2013 Challenge: One Poem a Week

[Angeline]

21 6/10/13

Tighten the Tackle*

Nurse Jamie has your back
and your front for only five
hundred seventy-five dollars

the blonde beautician will
erase wrinkles, hair, discoloration
from your scrotum. She'll restore

that smooth youthful sheen
which overuse, mistreatment
or even simple neglect may have

stolen thereby reducing manly
pride to a sad and begrizzled
state of shame. Fear not!

She'll laser you to perfection.
"Men like their gardens well-kept.
They want to be ready for the Emmys."

Nurse Jamie and her laser compel
me to consider that most uncomfortable
of all Red Carpet Questions:

Who are your balls wearing tonight?


* A mostly found poem

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

24 - Domestic Bliss

She cooked and cleaned,
made a home by day while he
toiled in the halls of high finance, a
pin-striped position of power
and responsibility. An immaculate
modern couple.

But

at night the front door key
was the trigger for their arousal
and she would greet him. Her body
in leather, or naked but for thigh-high boots,
once bespectacled with a metal rule
that left his balls stinging for weeks
and always he'd rise to
her domination.

His dinner was waiting
in a dog's bowl under her table
and she'd kick him if he used his hands.
Bad dog!

On a good night she'd find
a reason to flog him and
he would come to her bed
a burning, pulsing nerve where
she'd tease and deny until he
ached for release but she never
let him sleep before they were
both satisfied.

 

[HarryHill]

.....

 

[hmmnmm]

bit early 5

fatigue is no worry. Water was
always heavy, knew so before the bucket
was picked and the haul began, from trips
over hilltops similar enough
and the animals moan and bray of thirst
but the animals are quite fat, give
the vale, especially in November
signature in spoiled, beastly, stench.

See they’ve gotten too snobby to drink
from the creek they all can drink freely from
as a young one snuck through a sunset
and espied the scene on a porch, knowing no
difference in understanding a difference
between the special tea and the free
water that makes a creek that makes ripples
as fresh as the favorite farm girl…

and though the young learned a tough lesson,
like a steer suffers but a freezer houses
it was too late to stem damages
that gossip causes - oh yes the animals
gossip, gossip all the time, not much else
to do down there in the vale, but gossip,
and somehow there was a roping; bucket
filled, carried, down to the animals, nightly.

 

[Tzara]

24

Oenology

All I remember now is your jeans
ironed onto your body,

me peeling them off,
uncovering there the wild swirl

of your fluted beauty—
so like a fine chardonnay

to taste and spit, taste and spit,
beneath my restless tongue.

 

[bogusagain]

the snitch

for a life time now
I’ve been trapped inside myself
irritated by a vague awareness
there was something beyond myself
like a world beyond a wall

this was at first, a minor irritation
an itch I was unable to scratch
an odd smell I was unable to locate
some apt adverb or adjective
unwilling to trip off my tongue

I got on with life, unwilling to allow
this annoyance to squat upon my life
determined to treat it like a house pest
flatten it with a stomp of the foot
extinguished it with pesticide

like a cockroach it would not die
but unlike a cockroach, it promised beauty
promised to acquire wings and fly
if only it could escape this cage
this bony dome that holds it captive

you never noticed my plight
simply considered my restlessness a malady
as though I had consumed too many E numbers
a condition a purge could rectify
something your haranguing could put right

now I keep myself to myself
conspiring with myself an escape
but each time I dig a tunnel
or make a ladder to climb the fence
I turn snitch and inform on myself

now there is no one to trust, no one to turn to
every time I make a plan I leak it to the press
make sure you catch me in the act
of lifting the lid off of my skull
the trapdoor into the world beyond

 

[bogusagain]

the gardener

yesterday I worked in the garden
planted hundreds of colourful flowers
none of which I knew the name of
ignorance being my expertise

this morning I have awoke to find
my fingers have sprouted shoots
is this affliction a contagion
brought about through meddling?

the garden being a natural laboratory
with jars of contaminants and poisons
waiting for the unwary alchemist
to brew up a monstrous concoction

or have I been touched by nature
its roots reaching up like hands
knotting about my ankles
reclaiming me for the earth

outside the garden is quiet
the birds are silent, the bees, absent
not even the neighbour’s cat prowls
are my fingers weeds or seedlings?

