The Poetry Marathon

Prompt 25/H20-Pulling from a love song

 Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot 

Do I dare to eat a peach?
Or nectarine of yellow and sweet?

Do I dare to strike the clouds?
Demand an answer from them aloud?

Am I a fool who cannot eager be
And thus begins so foolishly?
Or do I love that which cannot die
Philosophy of the endless why
I don’t claim to know the bounty of my worth
Or for that matter the value of the Earth
But still, I carefully long for sweets
My cheque does not suffice.

I am banked and bankrupt

19

Dear Writer:

 

I will call again to you, no matter what you say.

I will call again to you to lay down here and play.

And rest your head.

And close your eyes.

And let those silly poems synthesize.

That’s right. Zzzz.

Zzzz are our friend.

Zzzzzz……………………………………

Love Song-Hour 20

I would sing at the top of my voice

If I could trust said voice

Across vast wildernesses and mountain ranges

I would echo through the canyons

Screaming my love

My hate, my contempt, my desire

Yes I love you

But you eat at my soul

You truly do

You always have

You are my purpose

You give me my identity and my consolation

You give me my bursts of eloquence

My moments of great achievement

But the pain

The pain, the indecision

Being unable to reach that pinnacle

Let alone have steady readers

I give and give

You take and take

I am raw

Wasted

Always searching for one more word

One more sentence

I grasp for sanity

and you rip it away

Be a writer I told myself

Now I wish I hadn’t listened

Success eludes me

Hope eludes me

But I hang on

You are my great love

I sing out to you

Reach to you for guidance

Wasted echoes

Wasted words

Wasted melodies

Wasted hours

You are a bitter lover

That seldom gives back

I will sing my love for you

I will never leave you

But sometimes I wish I could

 

Prompt 25 Hour 20

Indeed, I read the poetry

The lengthy carcass of sprawling words

My eyes adjust to only reread the same lines over and again.

This assignment, this wayward task

Has me running in circles

searching for a short glass

on the rocks, these eyes already read

end the drama, end the scene

For Mr. Eliot I cannot

fathom your scheme

Your lines cross my eyes

and all I can gather

is time

is left

on window pane

in an empty bottle.

 

C. Churchill

The Art of Safety

Drowns the possibilities

of those adventures, so

exciting after decades

of resentful boredom,

cowering in the comfort of

our rooms, scared to shed

even a hair from our scalp

prompt 23/24: reply to a favorite poem

Reflections on an experiment in self love

1.  my mixed blood waters down my colour but not the weeping of our people when my head turns to face the land no longer ours – which feels the same as when he looks at me through blurry eyes
2. those boys I loved, with obsidian hair, could not enter my house because my mother couldn’t see the pieces of herself my father loved to deny
3. the deeper I look into my dancing DNA, the more closely I feel to language I can only feel
4. sometimes I wish my skin did not give me the privilege I could not recognise.  It seemed to be disguised as hubris.
5. there are times when I feel sick to know I am part of the colonial problem
6. at those times I smudge and my Ancestors hold me to their drumming hearts
7. “queer definition: knowing your body is both too much and not enough for this world.”
8. I can’t hold myself now – my arms are not long enough anymore
9. at the end of it all, this flesh is dust…my spirit lives in love forever.

(c) r. l. elke

In honour of Billy Ray Belcourt’s “Love and other Experiments” in This Wound is a World

The living daylights

We dove through the depths when everything else seemed lost. Even when you feel lost

to the stars, existentialism never gives up on you. I stare the reaper in the face and

feel his own insecurities firing back at me. He’s powerless to break me when he

knows nothing of his own fruitless circumstances. Even when we fight back

against the darkness, we make our own mortality feel unencumbered.

For all the times we’ve scream endlessly into the abyss, we need to

feel the ramifications of detaching from our essence. only then will

the rest of existence come into focus.

Lone

To dine at a corner table, long nights

Of blues and poetry stringing together

Speaks of loneliness.

But yet, as you sit there with your jokes

And your smile, a word whispers, lonely,

The line in your shoulders

The Atlases effort that it is, to live,

To survive, but survive we do.

You can be alone and not lonely,

But dear, tell me,

Can you be lonely, yet not alone?

Hour 20 ATOMIC CLOCK

Look at your hand
And think of this:

However close
You concentrate,
You’ll never see
Those elfin, subatomic crumbs
Crammed in there,
Undecayable;
Existing even when
That bog you’re buried in
Is swallowed
By a dying sun.
And think of your descendants
Ticking their hours away;
Reckoning decades
By the clicks
Of my slim quarks
Thumping after you forever.

Look at your hand
And think of this.

Prompt 23 On Beginnings Revisited.

In the beginning, was a hole,

And the hole was without sound

the sound was without a beat,

the beat was without melody.

And there were no words to the music.

 

Then a voice was heard:

Let there be a dance.

and let the dance have sound,

and let the sound be a song,

 

and let the song have words,

and let the words form poetry.

And let a beat take form.

And let all dance along.

 

But the world was void of dancers

So God took Elm and Ash

and made from each a man and woman.

And then the dance began.