Erasure

That was a tricky monkey!

Exorcisms of mind

 
The womb of art is mind

The gods

Are human intelligence

Minds:

Gods, behind the scenes

Day 9: palinode

A palinode is a retraction of an earlier poem. It would have been neater to do this with a poem I already wrote for napo this year, but I couldn’t make it work. So I've written a reyraction to a poem I wrote as a teenager instead (largerly cos I have changed my mind on it over the years). The teen poem is first and the retraction second

No Compromise
I won't compromise, I won't compromise at all
I will fly and I will soar
I will touch the stars
And I will pocket them
And if I fall, then the ground will break my bones
But understand the ground
Is only there
To stop you falling further

A Compromise
I will compromise, there is no weakness
In learning how to swim
Flowing with the currents
Took me to sideways places
Flexible and motile, darting, changing
The stars reflected all around -
Suspended in my element
There are more directions
Than simply up and down

Day 8:money

Money

Money makes the world go round and rather
Than stop its spin and have the plates fall
It's time to swallow all my foolish dreams and
Grow up tall and hunt for money in the bushes
And the bayou and the monied monkey haunts
Lay out wires across the pathways of the jungle
To catch me wild money, tumbling into pits
I dugged in levy floors and covered with an inch
Of bracken - wild money howling lowd and lewd
In earthen holes with wide eyed owls and snakes
Get me down that twelve-bore-wide-boy
Today we hunt for money perched on trees
Flying green across the moon. Catch it
Stun it. Put it in a zoo. Maybe it isn't money
That I'm thinking of -- but parrots, or wasps
Actually this poem isn't about money, but
Something else entirely -- so there.

Day five : Emily Dickinson rewrite

Regrettably I know huge swarths of Emily Dickinson by heart.   479:Because I could not stop for death, has always bothered me
This parody would work better a little longer (something needs to be said about her bloody tippet for a start) , but I'm racing to catch up with the prompts.

Because I Could not stop for Death

Because I could not stop for Death
I became a zombie bride --
And spent the rest of time
Riding shotgun by his side

The horses heads went onwards
Racing towards the sun
He repeated every joke he knew
-- Each and every one

Forever dragged forever
I bored of him -- he tired of me
I wish I'd chosen quiet death
-- Not this eternity

Belated Day 3 : fourteener (not iambic heptameter, cos I can't do meter)

Black Venn

These blackened cliffs are made of mud and walking to the ocean,
And so unspill with every step the unremembered dead;
Thrown out -- like breaths, the memories of a shallow sea,
That pooled in lapping silence o'er this tepid shelf of life.
All brought to fecund flower in one vital summer's heat
That lasted for a chron; two hundred million years ago
Bouyant with benthonic grace in the Tethys dying swell -

-- Here the bold Atlantic came to birth and rude aborning
Ripped continents apart. Opened with a midwife's knife
The mid atlantic ridge strides high, splits plates asunder
And sets land sailing, breaking, drifting, dancing to the north.
Submerged, subsumed, growing, scaling, dipping, twisting, changing.
Rising from the depths,  climbing from the ocean that obscured,
Waters fall before them and these cliffs walk up towards sky.

Oceans find new paths; families and orders rise and fall;
Birds wheel noisy in the heavens, fish drift quiet in shoals.
Deserts race with earnest drought, blink with angry heat, blow out, die;
And softened summers bend their backs to winter's frantic scolds,
And deep within these banks are laid the bones of creatures strange
Who shall not swim these seas again, whose days are long gone past;
Whose memories are faded save for those the black cliffs hold;

Walking, burdened with time: they pace slowly, surely onwards
To an ocean born of change, disruptive of their aeon.
They bear no malice, merely old memories to unload;
Spewing forth the dead upon the sand -- their own digested skin
Tasted and spat out by the ever hungry churning waves;
They walk, they pace, they stumble towards the ancient new
Spill forth their sacrifice, bend down before the present.
Proud in these final dying moments. They forget --  release

Day 2.5: stars

We live in a galaxy of birth
In a cut glass night of expectation
Exhaling breath in crystal shards
We looked up
And saw the ribbon of the Milky Way
Bold against the sky
And rich with nebulae and birth

Noisy with the chatter of creation
In nurseries of gas and matter
Protons fuse and burst and stars ignite
There are stars up there whose light
We'll never see --- stars just born
Radiant and racing towards a present
Ten thousand years away

There are stars there died before
We took our mother's milk
And trod on earth -- stars that burnt
In one long fury, blazed with angry light
And guttered out. Long dead.
Sending ghostlight from their past
But brilliant in this moment

Exhaling breath in crystal shards
Above us weaved the Milky Way
We fused and burnt a memory
Of a moment. Ghostlit in our heads
Actions lead to deeds we'll never see
Radiant and racing towards a present
On a cut glass night of expectation

Napowrimo Day 2: a negation

A negation

I was not “yours” --
A person cannot own a person
The best you could've hoped for
Was mutual support

I was not a “goddess”
This does not distress me
I never longed for deity
My feet were never made of clay
But walked the earth on flesh

They felt like pounded meat
In those new red sandals
You said you so admired
And my steps were “small and even”
Because I was hobbling in pain

I am not a “classic beauty”
I look a little like my father
And I have my mother's nose
A sculptor would not feel the need
To map my face in stone

And even in verse you gloss
Over my particulars
Save for my “raven locks”
And that was dye
A fact you should have known

I was always just myself
Why should I be compared
To someone else?
Venus was a slut, and
Helen had a lousy time
All things considered
-- As for Callistrata?
I think you made her up.

No great tragedy rendered us asunder
I would have traveled with you longer
But our paths diverged.
Your company was easy
But we never climbed
The heights of passion.
That was written later
In revisions of your press

Finally, I would like it
If you recalled these verses
As my husband might find out.
                       

NAPOWRIMO DAY 1 (prompt: I guess it's too late)

I guess it's too late to get my purse now the bus has gone and I am on it
My keys, my phone, my credit cards left sitting strange on some car bonnet
I guess it's too late to take a breath, unquench my rage, unvent my spleen
Better to have my worldly goods, than tell some crap cyclist what I mean
I guess it's too late to leave on time and catch the bus that leaves at eight
And miss the pavement cycling freak who knocked me flat outside my gate
I guess it's too late to pour again , unspill the coffee, unstain the shirt
And then not have to change again cos I put on one that's smeared with dirt
I guess it's too late to go back to sleep and wake again without the hurt
That churned within my sleeping mind, so my first words were words of hurt
I guess it's too late to start again. I guess it's too late to start again
It's far too late to start again

                                                 It's never too late to start again
It’s never too late for anything. To breathe and pause and start again
Rub down the bruises and numb the pain. It’s never too late to start again
Cancel the cards and recut the keys, accept the blow from insurance fees
Make all the calls and fix what you can, leave all the rest -- it can go hang
It’s never too late for anything, the day’s what you make it at anytime