The Poetry Marathon

Guilty Pleasure (hour 9)

I have this tiny, little, guilty pleasure.
Sometimes, I don’t look where I’m going,
and I make men walk around me.
You see, it’s funny because they
walk right through me instead

They cut me off, and I apologize.
They cheat on me, and I apologize.
They lie to me, and I apologize.
They attack me, and I apologize.

Another guilty pleasure:
I date the wrong guys.
The guys who can’t keep rhythm,
and don’t understand reason.
You see, it’s perfect because then,
they can always blame me.

I said stop, and I apologized.
I said go away, and I apologized.
I said please, and I apologized.
I said don’t, and I apologized.

A tiny, little, guilty secret:
whether he was pinning me to the ground
or holding a gun against my head,
I was asking for it,
or at least that’s what my mother said.

 

 

 

Yuck…this needs a lot of reworking, but here it is….

For All Of Our Lonely Patterns (Hour 7)

Following the roads that lead along the river,
the turns and washed out crevices that only we know.
Under the shadows of moving clouds in the vast Kansas sky
I kissed you in a ring of watching oak trees,
the first witnesses of my heart presented on bleeding paper.

In the wildflower dance of that neverending afternoon,
I blanketed your body with the wounds I learned to heal
before my hand could hold steady enough to untie the ribbon in your hair.
So I swallowed all of yesteryear’s memories
to try and give you a real word,
a purity from my lips untasted by any others but you.

The trust in your crying eyes,
as if you had seen all of this happen before,
somewhere not too different than here,
in a dream you use to dream when you were a little girl.
And the disappointment of reality became
the tripping step of mad love, falling hard for the imperfections
of all our failed promises.

I never wanted to be what hurt you the most,
or a painful chapter in the story you wrote
with your skin and hair and lips and love.
Is there no other way to exist as close to someone as we have been?
Our pain preserved like rusting metal left in the fields,
where I saw the red tail resting on the fence,
his face turned to the sky,
so that his eyes may better watch
the movements upon the ground.

Based on The Love Poems of Elizabeth Sargent

Melodramatic
extravagant, faded lover
My lost movie star

Miss you so tonight
Picture your long rock star hair
and ache to feel you

Our movie was best
blockbuster love story so
unbelievable

A seventies hit
Winning our own awards, so
scandalous, miss you

Melodramatic
extravagant, faded lover
Still dream about you

© Diane Morinich
All Rights Reserved

Every Breath

Standing by her bedside

Life ebbing away

Her chest–rising, falling.

 

Heart slowing down

Holding her hand;

Prayers for peaceful passing.

 

The monitor is beeping

Time stands still;

Her forehead relaxes.

 

Nurses nod their heads;

Gone forever, now.

Imagining her welcome.

 

Gathering my thoughts;

Aching so intense–

How to go on now?

 

Breathe in, breathe out.

Lungs full, lungs empty.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Protected: poem 9 hour 9 homesick for another world (“borrowed title” poem)

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(Hour 06) 03.30-04.30am. PROMPT, stuck in a very small place, actual or metaphorical

sentence

many are the days my grief & i
wish to simply curbkick company
lock all the doors draw closed the curtains
keep out as much of the cold as we can
cuddle the past under the doona
as we slide between the covers
to trap ourselves in another world
till all track of time is gleefully lost
only emerging from our paper prison
break the bars of my textual cage
to piss as infrequently as bladderly possible
then rapidly reincarcerating imagination
until the final phrase, the last line leaps
breaks free from the final page
fireworking the final neurons in our brain
before slumbercrawling back into the world
grief wrangled, mollified, appeased for another day

Just one more moment

is all I need

to breathe the words

“Tu me manques”

On your lips

Pinnacle

Sometimes i feel like a leaf, being blown through the wind

Sometimes I feel like I can’t change the flow of my life

I feel like I can’t change my pace in this world that I face

But somehow I’ve got to know what i need to change

I’ve the high and lows and all those red letter days

All the good and bad and otherwise a man could face

Times they have been rough, somehow they have made me tough

And I think i now know what i need to change

And now i can reach the pinnacle of my life

Dearly Beloved

Dearly Beloved

We have gathered her today to solve a problem

Or at least

We were

But you all could not work together for five minutes

Your attitudes, your selfishness

You are ruining this

Can’t you see this is bigger than all of us?

Don’t you care that if we fix this, there is no tomorrow?

The world is ending

THE WORLD IS ENDING

Your problems are nothing

Your egos are nothing

Shut up

Shut up for five goddamn seconds

Listen to the earth

It is screaming at us

Screaming that it will destroy us

You think our mother will weep for us when we are gone?

When the parasites that have been trying to kill her since our first breath are finally extinct?

We have gathered here today to solve a problem

But none of you even showed up.

Speak now, or forever hold your piece

Because soon, we will all be gone.

 

Blame Game

We often look for someone to blame
for we need to cover up our shame
to family and friends
we find only dead ends
and our arse is all alone in the flame.