the other impartially; not wholly evident to me.

Is this but a razzle dazzle afront by that one, who

clearly knows from behind the scenes, emptiness ~ all.

Last Hours of 2010 poem

Every regular day as I leave home,
some faint tongue of fate whispers, “Accidents
happen.” There’s my daughter in the window,
waving goodbye, voice faint behind the panes.
Is it life or my perception that slows?

Somehow that moment crossing the flagstones
fills with such longing and love and regret
as though every tragic, comic, mundane,
epic journey of the Mandelbrot set
of life grows from each goodbye and hello.

Still I go and come in a bittersweet
ballet with many storylines wending
where they may. A world blooms when the car starts,
its fragrance accidentally undoing
all other worlds for now, for today. Then

the day transpires, and soon I’m returning
home safely. (My wife asked for this ending.)

darkness

1.
when i think of light
i think of nuclear bombs
a dazzle so bright
capable child of our technologics

lit, it melts our eyes

2.
the nun from africa
talks about how
it is too hot mid-day
sun is a menace
where she lives
night is the balm there, night the time
for getting things done
night, the cool, receptive darkness
enswirls her, a time of conversation
and connection,
laughter and action

3.
because of sky god confusion
some burn their eyes in upward glances
defying earth

4.
i will gladly receive
the gifts of worm duff and leaf goo
the rot of earth
which birthed
this toasted hazelnut rice stuffed squash
these little leaves of thyme
minting my tongue

some sun, sure, but remember
the greater embrace of clay (volcanic molten ash balls long ago
lobbed to our now, capable of holding water and so many minerals)
and the endless dundering sundering
rock tumble of pangaea and glacier
across geologic aeons which gives
us this fertile
dirt:
earth

5.
down into the dark caverns in earth belly
down the earthworm superhighways
down the muckpiles and festering fresh rot
fungal beloveds and mycelial mushroom muscle

down into the cunt of the earth, the earthwomb,
the throbbing life always in labor and always in birth
somewhere fallowing elsewhere nourishing

beyond our projection of terror given by birth-stealing
religion (pretense of fecundity)

beyond our learned aversion to mystery and
glorification of cause-effect

beyond our recent primacy on sight and
loss of low light or night
movement

6.
we can still walk the night path, a life
giving chant on our earth loving tongue,
gently receiving the moist cool linger
a kiss of darkness to bless our way

7.
as we learn to stop poisoning the earth and it becomes
impossible for corporations soon denuded of their false bodies
to profit short term off of long term poison

as we lose our fear of the wild rampage of life
and reconnect with our inner wilderness
our sex high howling pleasure and savoring succor

8.
i will give you back your sky gods and internecine
nuclear fire shatter; you give me back the earth

9.
no need to ask or give; we reinhabit.
daily
in slither and wriggle,
dance and shout
in organic dill and dogwood blossoming
this gorgeous, fertile
larger body,
arm of our arms,
leg of our legs,
planet supple
huge and healing
dark and moist
depth revealing
we-earth
we-earth
we-earth


26 Dec 42010

Bonus Razzle Prompt for Winter Stills - Favorite Words/Scrabble Poem

Greetings Imunurian Poets,
I am imaging us at a winter table, sipping tea. We are enjoying a mellow evening of poem making with scrabble tiles near a roaring fire. Some of the words I might use would include quiescent, quaff, blooming, razzle, bless, sail, and gloaming.  Please feel welcome to make a poem with some of your favorite words (or you could use some of these). Your poem could be spare like a leafless tree or frolicsome as your mood depends. You can write your poem in tiles or letters, evocative haiku or splendid word-fountain, laser beam or galaxy, your choice. Holiday blessings from  : ) Scooter near Solstice 2010

Label: Razzle, Poem

Winter

like a clock of sunrises,
somewhat cloud muzzled,
winter comes, spreading her cape
of dead plants and twigs,
birds in droves
of pippery, and deep
fallows. the core of me slows
to a crevasse, a whisper,
not even wind in this
valley. the only snow's
inside, but that's enough:
to be wiped clean to nubs,
nibbled by those
who aren't fully asleep--
and slumbering in the slow breath
of those who are.

a time of bedazzlement
if sun peaks through to the smile in me.
but mostly blackness wombs me
in winter.
winter rings
the almost full moon
in a circle of light, a glowsphere miles out
from her fresh gaze, accentuating the fathomless
blanks of space.
deep in clearing the heart
of me, that deep in
these moonportals of cold white
embalm the night in me.
these inner snow flurries
this cold
winter.

Season’s undoings

Great earth snakes change guard
over tiny us, slide in in new skins.

Winter pours from the ground
to lay across the woolen world

in cool, nest-sitting repose.
It abides, eating my certainty.

The shapes of summer’s purposes
melt in its smooth belly.

I can’t guess what I knew
in fall or spring. For now,

just walking to that chair and
sitting down seems the only thing.

Its Own Wonder

i.

