24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
I wonder why we have such trouble letting Venice sink or abandoning New Orleans in the wake of Katrina with all the toxins embedded in the buildings and soil. We cannot right the axis of the earth, stop the ice caps from melting, clean the plastic from the waters or lower the temperatures.The time is now to fix ourselves. We can imagine a new existence if we work together. Let the land sink. Save the people.
“Give each project at least one line. You should open the poem with the first project, and close it with the last, but otherwise use the projects in whatever order you like. Do all twenty. Let different ones be in different voices. Don’t take things too seriously.
1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synaesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use a piece of false cause-and-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of “talk” you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun)…”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he/she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a nonhuman object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.”
They burn like embers awaiting fuel
Forced to wait in stasis, trapped 3000 years and still alive
Deaf to the world and mute to the cries of their supplicants
The unending cacophony a golden splendor
Their worshipers clinging desperate to the promise
Stroking the letters clad upon the dias
Archons of Athens, scions of Stygia
They listen quite carefully to their worshipers
Tasting the tears of Archimedes
They bide their time, an image of patience
They were once living you know,
Rizzing their way through the clergy
Their priesthood not one of chastity at all
Indeed it’s said their godhood proved evolution
For once one had them, one had a bounty of others
“Down bad” and” thirsty” for more, a rizz fountain unending.
The bright flower of desire attracting their followers like moths to flame
But no change was had by this metamorphosis
A caterpillar cocooned and emerged the same
No gorgeous wings on which they’d have dined.
Merely the same creature with a night
Of golden ecstasy
Once the scions of Stygia were seen
Upon a hill in Athens
Giving to the poor and needy
Despite their selfish nature
And the goblin watched with mild curiosity
“Why do they behave so out of character?” Tiny Stacks implored.
Should the goblin get an answer, the archons’ll age no longer in this world
The squishy rock beneath them will squeak in much dismay
And winded the godlings, breathless, will certainly moth grabe.
“Como es usted problema” the cat asked them, judging
The scent of bronze and silence, the muted gods await
5am poem 3
Help
Fire. Storm. Firestorm.
Could we not have called
Mayor Mike back to assist?
Rumble smash smoke sting
melting… melting…
Lahainatown.
We could not have called
Mayor Mike back to assist.
I wrote him several messages.
Deleted them all before sending.
Pilau to even ask.
Where there’s smoke
there’s not always fire.
Sound the alarms just in case.
Pilau to even ask.
Don’t send the message.
Don’t wait to ask.
It’s the rude beg of truth
the black sky of truthfulness
the cover of black sky.
Mayor Mike could have volunteered
maybe could have remembered
Lahainaluna
Ms. Fellows’ students.
Maybe not.
Pilau to ask.
He’ll make a statement
when the shock wears down.
We’re all frantic healing.
I’ll send one of those messages someday any day now.
Mmmm… malama pono.
Ashes call to him
far louder than any words of mine.
Fire. Storm. Firestorm.
.
He sits under lime green leaves , a sentry covered in armor.
I expect him to protect me with his cast iron body and patinated shell.
His cold hard self still, not able to move in the shade.
Scented lilac permeates the leeway.
Crickets call in the Moon.
My tongue reaches for the rain starting to fall.
He is just a decoration.
I wait for the air to quiet into gray.
and yet, Athena would shed her soul for Tritonis.
I saved my tongue for proper use.
Did I ever want him to save me?
Certainly not a simp as a savior.
A garden lizard, hardened and stern
as my savior?
Prav.
Say it isn’t so.
Clouds are like balls of cotton
but are actually made of linen.
Ollie really likes to look at the clouds
and he will fly among them some day.
Mike, the border collie, told Ollie
y’all goin’ to be swimin’ with the fish.
This would be a rad concept if
thaitin eitilt liom.
I can hear the wind rushing past me
while I taste the salty breeze.
Your rose hips perfume wafts
gently through the air.
Your red hope is to be with us when
we marry even though we do not love each other.
I see golden orbs when I hear your voice, and
taste angel food cake when I touch your skin.
As I see your hard hair, it makes me think
of clouds being like cotton balls.
Image prompt
Mercury Rising
In that dustbowl summer
we learned and relearned again
the musculature of dream.
Bright horizon, future a golden hum.
Heat was a verb we exercised with
no caution; hearts heedless
to colder climates, shifts in wayward weather.
Now a feather floats on a scorched breeze,
a memory alights
and infinity spins on a dime.
While somewhere, millions of miles above
Mercury spins around the sun
it’s burning core visible
on soft summer nights.
In all my wishing well days
it was you
the darkness sang for,
no rusted coin or funneled depth of thought.
