Dead calm

Dead Calm

Parle de ses doigts a fusil

(speak of your trigger fingers)

billboards

shapes/sizes

shoes/color

        walks

haircuts/bangs

lengths gone

over the lines

longer thans

vanishing horizons

gulf streams

obsessions

ceaselessness

la langue qui s’enlarge

(the tongue that grows)

la faim sans vide

(the bottomless hunger)

a mime in a rowboat

dead calm

Dolce accelerando

By the time I get to North Beach, my skin is sliding against my skin

It’s late spring and hot, and the only thing I need is gelato—

Kahlua with dark chocolate chunks and chocolate-covered almonds—

so cold—milk coffee caramel thick, licked in the shade so slow.

I scrape the bottom, and I get up to walk back downtown.

I decide to have a cookie, too. I am so

vanquished that later I also gulp a peach

and feel that falling compulsion I know

from bodysurfing at Sandy Beach.

In salt surge and sugar siphon,

I stand and stroke while each wave

eats me up, foraging,

back-bending creature,

pushing the verge,

pushed below

one large

urge.

Craig Damlo

IMUNURI Prompt: MoodTempo

Check out this list of musical
"mood markings with a tempo connotation."
You can scroll up or down for more inspiration
from musical terms and directions.
Choose a term from this page as your poem's title
or part of the title;
then write the poem.

Examples:
With Fire: Allegro con brio


Playfully: Scherzo leggiero

Stately: Maestoso

keywords: your monicker, poem, moodtempo