 

[greenmountaineer]

25

Martha's Tour of Indelible Beaches

Martha recalled when you didn't ask why
D-Day would sometimes explode in Tom's sleep
as long as paychecks came on a Friday.

She stood by the shoreline thinking of Tom.
His nightmares had paratroops stuck in clay
near Omaha Beach like toy soldiers found

in the mud under a bedroom window.
She also recalled on Long Island Sound
one summer day of fishhooks and minnows

and blood in a bucket near Oyster Bay
she'll visit again after please, Jesus,
Đà Nẵng where Sammy walked on its beaches.

 

[Angeline]

22 6/16/2013

Daddy

Sometimes I picture you
in the Ardennes walking
into mayhem, no gun, a red
cross, Delancey Street bravado
and an agile mind. You are invincible

to me, carrying me up staircases,
driving impossible distances sleepy
roads past orange groves, the Lincoln
Tunnel to the symphony of midtown,
Newark, Passaic or the intimate dawn
of a tiny kitchen,your coffee
spoon chiming a soft alarm. I wake
you leave another factory day.

At night I sit on your lap we watch
Combat, Twilight Zone, we share
root beer, ringside seats in thunder
storms counting the miles one
mississippi, two mississippi. We chatter
and dance I follow your feet. We catch
minnows, listen to La Boheme, wonder
worry argue. You are invincible to me

until you aren't. Then I feed you
chocolate ice cream we sing Can You
Bake a Cherry Pie, Darling Billy? your voice
cracking past your lips from a broken
smiling face. I rub your back once

more the highway cries driving home.

 

[bogusagain]

dark room

beyond the shadow, as if it is
the literal end of the world
hands that reach out
are amputated at the wrists
a simple open door and a threshold
into a darkened room, where
the rational ends and faith begins

through the veil, another world
or maybe, another universe, where
disembodied hands weave like spiders
a phobic web of black interiors
where you enter, never to return
this paranormal space, an habitat
of ogres which multiply at will

my hand crawls like an insect
inching and feeling along the wall
half expecting a predator’s bite
teeth anchoring in my bony hand
dragging me in, to disappear into the dark
a flick of a switch brings reason back
a world which responds to physical laws

 

[JudasIscariot]

Week 1

If heaven exists
Then hell must do too
Would you trade in your soul for a dollar or two....
We wash away our sins
And get on with our lives
So does that make it ok to cheat on our wives......
If the devil could speak and offered you gold
Would you trade in your soul and never grow old.....
As my mind has these thoughts and searches real deep
My eyes fill with tears as my soul tends to weep.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

25 - Coded Appeal

Come back to Yala, Eromi,
the monsoon has passed and
it is safe once more. The
Bodhi tree shades the pilgrims
and nature is everywhere. At night
there are as many stars on the lake
shores as in the sky, watchful,
beautiful in their wariness. Foot-
fall, snapped twig or sudden cry
extinguishes the lake-stars.
It is black here at night without
your light and my loneliness is
complete. Last night a jaguar
prowled in our garden, but the
peacocks made his stealth useless,
he left only his footprints near the
pool. Each day I find the most
beautiful flower to put in your hair
and keep the most lyrical birdsong
recorded in my mind to play for you
on my flute when you return from
Colombo. Come home, Eromi,
everything means something else.

 

[HarryHill]

.....

 

[HarryHill]

.....

 

[Micahb2]

I was walking nude one day.
Flat out butt necked.

I did't think too much of it.
The wind felt good between my nuts.

Yet, feeling so good, I miss you,
I can wave off any amount of traffic,

But you? I wait in the lounge.

 

[Desejo]

Restart, week 1: Talk about it

If only words
could dissipate anxiousness
worries stoked on a sweat lodge fire
doubts poured over patient sauna coals
release great clouds of hot steam
instead of snotty tears

But no.
writing those words
scuttling like insects between ribs
droning refrains in malaria dreams
giving them form and voice
brings no solace

We are alone.
We are alone.

