The Poetry Marathon

I have forty minutes

Enough to write,

write possibly,

possibly and adequately,

a slightly adequate poem

or one with delusions of adequacy,

but this is a time in the game when your play not to win

but to not lose.

This perfunctory bit of squalid pseudo-verse will have to just do for now.

I don’t ask you to excuse me from the claims of proper behavior,

Just pardon me and sign the papers that will release me from prison

And help me find a more welcome home

More alluring than the these four cinder block walls.

I have nobody but my self to thank, you miht say,

On the principle that if you lie down with dogs,

you are bound to get fleas,

Yes,  I could have hung out with different people,

and certainly been suspicious when they asked to hang out

their money to dry in my place.

I have been travelling, in my own way,however.

“How do you do that” you may ask.

I simply check out library  books on travel –

The desire to be elsewhere a common sense among prisoners,

I find a vividly compelling illustration to check out,

and go there in my mind for a time.

I had a summer in Spain,

an. afternoon on skis in the Alps,

or have a NIce day or

a festival in Cannes.

It reassures me to know you wear my picture

in a locket around your neck.

I am depending on you,

and remind you can thank you for getting me discovered,

I’ve gotta run.

They don’t let me jog here

and my posture is poor from the short beds

so I am bent out of shape…..

this prompt helped me create a totally silly non poem

of which I am ashamed

C
.,

(more…)

Your first dog

is a first love

Even if she has a chronic sore on her back

and gets fat and tired

so you hardly notice she is missing

when she wanders into traffic and dies.

There was still that moment when Ginger and I had a special bond

Outside the complex world of the big people.

In the long ago time when your dog just followed you aroundDay

and there were no leashes or poop pick up laws.

Every lesbian has been told they need “good dick.”

It is just as universal as the offer of mustache rides,

And just as irritating and pointless.

Both are just a version of dipping the girl’s pigtails in the inkwell.

The answer, of course, is that most Lesbians have had plenty of “good dick.”

“I’ve had great dick, much better dick than you could ever give me

There was always just one problem with this famouz “good dick”

There was always A MAN attached.”

And the answer to that is silence.

Blessed silence.

RIGHT NOW SOMEWHERE ON THE GLOBE

The poetry marathon is cutting across a different segment of the stratum of the world

But the same segment of the journey we are on together.

Someone is in a household that is waking up,

Someone is in a household that is going to sleep.

Someone looks out their window at the bright sunlight and thinks about the pumping of their heart.

Someone looks out their window and sees the dark, and takes their metropolol to control the pumping of their heart.

One person sees a meadow and recognizes it as Yosemite.

Another wonders why there is a boardwalk in the wildnerness.

People see glassy buildings that look like home,

Others see an alien structure found only in the fabled big cities.

One person writes their first poem at 6AM, after a sleepless night worrying they will miss the alarm.

At the same moment another person is checking the clock after a comfortable dinner at home.

One person strolls in and out of their familiar writing spot,

Another is hunched at the kitchen table.

At the same moment one person is writing while rush hour traffic pelts by,

Another is hearing the crickets.

Another hears a distant siren in the quiet of the night.

One person is writing on the Sabbath,

Another will finish just in timey r church.

Sleepy and wakeful,

Isolated and distracted.

Quietly centered and

Raging with a personal drama,

We are all at the same moment,

finger to the keys,

In the same moment, the same rhythm, the same phase,

of the marathon.

Stop telling me what to do.

Push, pull, or get out of the way,

Don’t throw things from the sidelines.

Don’t play games with me, mess me about.

I don’t aim when I pitch, I see the target and throw,,

Letting my body adjust on its own.

Holy flapjacks,

This is not a time in my life for coaching from the sidelines,

For strange tasks laid on me like a party game.

Get in her and lift this beam out of my eye

Do not scatter specks and call them glitter.

Don’t tell me what to do.

One after another the tiny bodies emerge.

When the time for birthing comes, they all come out.

