NaPoWriMo Challenge - April 1 - April 30

[Tzara]

24

susurrant murmurs float through an open window. . .

On the Street Where She Lives

Through opened window slip her muted sighs,
The susurrus of rumpled sheets, mussed hair.
I wonder if they know that passers-by
Through opened window sense their mingled sighs,
Anticipate more animal-like cries
And wish her moans were by me brought forth there—
To opened window cast her muted sighs,
The susurrus of rumpled sheets, mussed hair.

 

[Moochienanu]

20April2021

Close

Feeling a flush
Warming from within
Plush tingling center
Radiating out
Dissecting through
Core bursting with ache
Dripping in fingertip lines
Walking down spines
Wrapped around you
Draping nimbly
Deep wringing inside
Singing of bitten lips
Sparking lights in harmony

 

[Angeline]

20-30

Justice

In this dark reign of hate the clouds parted and the Sun came out. Progress.

 

[champagne1982]

there's a space between knowledge and faith.

And In Between Are The Doors 20/30

Things known get in the way of mystery;
so my understanding shapes faith
not blindly but through what I see.
..... My eyes give volume and colour
..... to everything that reflects light
..... and fill in black
..... when they see what does not.
then, when vision has given substance
to the formless things, my ears listen
for reason, to hear an explanation
that applies to what my eyes have seen.
..... I don't just have faith
..... because blindness will just make
..... everything black and do the work
..... my sight has always done before.
But science hasn't got all the answers;
there are only theories and hypotheses.
The definite thing in this, is that in
the absence of light, there is black,
and black is the presence of all colours.

Now if that doesn't just slightly fuck you up,
nothing will be a mystery, and you might just be a god ...

 

[29wordsforsnow]

22/30 - Yesternight's back

bending my back from intimacy
hours meeting the pleasure of your
Want to see what I've learned today?
with your head in my lap you dared to look up
sighs on shut tight lips painted by subtle motions
fingers treating the hardness born beneath soft skin.
Release? was not a question, therapeutic task still at hand
my fingers on your neck, guided to its tensed up back, Massage here

 

[Levitating_Bed]

20/30

Part of me trying to be a good dad:
I encourage my son not to think in binaries.
This is done despite the sneaking suspicion
that he's headed into a world where
nuance doesn't scale and that's all
anyone wants to know:

Will it scale?

And, after the verdict when he turns
to me and says:
I hope that fucking pig dies in prison
my heart, which gets broken
all of the damn time anyway
breaks again.

I know that it's always too late for justice
in the places where it's needed most.
but I believe that all anybody is
is everything they've been given
and shown and surrounded with.

Yes, but, will it scale?

So I try and take him though it:
a guilty cop getting his first of many
Aryan Brotherhood tattoos, the way
those factions are already so well
established and those lines are drawn.

The way that prisons are buildings
full of nothing I necessarily think of
as being justice, as much as they are
full of people who

remember
very clearly
what happened on
the worst day of their life.

What are the long term projections and rates of return?
Just tell me: will it scale?

By the end of our conversation
I haven't convinced him away
from how good that righteous anger
feels inside of him.
The best I can hope for is that
he somehow understands that it's
only useful if it can manage to
yield anything like positive change.

But what do I know
except that my heart gets broken
all of the damn time anyways
and I got up at 4:45 this morning
to write a poem.

 

[todski28]

21-30

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JpTqmfrFlHk

Galileo speaks his heresy and the mob
defies him because what greater way to uphold
orthodox thinking and barking dogma
than with the destruction of nuance and the insertion
of rigorous denying force
of the views espoused

truth often meets on the slim hard edge of that same coin
I could site statistics of one or the other
or appeal to every emotion
and know that I didn’t do my due diligence
it’s easy mouthing the words of the crowd
harder to stand against its tyranny

harder still to walk the edges of a coin as it spins through the air

what the fuck would I know though
as an addict riddled
violence prone
nobody simply peering through
a telescope and reporting what I see

bring on the guillotine
because that’s what we do to the dissident

 

[Piscator]

XXI/XXX

Cougars, Beavers and Foxes

I find it nothing short of species approp-
riation when we label ladies of a certain
age who have an occasional a drink and
sometimes frequent lowlife bars seeking
an anonymous liaison with men, women
or sometimes both who are also looking
for the company of women, men or some-
times both, who are similarly inclined to
exchange sexual favors in no-tell motels
only to find themselves lost in a maze of
mirrors looking back to see themselves
with legs stretched wide to reveal their
luxurious moist pelt unobscured by lacy
lingerie, bikini thongs, or other underwear.