The dark left as itself
impresses upon me a whole,
a depth incomparable,
a wonderment beyond
what typically is taken
as the simple absence of light

For the dark is itself
a deep nourishing, a salve
to my bones and beingness as
I walk in the dark, sampling
this exquisite treat of the
unnameable senses

True would be the loss
to suffer nyctalopia*, although
many do without knowing
this condition is theirs,
we've become so blind
within the hierarchy of light

ii.

Dusk finds the ground within
such that surfaces dissolve
give way to the softer core heat
This communication begins
its emanation, naming each
thing anew as dark arises
In contrast, intentioned light
overshadows and can carelessly enter
the exquisiteness of the dark
where naturally listening things
recede into their essential
incognito. The dusk is that listening

iii.

What do we have in common
with the dark? Are we not dark,
dark in our marrow, in our quiet,
in so many yet to be
realized ways?

And how are we similar to a flame?
The flame, kin to the dark, is it not
ever tender to the shadows?
Lighting a flame, our dark
dances within, with, and around us.

iiii.

As a sweet melancholy
unlike anything
I am drawn to take to the dark,
an exquisite entry

A prescription unique,
a remembering
timeless
walking forward looking deeply
eyes open and open again,the vastness of the dark field,
to deeply see
what cannot be seen
what cannot
be perceived
through a different wonder.



*nyctalopia |ˌniktəˈlōpēə|
noun ~ the inability to see in dim light or at night. Also called night blindness .

This Week's Prompt: Dark

  

Darkness.

The Dark.

Darkening. 

Pitch dark.

Dark chocolate with dark beer.

Darkrooms.

Dark matter.

Donnie Darko.

Dark field.

Dark eyes.

Crepuscular.

Benighted.

Aphotic

Make the absence of light your field of exploration this week, or find light within the dark. 

     You could even write your poem by candlelight or flashlight if you wish.

     Keywords this week: "poem, dark"                                                                                    

The days of paper routes and phone books

We would sit in the cherry tree,
high up on thin limbs that could barely hold a breeze,
looking for fruit that had ripened yet somehow escaped the squirrels.

We would sit under the bushes,
inside the bushes in fact, where grown-ups would never think to look.

We would hide inside cabinets and closets,
sometimes hide so well we wouldn’t know
the others had given up seeking and turned to snacks.

We would haul the dog up to the tree house
and pretend we didn’t hear our parents calling.

There were screens on the windows, of course,
but just the one screen in the house,
the size of a sheet of loose leaf,
and we were forbidden to watch its black and white opinions most of the time.

The phone was attached to the wall,
which was fine because people rarely called,
certainly not during dinner.

We didn’t think it was idyllic.

It wasn’t. It was just the suburbs
and kids came home from Vietnam in boxes
or ended up like Uncle Ray, pumped full of lithium
in Pilgrim State for trying acid or being gay or both.

The girl next door got picked up for breaking in
and stealing mom’s jewelry while we were on vacation
and suddenly the cat was missing an eye.

A microwave was merely some mystery of radio relay,
so dinner was more likely to be cold...
and it wasn’t called domestic violence yet
even though the churches were full of folk music.

We would hide under the eaves.

We would crawl beneath our beds.

We would sit inside the bushes,
bitten by brambles, bleeding from needles and thorns.

But it was quiet there, secret and safe,
and no one could find us for hours at a time.

a sharp remembering

I.
you don't have to teach me
i said
once two hands are on,
and my fingers close around
the scuffed, oil honed snath
curving
into angled reaping lance
i am gone, can't hear you anyway

II.
in the morning we are quiet as harvest begins
gruff greetings as each arrives
animals provisioned, cow milked
get ready for a long day now
that the sunrise has boiled over
from all that madness
into a bend of pure blue,
and the dew has all returned to heaven.

now even the birds have begun
attending to everyday chores.

check your blade for sharp up against the sun
any dull bit, too wide to splice light,
will glint and sparkle and needs attending.
your back stays straight, arms as well
arc your torso a stiff hip twist
follow the elliptic side to side
with every full swing
as if your pelvis were the earth.

III.
i go in and out of believing in human past lives,
sometimes ancient antiquity
is tirelessly thronging with my people,
my blood kinned to so many of history's helices,
that i rest confidently cradled
in the long learning journey i ride.

the rest of the time it is obvious
that mostly i have been dirt, tree limbs, stones.
and that is that, beautifully.

until i pick up a scythe. or a sickle.
and then god plucks me,
the ground cracks and swallows me
and with instantaneous precision
drops me directly onto a sweat painted field
into the metered beat of swinging tools
the whole farm full out to help.
metal flying close to the ground
without knocking rocks
grain sundered into swaths
braced to be banded
and stacked in stooks.

i am content here
as regular as breathing
as familiar as the smell of my bed
reaping by hand
the wedded cells of sky earth and water
united in biological matrimony
a million times over
in each golden stalk, each budded head of wheat
that sways in the rosy acreage
as one breathing thing
which we have come to bow, fell, level
and lay down to dry
for a snowy night's worth of bread.