Firefly heart, stop, restart.
The circumference of time
a linear knot
we cannot unravel.
But. Bring me back. Je suis desoleé.
In this arid landscape
there is only dust; the detritus
of those summer dreams
whirling devils in the wind,
the bones of what has been
rattling around in my dreams.
While Mercury, still sun-stunned,
drags it’s molten heart in blinding orbit
around the burning sun.
Twenty little poetry projects, after Jim Simmerman and Lexanne leonard
1. Start with the salt
2. Stir up and down, up and down then around 17 times. Slap it twice
3. scatter randomly throughout the poem.
4. Feel the purple crawling up your fingers, the slow cut of murex shells, then pour when it reaches the top
5. Rhiannon, flying in the wind, the slow smoke over Winnipeg
6. Shake it off, shake it, shake it shake it off, shake it all off
7. And rush to pick it up, the small soft body
8. Remember that all words go into poems, even prose, even the badly spelled (sic)
9. Because it belongs there if I said so
10. Coom ben the hoose, hen, coom ben
11. The stinking smoke of far off wildfires glaze the sky, the breakable image of tomorrow
12. but still sweet on my tongue, colours the afternoon, perfumes the day
13. I watch myself without looking, a sly glance from the corner of my eye
14. Change my zoom label to she/he his/her like all the modern kids
15. When I will speak and have them listen, all of them, even the ones I’m talking to in their little tiles
16. Overlapping every corner in their monochrome screens
17. Here! I will stand here, in the corner and sprinkle my hollow cupped pyramidal words as garnish
18. Remember l’esprit d’escalier and go back
19. So that it blinks and blinks again
20. Then fuzzes out, signal lost, sweat drips into my eyes
There I sit in the middle of the room
remember Montauk two weeks ago.
Quiet and empty like this room
just me, my towel, sunscreen, and my chair.
Then company arrived of an unexpected kind.
Seeing water shooting up from the wakes
spurts of ocean spray above the waves,
there were no boats or barges.
The Atlantic Ocean, a giant fish tank
for the largest mammals of the sea.
This school of whales became my company.
Whales washed up dead along Long Island beach shores in recent days,
struck by boats or confused by sounds
from windmills placed inside their homes.
Not here by Ocean Vista’s desolate beach
seagulls and plovers dip in and out of tides
as spouts like sprinklers spray up like fire hoses.
Huge fins appear like they’re dancing on shimmery waves with the reflective surface of sunlight.
This welcome calmness of an empty space reminisces me back to a Montauk moment.
Dearheart
I was young and we
were riding bicycles across Iceland,
ashen land, young men
following me everywhere looking at brown
eyes because they’d never spoken anyone’s
brown I understand that just by
looking delightfully cold at blue heartbeats
crystallized stillness roped off places you can
simply melt inside Blue
Lagoon hot, you simply
melt just by swimming looking up
at blue heartbeats of delightfully cold blue crystal Icelandic sky
she was young, eloquent feet, ballerina soloist, radiant creamy
skin, one of the bluest stars dancing extraordinarily
Iceland blue in the sky blue heatbeats dancing
her eloquent feet deteriorating blue
heartbeats pounds piled on her skin so horrible debilitating
pounds piled on her neck thick with a
stomach roll didn’t even recognize how blue
took hold didn’t recognize how blue took
hold of her extraordinary crystal gift
cold blue broken crystal barre roped off workouts
simply dance melting inside blue crystallized stillness,
simply melts just by dancing, looking up
at the blue heartbeats cold blue crystallized stillness
Hour 3
9/02/2023
“Seawalls…”
California dreamin’
been there, done that.
East and Gulf Coasts…
Japan, other green-riden places…
Norway, Portugal, Crete, Turkey,
Great Britain… and places that aren’t places anymore.
I’ve paused on docks, promontories, battlements, bridges;
in meadows, gardens, pubs, malls;
at empty places, within crowded spaces,
days, nights, mid-naughts – all;
along ship rails, desert dunes, glacier ice,
city curbs, park benches, steam grates, asphalt tangles,
and within church pews and at too many tombstones marking souls.
Each is but a Seawall in my mind’s view.
A place where thoughts coalesce, meander –
wander, wonder
…and flow unbidden,
where dreams fade like steps along the shore
as tides bring “waves” til the eyes …see…
no more.
And sometimes along the way
you share the space – but seldom the moment –
each has their own perceptions needing expressed –
addressed – breaths taken, held, then lost –
til time gives up its ghosts
and life moves past – each now
becomes a “then”.
So many echoes are behind my eyes,
and the years are strewn with “silence”.
Chris
(C) Chris Twyford 9/2/2023