But then I‘m caught in their feral gaze as
they a ruby lipped, sharp toothed smile
and not so sure,

 

[Moochienanu]

21April2021

Pomegranate

Gathering flowers for Cerberus
Sweet fragrance of deep dwellings
Personal Charon for my soul
Find my daughter on her thigh
Etched into the flesh-coated seeds:
The wife of the devil himself.

 

[Lyricalli]

20/30

Haven't been sleeping much
waking up from weird dreams
toss, turn, repeat

Too tired to think
well, that's not true
I always do that
so, let me rephrase
too tired to reason
well, except ones I create
to debate assaults from my brain
in its perfect state
for worry, fear, insecurity

So, I'm losing things
that are right in front of me
my head is spinning
sometimes dizzy
easy words seem lost from memory
which makes it difficult
to write anything resembling poetry

 

[champagne1982]

What Doesn't Kill Ya 21/30

My mother thinks shot two won't lay her low
but I have seen younger than her drawn,
haggard and weakened as their bodies
begin to build the armies of lymphocytes
it takes to fight a killer

She says she'll just insist to herself
that she isn't sick, as if prayer
and importuning her immunity will keep
her B and T cells from amping up
in her blood stream, as if a fever
can be cooled through will alone.

I had to laugh when she said it though
since I remember her wizened face
clammy and pale, and her voice shaking
as she fought off the flu and won
two years ago. I guess being ninety
makes you stronger; nothing's killed her yet

 

[Tzara]

25

Skagit Tanka

tulip petals fall
after these few days of sun
without any rain

...have I not watered our love
...when you turn away in bed?

 

[29wordsforsnow]

23/30

Above the Ole Clock Shoppe on Century Road,
the digits come closer in the alcove abode.

While seconds grow weary and thick,
I wonder how your mind does tick.

The curtains' shade close in on your eyes' slits
riverbeds beneath run an issue before today quits.

"What wears your days, and tears your mood?"

Simple, the past.​

In the disrobing moonlight, your irides bloom,
searching for more questions that might loom.

"What wakes you at night, and makes you brood?"

The future in progress.​

Then suddenly, it makes perfect sense to me
the present tense in a moment to be.

"What could make you happy?"

Now, you are.​

The clockworks pulsing through beam and brick,
as if hyphenating "You're so ro-man-tic."

 

[todski28]

22-30

measured and tabulated the
exact angle and distance between
one too many and forgetting how to piss
tested the cusp of addiction
folded to my breast and fed it till it grew
and went through metamorphosis
as if alcohol and marijuana were the appetisers
meth was the main coursE
and supped on LSD for desert

till the night was day and nine sleeps later
I tried to convince myself that the worlds
fatal flaw was that man was nothing more than an agent of chaos
of self destruction and propagation
violence and fucking and drugs
played to the tune of Mozarts: concerto no 5 and Red Hot Chilli Peppers
because the violin killed me and the bass made me hard

learned beyond my years and lost more than I gained
remember the tick of a metronome on
harsh bright lights
the taste of haloperidol tincture was salted caramel
and dribbling down my shirt front was fine
because my mind was full of cotton wool spiders
skittering through the dark...

Pinesol now puts me back in solitary
head-butting the wall till I bled
dark pools of sanity
onto the cloying tiles

some days I stare and the sky
feel the scurrying in the back of my mind

 

[champagne1982]

Earth Day Spring 22/30

Today clouds drop snow
flakes tumble and gather in piles
insignificant.

 

[Levitating_Bed]

21/30

2nd One

The Polio vaccine
might have been worth as
much as 7 billion dollars had
Dr. Salk decided to patent it.

I wonder if any Pharma CEO
can read that sentence without
a reflexive stone-faced
head-shake of tragic disbelief.

When asked why
he sought no patent
Dr Salk said simply:
Can you patent the sun?

I wonder if any Pharma CEO
can read that sentence without
eyes wistfully glazing over, thinking
Can you even imagine..?

 

[Moochienanu]

22April2021

Tut Tut

Drinking in the smell with each breath
It’s coming soon
The clouds gather on the horizon just past the delineation of blue
Mingling as they grow darker
Brooding over their past evaporates
Mountains holding back the low stragglers for now
Wanting nothing more than to throw themselves to the ground
Fits like children in the family checkout, prize within reach
A cooling breeze changing the wind
As the crowd in the sky gets their wish
And the ground swells to welcome the crying babes

 

[Piscator]

XXII/XXX`


Not About Me

CBC Literary Prizes - Today's writing tip: 04/22/2021
Write a poem that's not about you.

