Need a quick fix for that sonnet your stuck on?
There are a few words you can throw into
any line to make it more poetic.
Try "sky" or "wind", "leaves" or "flowers."
The stars always give infinitude.
Oceans, trees, clouds, and the moon
can make any line soar. Birds are the poet's
best way to talk about himself. Fire is surefire,
be it a roaring flame or one quiet little candle.
("Little" is a word that can work wonders)
Most of all, the heart.
The heart must always be mentioned.
The heart flows with the finest wine.
You can pair it with anything and it's good.
Rattling heart, rickety heart,
beefsteak heart, the heart as an ocean.
Watch as I put these techniques into effect:
The Moon makes
a sky of cool fire.
As birds moan
oceans of stars
my beastly heart
again goes trundling.
See? Pretty fuckin' poetic.
Oh, also, sunsets and sunrises.
Anything nature does really.
The poet is supposed to be alone.
Nature gives him something to talk about.
Showing posts with label flowers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flowers. Show all posts
25 March 2012
17 August 2011
Ophelia
Ever since you were
in that play with flowers
growing from your hair
and one of them,
the white one, fell
from your coffin
to the blacktop
and the rain came over it like boots
and the boots came over it like rain...
What a death
they wrote for you! The human flower
crying yourself down the stream
You couldn't sing but boy could you cry!
I’ve never seen anybody
cry so much, not even
in real life
It cracked our hearts
for a while but got annoying
and soon we disowned our feelings
like old bread.
I loved the way your dresses fell
I still hear your song
and every flower you cast down
(
they’re just props but they mean to me
what he said they mean)
You untangled death and blew new breath
in her lungs,
joining the others
who've put bodies over that soul,
new flowers on the Bard’s old tree
By the end the stage was a churchyard
and we yawned and clapped
walking with the dead
as a tree is itself
upside down
roots in the air
branches in the ground
I left the night into the opposite stars
thinking what a life death may be!
in that play with flowers
growing from your hair
and one of them,
the white one, fell
from your coffin
to the blacktop
and the rain came over it like boots
and the boots came over it like rain...
What a death
they wrote for you! The human flower
crying yourself down the stream
You couldn't sing but boy could you cry!
I’ve never seen anybody
cry so much, not even
in real life
It cracked our hearts
for a while but got annoying
and soon we disowned our feelings
like old bread.
I loved the way your dresses fell
I still hear your song
and every flower you cast down
(
they’re just props but they mean to me
what he said they mean)
You untangled death and blew new breath
in her lungs,
joining the others
who've put bodies over that soul,
new flowers on the Bard’s old tree
By the end the stage was a churchyard
and we yawned and clapped
walking with the dead
as a tree is itself
upside down
roots in the air
branches in the ground
I left the night into the opposite stars
thinking what a life death may be!
15 October 2010
Train-train
The world is rolling around one more time,
giving me another chance to do the things I’ve
successfully deferred every day so far.
I go to the market
and a girl climbs into my eyes like they do every couple hours.
Reasons to fall assemble easily:
because of the way she’s smearing jelly
between two cookies with a dull, shiny knife,
because of the way she almost kisses the glass display case
when she breaths on it to clean it,
because of the way the flowers in black plastic barrels
surround her, eager to be gathered up and delivered
to her arms. (If it’s at all about love, it’s as much about
ferrying the flowers to their respective destinies)
Two models sit near me
looking just like how models are supposed to look, but somehow
they are not attractive to me, their beauty too flagrant a reminder
of the imbalance of things. I suspect I am not the kind
of man they require and silently rescind myself.
I prefer the jelly girl,
whose beauty is subdued by a kind of helplessness. She shares an
oppression with me, being meek enough to have arrived behind that counter,
at the mercy of the clock spinning her toward a boredom of her own choosing.
I should talk to her. Instead, I watch the
steam rising from my coffee, continually refreshing
the idea of death, which remains unconvincing.
In case I’m wrong, I should talk to her.
A hundred million years from now
none of it will have mattered
as right now all of it matters so much.
Every discarded moment piles into
an ever-rising crest of Now.
Now is here. That much is clear.
Go talk to her. Go talk to her. Go talk to her
(My mind is always giving an ineffectual pep talk,
I seem to be a sightseer touring all the various guilt trips of life).
I can’t think my way into the brief lapse of thought
we call courage. I’m entrenched. I've done all I can
to make myself impervious to chance,
to ensure safe, undisrupted passage down the corridor of each day.
I’ve plied my aloneness into solitude,
where shrewder ones have learned to
accompany it with people.
The familiar, gloomy conclusion
revises itself for today’s dilemma:
If I talk to her, it won’t make me any less alone.
Once again I have bartered bravery and the dim possibility
of elation for the patchy cloak of thought.