 

[Tzara]

25

Father’s Day

You could tell me how to build a bridge,
though that wasn’t your expertise—
your brother’s, rather,

though you always knew where the stress
would distribute itself. Where the elves
want to bring a structure down.

You could write, too, about your life.
More interesting than mine—
drunks lying in a rural ditch, et cetera.

I was never a perfect son. I didn’t want
to be. And it was probably more morphine
than me that slid you

into death. Dad,
I would miss you if that made sense.
And it makes sense. And it makes sense.

 

[HarryHill]

.....

 

[bogusagain]

missing

the seagulls are flocking inland
a swarm of harbingers
picking over the landfill sites
like vultures over a massacre

sulphurous odours of rotten roots
death memories on the breeze
conjures up a razor sharp truth
of something that never really happened

how many lost persons, who
go unreported, find them selves as carrion?
enough to know the dead walk amongst us
begging for our attention

I read about the murder statistics
without emotion, as if to acknowledge
the most likely murder one will commit
is the murder of one's lover

there is no apparent need to plan
with guns, daggers or poisons
whatever avoiding action one takes
tragedy keeps to its fateful course

the intricate stitches woven at random
by myriad individuals
run like rivulets across the beach
into the receding sea

into this tapestry we find our footprints
mapped into time and space
permanent and traceable, until
the onset of the next incoming tide

 

[bogusagain]

when two moments meet

and looking back, I wonder who they were
or if they knew themselves or if we know now
the couple who left the road and took separate paths
wading through the yellowing waves of meadow grass
meandering beneath the bergs of cumulus clouds
a seemingly endless drift towards the horizon's edge
fissures rippling through the breathless air

the cleft landscape, the place of the rendezvous
where once the railway cut through
connecting this nowhere to somewhere
but now it's used on occasions such as this
when the chill of the evening bites
on the bend where the hawthorns give shelter
here the squawk of the crow gave her song
black folds against the pressing sky

the mute air swollen in her throat
her eye's jewelled accumulation welled and spilt
her modesty might of objected, to keep taboo
as they conspired and silently laundered lies
pained with rancour of the evening's brute utility
oppressed by the dimming lights and fussing gnats
they returned like strangers towards the road

 

[Tzara]

26

“Garden” as Metaphor

Though we have never met,
I can imagine
the contour of your body,

as if it was a path
I had walked many times,
enjoyably, out of the sun,

pausing here and there to inspect,
perhaps, a delicate fern,
one a bit ignored

though very healthy,
its V-shaped fronds
quite opened to my sudden, soaking rain.

 

[HarryHill]

.....

 

[Desejo]

2: Wine on an empty stomach

Waking seasick in a too hot room
bat-eyed stumble to the sink
cold water drops roil and boil
over hot skin, cooling like an oasis
raccooned eyes of black mascara prove again
nothing was learned from Seventeen magazine
“remove makeup before you sleep”
Right.

uneasy recollections of stabbing
At unreasonably small digital boxes
numb fingers picking out a final
“Ignore this”
Make me afraid to look at my phone
did not learn much from Cosmo either
("What not to say to a man")

I can only hope autocorrect
trumps autopilot.

 

[greenmountaineer]

26

The Human Mind Has its Dark Corners

as when the Southern Baptist belle
who now owns her dead daddy's farm
beseeches the ebony Walmart man
to buy a truckload of peaches.

Deal's a deal until twenty cents
a pound is liver to stomach
bile that reminds Annabelle how
low the Suwannee's become

and how peachy it must have been
when her great great granddaddy dug
Okefenokee topsoil from
earthworms and graves without caskets.

 

[Angeline]

23 6/26/13

Fish-Eye Lens

Don't look at me mouth
agape, lips stretched. No
words are sacred miss,

not even mine if you don't
shut it why you'll catch flies,
and I have need to cull

some time apart. You've
no need to wonder why
or what lies in my heart.

In time we wove a net
of days in cheer or some
approximate thereof waves

of kindness wouldn't keep.
I never say I loved, but only
wrote it in a poem or time.