Poetry sucks
Poetry is not
Not easy
Not to me
To be sure
To be or
Or not me be
Or else
Else me be
Elsewhere
Where deer and antelope play
Wherever
Ever sharp
Ever after
After covid
After all
All is said
All is done
Done well
Done like dinner
Diner at diner
Dinner bell
Belle of ball
Bell tolls
Tolls for me
Toll charge
Charge it
Charge me
Me me
Meme
Meme today
Memory gone
Gone gone
Gone to hell
Hell’s fury
Hellfire
Fire at the whites
Fire in their eyes
Ayes have it
Eyes of soul
Soul music
Sole survivor
Survivor Season 41
Survivor Guilt
Guilt by association
Guilty me
Me too
Me. myself and I
I
too

 

[Angeline]

21-30

Lament

My sinuses have come out to play.
They woke up fractious yesterday
and now they're in a gleeful stomp
behind my eyebrows, a great romp
such that my eyes are filled with tears
and there are bells stuck in my ears
a'ringing, ringing. It's a game
my head is playing, Notre Dame,
For pollen is my kryptonite
Oh god please let me sleep
tonight.

 

[Tzara]

26

To Various Female Poets
Who Post at Literotica

Feel free to fill in the pronoun with your own name.

When I read her poems,
I sometimes want to touch the screen
because I will never be closer

to her than those thousand pixels
imprinted on my eyes. That is not love,
not properly even friendship,

but something more like adoration,
as when a minor deacon would display an ikon
of the Virgin and everyone would bow

and kneel and pray. Not that she
is in anyway virgin,
nor I constant in my devotion,

so let's toss the religious connotation
and call it what it likely,
simply is. You know, plain lust.

 

[29wordsforsnow]

24/30

(Ramones' first album debuted 45 years ago)

Judy's alive
and still rocking
in a squeaking chair

Judy's still a punk
living in the underground
retirement? home?

Judy's still a brat
snitching candies
from kids on the floor

Judy's still alive
for longer
that you can think

Judy's still a punk
perhaps she'll live on
a million verses more

 

[Lyricalli]

21/30

A simple question
that touched on desire long held
so unexpected
it made my want palpable
and every thought touches you

 

[Levitating_Bed]

22/30

What are you looking at?
The same thing you are:
e v e r y t h i n g .

When we kissed, the planet spun slower.
But we sent now spinning so fast -
moments so alive, so present
they reframed both past and future.

Yesterday and tomorrow in fixed orbit around right now.
How many times did we collapse in on each other?
The light gone behind eyes squeezed shut.
How many universes did we create?

And despite
fluctuations in the product of our masses
and the inverse squares of our distance,
I've added the weight of all my subsequent joys -

dropped them like precious stones
Into the emotional gravity well that
we created out of the sum of each other.

 

[todski28]

And I know you’re no longer here
the gaze of your shadow and
The hammer fist of your words still echo
in my head as if you’re sitting next to me

what we were was always broken
but tack welded together by her
and so we fought and we blamed
complained and raged against each other
the argument where I took to my own
head with a hammer because I couldn’t stand
another vowel or consonant you muttered
was when you both realised
I wasn’t quite stable
contusions swell and blood trickling down my face

or when I walked head first through
8mm plate glass and the repair man
though someone had hit it with a car
or when I crushed my phone into powder
Because hanging up just wouldn’t cut it

if you had been anyone but you
and she had been anyone but her
I would have quit for the sake of my sanity
or to keep me from prison

And yet when we worked together
the place was a harmony of saws and scribes
glass and Alluminium
board and doors and drawers
cut, assembled ready to go
magic ran in the clockwork tick
of efficiency and human ingenuity

your baritone voice cut through the noice
the way Oprah singers shatter glass

the day you brought me my first drill set
my first tools
felt like a father acknowledging a son
and now I’m torn in two
of which memories are the real you

and your not hear for me to ask

 

[Piscator]

XXIII/XXX

Runtogetherwords

In penning my latest opus, I was distracted
from my usual omniscience as the spell checker
(two words) highlighted (one word) and
corrected several of my two word amalgamations.
including, but by no means restricted to:

each other (two words) not eachother,
ever after (two words) not everafter, and
after all (two words) not afterall.

While on the other hand, there are:

highlighted not high lighted (two words)
wherever not where ever (two words), and
nonetheless not none the less (three words).

AndIknownotwhatelsetosay.