Sunday, April 9th, 2006

Today, I was having trouble writing, so I decided to try a simple writing exercise. I'll present the poems before I explain the excercise. Maybe can can it out on your own.

Changes of Scenery

I: Reverie

So much flows away

Against the dust of the earth,

The intangible weakness of faith,

Sometimes, on purpose,

The stillness seeping in to everything

As I squeeze my programming books

With the anticipation of a thief

With no aim.

II: Babble

And it gets to him just briefly,

This feeling of moment now,

That just under the skin

We are so prone to mistrust

Lies among the skeletons

Inside the tired vault, the empty mind,

A warning tale

Seeming far too real.

III: Anonymous

Some days are worse than others

In the distant map of my dreams,

Keeping under shadow:

"Never heard of him.

There was no one."

But it's the same story in the end,

When you wake in the morning's deep.

IV: Stood Up

You wait at the curb for me,

Brooding and urgent,

An aimless perception

In the booth of a dirty bar

Here under my feet.

So what went wrong

Counting each breath in the sun?

V: Insomnia

I was almost out of patience

Tumbling 'til morning,

Exhausted after laps,

Meditating on the warming breeze,

For the rush of warmth,

And nothing but library whispers

From beyond the dry plains.

VI: Conveyor

Where's the righteous impatience,

Spinning out its fate

Each time he brings one in?

What does it mean? Who cares,

If you haven't paid attention.

Some of us are made for minutia,

But it's just a device: a ruse.

Did you figure it out? It's a very easy exercise designed to increase your awareness of poetic line breaks. You take a small stack of five to ten poems and make a new poem using one line from each poem. For mine, the first line came from my January 1st poem, the next from January 2nd, and so on. There's one poem for each of the first six weeks.

Now, you're supposed to do this exercise with your own poetry, but you could do it with any old book of poetry. Of course, if you use someone else's work, keep it as a personal exercise. Don't distribute.

Monday, April 10th

This poem refers to a painting by artist John Register.

Office

It's always Sunday at the office,

When the artist,

To whom the day of the week is today,

Arrives with his keen eye turned in,

Already finishing the painting in his mind,

Fumbling the sketchpad, the tin of pastels,

From the only car on the street.

From across the desert,

From the moment where the sketchbook

Bullied the orange juice to the booth's edge

And flattened crumbs of dry toast to the table,

He'd been plotting the course of the sun

Through a window that didn't exist

But to a man who didn't exist even more.

In the drawing, there is no sign of him:

No dates marked off on the calendar that doesn't exit.

No paper crumpled in the waste-bin that isn't there.

Just one desk, one chair, and one phone

Turned toward the seat

To make it easier to answer

Despite that it never rings.

But the phone knows less of the days of the week

Than the artist who doesn't care.

The phone waits. It strains to listen to its wires,

Longs for the day He will sit in The chair at The desk

And lift the receiver for something more

Than to check for a working dial tone,

Some news of the world outside.

The man who doesn't exist starts Monday,

Or quit two weeks ago and is yet to be missed,

Or took his vacation to stay at home

With tins of soup and a black and white TV,

A newspaper he gets second hand,

And the sound of the 7 p.m. Eastbound,

Blowing its whistle at the only road through town.

Like the phone, he waits for something to happen

Even on Sunday, as everyday,

The sun blows west and casts the shadow of a bell

Like the shadow of an angel, singing unheard

For the phone that's turned away,

While the train blows east without stopping,

For the imaginary man who never imagines the station.

Tuesday, April 11th

Hiding From Harry

Being a muse

Well versed in the art of theater,

And a goddess certainly too,

She plays a most convincing corpse,

Pale and cold as a statue,

Though some would grumble

That there's no difference there--

Those she favors less frequently--

But not me, no never me.

I fall for it completely,

Writing gibberish on the police report,

No mirror under the breath she has held all day,

Her eyes gone white as her gown

And all of her fading moment by moment

So that by noon, only her chalk outline remains.

The white line giving shape to her fall

Rends the heart with its fateful filigree,

The twirls and flourishes lauding each faint

Of her divinely twisted hair,

The supple arcing race of the stroke behind her absent calf,

And the light lift of the line where the legs were crossed.

And it isn't until I spot the artist's swaggering signature

That I catch on to the ruse and am inspired again,

Reciting a shock of indelicate oaths

So transcendently crude, so despondently rife,

That her perfectly etched chalk ears

Blossom with cadmium flame.

Wednesday, April 12th

Eavesdropping

If the walls have ears,

Then the doorway is a gossip:

Alerting me of your fall down the stairs

I didn't realize we had;

Tattling that your flirty friend

Has turned up the stereo and gone suspiciously still;

Divulging your accuracy with a glock

And the uncanny speed with which you reload;

Warning that the tiger we keep caged by the couch

Is loose and wailing for meat;

Crowing the names of your visitors,

Famous actors, some of whom I was sure were dead;

Reporting your stellar work ethic

As you sit typing away late into the night,

Despite finding you retired and snoring instead.

Thursday, April 13th

Thom Ingram suggested I deviate from my normal "expansive" style and try to write a poem (or series) of small things. Today is the result of my first attempt.

Stains

A smudge of Asian vinaigrette

On the face and knob

Of the silverware drawer.

A skin of fudge

On the linoleum,

Ice cream melted, phased foamy,

And dried rubbery, flat

Before I noticed.

A swarm of dark ovals

Deep within the fibers of my shirt

From one moment of flipping the steaks

With more enthusiasm than care.

A smear of brown fluff

Under Kiley's furry chin

Where some god, presumably Bast,

Must have tested to see

If his lovely stripes were yet dry.

A thing I did without thinking

That makes me wince

As the memory comes unbidden

At the most inappropriate times.

Friday, April 14th

Here's another attempt at "small things."

Purpleclip

It would take me a lifetime,

Bending it again and again

In search of such precision,

A spiral as good as this one

Turned by Chinese robots.

I prefer to think of it, however,

This purple clad paperclip,

As a reed, a straw of latex

Bent by a bent man,

Whose coke-bottle glasses

And gigantic jeweler's lens

Strapped in tandem around

His patch-bald head,

Tow his nose to the bench

So that everywhere he goes

His giant shoes speed

Through a giant's world.

Then, with death-defying grace

He boldly sips molten steel

Into the elegant twists

And spits a breath of steam.

All for 30 cents a day, I bet,

For a thousand smoky smiles.

And for this they call him,

The others in the shop,

Old Dragon, an endearment.

The Old Dragon's wife

Sits stern at the next bench,

Pounding out tiny copper bowls

With a tiny ball-peen hammer

Before welding on their spike.

She scowls each time she hears it--

Old Dragon, Old Dragon--

Hearing in her own mind

Her own endearment instead,

Never mentioned directly to her,

But giggled in the back by new girls

Feeding tubes of ink with a spoon

With new and nimble fingers

And colorful new wraps to wear,

As if looking for husbands

On the factory floor.

And they call her Tacky.

Saturday, April 15th

Another in the series of "small things."

Mew!

Kiley mews at his water dish.

I fill it and he's happy.

He mews at his food dish.

I feed him and he's thrilled.

He mews over a shoelace.

I tease him with it and he's delighted.

He mews from the middle of the room.

I have no idea what he wants

And he doesn't either,

Trotting away as if so say,

"Well, it was worth a try."