Birth makes its own rules, its own time.

Strategies vary.

One whale or elephant child is born, and fiercely guarded,

While the salmon spends itself to find a place to strew its smelt and eggs together in great abandon.

The simple invertebrate spews its spawn on clouds across the ocean,

You;re on your own, kids!

The odds are some will survive.

If we told the sea turtle its eggs could only hatch one at a time,

a phalanx of predators would set up camp and dine at their leisure.

Instead, a horde of determined four footed engines floods the sand and heads for the ocean.

Some will survive, and those that do live long and prosper.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, they say,

But if you do,

Watch that basket.

The strategy for the poet is to foster fecundity,

but give make each tiny life the chance to  grow in strength and viability

so that it has a solid shot at survival.

There is only so much control that is possible.

So much is left to chance.

Labor pushes out another one.

I long for words as pointed and direct as driven nails.

Bang, bang, bang, each blow directly on the head,

Driving the point home, joining board to board, thought to idea.

There is no glamour or stammer in rough carpentry.

This is not finish carpentry in which we inset the nail heads and carefully hide them with stainable putty.

Bang Bang,the structure takes shape,

walls go up, floors and ceilings take their place.

Defining space is the job of the architect and the framer,

not  decoration, frills, or tricks to fool the eye.

Bang Bang Bang.  I knock together a world,

and make it safe for you to join me in it.

As soon as I clear out the debris.

Poem next

don’t tell me what to do or how to live.

I am totally and permanently disabled with bipolar disorder.

The rules do not apply.

I can either write no poems or cannot stop, sometimes.

I can either not stay awake or not get to sleep, sometimes.

Staying up all night is the worst thing I can do,

Except I do it all the time,

which explains a lot.

Let your passions roll the dinkum genius writes, as though he knows

what it is like to have to words coming faster than I can type,

and each one my GENIUS brain approves as brilliant, apt, not to be missed.

The waiting world would will be so lucky to read this!

Choices – do I take my medication and risk falling asleep,

not take my medication and risk falling off the edge of the world.

Perhaps I can check my archives for a message from myself when I enlisted in this turkey shoot. I must have had some idea of how to  proceed, unless I was in De Nile, which is not a river in the desert since it spreads its now polluted fertility along its banks….

Polluted fertility. That’s a good image for my brain.

Welcome to my world, my friends and frienders and friendees.

I don’t bite, scratch. Or do harm,

but I might hop up on you and lick your face.

Cave Canum.

The house dog, our burglar alarm

(BURGULAR, BURGALAR, BURGOLAR I can spell it as I like

proved forgettable after all.

Here I am on another computer, having ridden the first one into the dust.

The marathon goes marching onCoo as steady as the drum on the galley, pounding out the rhythm so the oars do not become tangled,

While my tangles bipolar brain

is racing up and down the aisles of my minimart life

jumping up and pulling things off the shelves in a jumble of joyful anarchy.

Cookies crumble as the packages are rent assunder.

How pleased is OliverthedogofGraceWiebenga with himself,

Diving in the dinky dumpster of disturbed demented  distress,

Mixing metaphors with similes with a toothy smile like a cartoon dog,

Muscular tail wagging so vigorously that delicate items must be taken to sanctuary for preservation.

‘Who can resist such joyful abandon?

We roll on the floor and tussle with this aging puppy, murrrmufrring love sounds.

There’s a boy, that’s a boy, It’s such  a boy, such a good boy, yes we are, oh yes oh yes oh yesssss.

Finally we find the special spot that soothes and does not excite, and things calm down enough

for words to emerge instead of inchoate thoughts and  cavorting emotions.

OliverthedogofGraceWiebenga

Sit.  Stay.  Good dog.

Quiet while I save this and publish it.

I know.  No fun.  More fun to tear apart the toilet paper rolls.

But let’s compromise with the other people’s world,

the calm ones who walk with feet on the ground.

Good dog,  OliverthedogofGraceWiebenga.