The Poetry Marathon

Dark Alley Days

She loved this place

Dark damp secluded

One entrance one exit no escape

The alley behind the blood bank

Heavy with intoxicating scents of her favorite hot red human nectar

Quiet and cool away from the crowd

Away from clipboards and questions and bright lights hurting her eyes
piercing her translucent skin

For the perfect price and promise of passion, they always followed
melting into her welcoming arms and darkness

Willing to give, willing to feed
her aching hunger

Soft moans from dark shadows

A whimper, a hush and a trance to forget.

Things I’ve Never Done

Gathering firewood is one of them.  I don’t wish

I knew how to do it.  It shouldn’t be hard to do

 

but one should shape things just so that there

would be something to gather – firewood, fireflies,

 

or fame, salt-and-pepper sets, sewing thimbles,

something for an evening of tea with invented friends.

 

What does the phrase ‘gathering gloom’ mean?

Do the clouds get together and decide to darken?

 

Does this mean it’s time for humans and other

creatures to huddle in a circle and chant?

 

Is it then time to kick off one’s shoes and beat the

ground with feet?  I don’t know how to do that either.

 

(c) Ella Wagemakers, 21.13 Dutch time (= 15.13 EST in the US)

Poetry Prompt #6 Stone gateway

What more do you seek?

There’s sun and hope for you.

Go, find your own path!
                    a haiku by Nancy Ann Smith

Feathered Flies

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

The water smells of rubber soles.
Downstream they know
And hide.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

A strange insect
Of feathered wings
Lands, then jumps.

There it is again!
Perhaps a swarm
Of feathered food!

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Stupid insects!
How they dance
With rhythmic respect.

Here we go!
Dance, oh thou
Feathered wings aglow.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Plop.
Swish.

Gotcha!
Echos from the wiggling space.

Sharp.
Pain.
Pulls.

Tastes of unfamiliar ions
And birds.
Gills filled with air,
I am caught.

Beware the fisherman, they said in school.
Beware the fisherman who makes a fool
Of even the wisest of trout.

He fishes down at the water’s edge.
We know him, they said.
They told me so.

You know him by the fins he wears
Nothing in the water bears
Such stench or undertow.
They block the flow,
You know.

I scream and fight
And warn my hundred brothers
Hundred others
Who survived the journey here.

Beware the fisher…
They do not hear.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Plop.
Swish.
Kxsh.

Hour 7 (Yellow Skirt)

Yellow hues

Fluttering about

Controlled by her motion

 

She is her skirt’s muse

As she skips in the rain

Causing a beautiful commotion

 

Shut out – 7/24

The atrocity of being shut out

feels like the burning wind in my asthma lungs.

When I’m playing tag in the third grade and the bully boy asks me if asthma is contagious

That’s what it feels like to be shut out

That my nature is inconvenient and

My peers have fear of catching me

(although I’m doing the chasing)

In either place, I won’t open my mouth

Even if it’s the only way I can breathe

 

@ angel rosen

Visual (hour 7, 3:02)

You really had

to be there.

When stars collide,

the resulting dust

and collected mites,

formed us.

Imagine the lines between

the loved

and the hated.

Imagine them crossed,

and blurred.

This is the beginning.

Right before the end,

it began.

Hating spiders,

and loving a man

whose arms are everywhere.

He weaves webs of silken words,

and you are trapped between the lines.

He whispers into your ear,

as his tongue caresses

each word,

and they slip in,

one thrilling word

after another.

It’s a visual,

you had to be there.

Your self promises

versus your virtue.

Ahhh, but the words;

the words wrapped round

my spine,

and I could not move.

It is the glory of time,

that for the most part,

we will always have

tomorrow.

#6 Collaboration 2 with my literacy student

Don’t tell me what I don’t know
You are not in my head
Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do
Until I try it
Don’t tell me that I can’t see what’s going on
You are not my eyes
Don’t tell me what I can hear
You are not my ears
And I can’t read your lips from the back of your head
While you walk away, still talking

Do I exist?

I etch my soul in the sky,
As, I need a rebirth,
Energy stretches into purple highs,
As, I ask within “Earth”,
Do I Exist?
Then, answers replied “Nothing Lives”
So I ask again “Why?”
“Is it up to the heavens and sky on who lives or dies?”
Then, I reply “Why Try!”
When all we are going to do is die,
I surrender and sigh,
The sky replies “Earths design was to give you a reason to shine in a human life,
But humans destroy life, so we take life,
So I reply “If I die, what happens then”
The sky replies “Life is designed to fly even when you die”,
“So nothing lives”,
So, I ask again “If we try, fly, and not sigh about life, then how is life designed in the sky”,
A gentle reply “Seek the purple high in the sky, find life, and fly”
And I reply “I get it, if we all fly, then no one dies and everyone lives”,
The sky replies “Life is etched in the sky, so no matter if you die”
“You will always try and fly” I reply “I exist when I fly”
Then the sky replies “Then, you exist”

After Grandpa Died, Hour 6

Consider this a rough draft. An hour was not enough.

After Grandpa Died

We found the newspaper clipping in his wallet,
yellowed, creased, from a time when
mixed race women of African descent were called
mulatto wenches.

The story?
Three women sold?
How does this figure into Grandpa’s story?
I always thought one of them was his mother,
but the look on your face makes me think
of another possibility:
his half sisters?

I’d always heard his mother was an Indian,
but I never met her,
never found her name on the Dawes’ Roll.
Maybe I should let it go,
make up my own story like you suggested.

But I have a story–
Grandpa, on the porch whittling
Me, careful to avoid his spit can,
singing along with him as he picked his guitar
or played his fiddle
How he loved my beautiful grandma
and cornbread and buttermilk in a bowl.
And…
the clipping in his wallet.