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Year: 2010

Looking for Flaws, Hoping to Find Some

April 21, 2010 • • 11 Comments

A student once asked for
something interesting to read.
Something good.
Something you can feel, she said.
Something honest.
Something real.

I asked what that would be like.

There would be misspelled words,
she said, a few bad sentences.
Not sufficient to interfere
with the story, mind you,
but an honest flaw or error
here or there so you’d know
it wasn’t perfect,
wasn’t meant to be.

Just enough to get a glimpse
of the true imperfect person
behind the artifice.

—

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt from Read Write Poem (#21: Perfectly Flawed) provided by Kristen McHenry asks us to consider the idea of perfection. It’s an interesting prompt that reminded me of a conversation I had with a student in one of my sophomore English classes a few years back. Further thoughts about perfection in literature were sparked by an interesting post, poetry by concession, at slow reads, which is very much worth checking out and probably influenced this poem.

The Desert Years

April 19, 2010 • • 4 Comments

We drew maps showing river deltas,
our path predicted by the contours
of our fingerprints, and we followed
our spirals forever away from home.

Where there was water once,
we marked those places on the maps
and gave them names from dreams.

We camped beneath aircraft carriers,
marooned a hundred miles inland,
and spent nights watching our flames

flicker and dance
like tortured acrobats

laughing us to sleep
against the rusted hulks
of ruined navies.

In the mornings, we watched
the sky for clouds or crows
and threw rocks at the sun.

The rains never came.
We moved on.

—

This began as a response to Read Write Poem’s NaPoWriMo prompt # 17: Something Elemental provided by Neil Reid.

The Cattle Egret

April 15, 2010 • • 8 Comments

There’s a swagger in the way the cattle egret walks across the fields of this fenced frontier, wingtips looped into his belt buckle. He won’t talk much at first, but if you get him going he’ll spin stories like country songs—beer drinkin’, cloaca kickin’ and trains beyond the horizon. He’ll tell of blue northers ripping down the plains and the time he lit a fire under a mule that hadn’t moved in two days. He waits while you imagine what a burning mule would smell like and then tells how the mule just moved over a couple feet from the fire and stayed put another two days before movin’ on. Usually, though, he just stares out past the longhorns, dreaming lonely dreams from another time. Maybe he even writes a song or two about the rough and tumble old birds of the past. In the evening, after a long day picking bugs off the backs of settled cows, he sends demos to Nashville and Austin hoping he’ll make it big someday.

glowing orange
the cattle egrets fly off
into the sunset

Sonnet for Ho-Ho’s and Ding-Dongs

April 14, 2010 • • 6 Comments

When I get up, it’s coffee and donuts,
(It won’t be hard to find the death of me)
And more honey on that pile of biscuits,
And, oh Lord, yes, more sugar in my tea.
Daily, I stop for ho-ho’s or ding-dongs;
For my chocolate fix: a Hershey bar.
The convenience store is where I belong,
And I’ll gladly try anything by Mars.
Vegetables look good and green and all,
But processed snacks fulfill my sweetest dreams;
And always at the food court at the mall,
There’s caramel-drizzled fudge-nut ice cream.
I’ll run long endless miles for exercise,
But those miles never match my sugar highs.

—

I wrote this during 4th period today primarily for the amusement of my students. We’re writing sonnets and being the good teacher that I am, I wrote during class as well so they could see me revise it and also as a reminder that poems need not be serious all the time. The meter isn’t quite there, I don’t think, but they got a kick out of it, and it’s always good when they see their teacher doing and therefore valuing whatever they’re working on.

Best to Ignore the Wind

April 13, 2010 • • 6 Comments

he heard the wind proclaim,
it’s not much farther now

saw the killdeer land in a ditch,
its feet running as they met the ground

studied the fading stains of
roadkilled armadillos

threw the bones of the library
on the sidewalk

picked through the oracles

divined messages
from broken patterns
and torn pages on
concrete

knew this all meant something
(knew it so deep it drove him silent)
these revelations he never

understood

—

This is a response the the Read Write Poem Prompt: Secret Codes provided by Carolee Sherwood.

Starghazaling (A Thousand Evolutions)

April 12, 2010 • • 4 Comments

We walked long hours following sacred stars
and watched for signs of certain darkened stars.

The moon rose thin and razor-like, slicing
a course across the meridian stars.

You traced the secret constellation lines
on my homemade maps of fallen stars.

I followed the moon’s trek across the void
and through the gaseous graves of ruined stars.

You talked about explosions bursting with
a thousand evolutions born in stars.

The atoms in our fingertips trembled
as we pondered our origins in stars.

Our hands met as our thoughts lingered on strange
dim memories of long forgotten stars.

I looked into your eyes—saw new worlds and
the echoes of eternity in stars.

Shower

April 9, 2010 • • 5 Comments

Lowering storm clouds,
the grey rain intensifies.
Everyone rushes to
stand under the canopy
& listen while drainpipes rattle.

—

Attempted tanka for napowrimo today. This weekend, I’ll just be doing micro-poems at a gnarled oak. They cross post at Identi.ca and Twitter for anyone who is into those things.

While Sitting in Church

April 8, 2010 • • 9 Comments

I didn’t hear a word the priest said,
but I saw the vultures circling

rising

in the air above the lake
outside the windows
beyond the altar.

Things looked clearer out there,
and it made perfect sense to see

God skipping church that day
just to ride thermals with the angels.

—

This isn’t exactly a NaPoWriMo poem. It’s one I wrote almost a year ago, but I decided to come back to it and do some reworking. For one I wrote today, you’ll have to visit a gnarled oak for my daily napowrimo micro-poem.