Starting home, I am pleased to feel
my feet hijack my body. They take me
on a detour by her booth.
I clutch an alibi: I’m only looking at the cakes.
I pretend to look at the cakes
while actually looking at the cakes
when I feel her walk up
(I've endowed her with such magnitude).
I brave a look at her.
She smiles at me.
I may have twitched
something back before fleeing.
I cherish the smile all day on into the night.
It justified the whole thing somehow.
She smiled at me. I've seen it.
Tomorrow I’ll say everything to her.
giving me another chance to do the things I’ve
successfully deferred every day so far.
I go to the market
and a girl climbs into my eyes like they do every couple hours.
Reasons to fall assemble easily:
because of the way she’s smearing jelly
between two cookies with a dull, shiny knife,
because of the way she almost kisses the glass display case
when she breaths on it to clean it,
because of the way the flowers in black plastic barrels
surround her, eager to be gathered up and delivered
to her arms. (If it’s at all about love, it’s as much about
ferrying the flowers to their respective destinies)
Two models sit near me
looking just like how models are supposed to look, but somehow
they are not attractive to me, their beauty too flagrant a reminder
of the imbalance of things. I suspect I am not the kind
of man they require and silently rescind myself.
I prefer the jelly girl,
whose beauty is subdued by a kind of helplessness. She shares an
oppression with me, being meek enough to have arrived behind that counter,
at the mercy of the clock spinning her toward a boredom of her own choosing.
I should talk to her. Instead, I watch the
steam rising from my coffee, continually refreshing
the idea of death, which remains unconvincing.
In case I’m wrong, I should talk to her.
A hundred million years from now
none of it will have mattered
as right now all of it matters so much.
Every discarded moment piles into
an ever-rising crest of Now.
Now is here. That much is clear.
Go talk to her. Go talk to her. Go talk to her
(My mind is always giving an ineffectual pep talk,
I seem to be a sightseer touring all the various guilt trips of life).
I can’t think my way into the brief lapse of thought
we call courage. I’m entrenched. I've done all I can
to make myself impervious to chance,
to ensure safe, undisrupted passage down the corridor of each day.
I’ve plied my aloneness into solitude,
where shrewder ones have learned to
accompany it with people.
The familiar, gloomy conclusion
revises itself for today’s dilemma:
If I talk to her, it won’t make me any less alone.
Once again I have bartered bravery and the dim possibility
of elation for the patchy cloak of thought.
Starting home, I am pleased to feel
my feet hijack my body. They take me
on a detour by her booth.
I clutch an alibi: I’m only looking at the cakes.
I pretend to look at the cakes
while actually looking at the cakes
when I feel her walk up
(I've endowed her with such magnitude).
I brave a look at her.
She smiles at me.
I may have twitched
something back before fleeing.
I cherish the smile all day on into the night.
It justified the whole thing somehow.
She smiled at me. I've seen it.
Tomorrow I’ll say everything to her.
02 December 2008
The Wine Key
His desk was an emerald city of empty wine bottles, with one serving as a vase for a long dead rose. All the water had been sucked up or evaporated and the stem was stiff and crooked but still had little pricks and thorns sticking out.
He was not picky about wine and had an unopened bottle of 2005 Australian Shiraz ($6 at the gas station) sitting next to a plaster effigy of a religious figure. He couldn't tell you who exactly, but his Uncle said it was St. Joseph, and people commonly buried his statue in their yard if they wanted to sell their house. He took the bottle into the kitchen but couldn't remember which drawer the wine key was in because it was one of those utensils of very specific purpose, but vague genus and species. He looked in the silverware drawer, but it wouldn't be in the carefully shaped trinity of slots in the tray and he didn't see it in the little trough next to it where the wooden spoons and ice cream scoops and spatulas all ended up. It wasn't lurking underneath with the saw-toothed knives and graters. He looked in the drawer with the utensils made for bigger jobs; ladles, cleavers etc. and amongst the add-on pieces for various electronic apparatus' (beaters, blenders, bowls), but he could not find the key.
Wine Key. What an appropriate name! he thought. It unlocks a whole other world to you; A world of squashed grapes and finely chosen adjectives, of breathy, poorly thought out declarations of love, of headaches; A world of years or centuries of dirt and rot and wisdom.
He didn't know how on earth one would open a wine bottle without a key. It seemed like a fairly dumb business decision, to only sell wine to people who could afford a key, but then he thought the cheaper wines all come with the more user friendly twist off cap. Could he bite the foil seal off? By god, he might have no alternative. He picked up a steak knife and thought about the logistics of prying the cork with it. He figured he could probably push the cork down to bob in the purple sea if he had no other choice. He looked in all the drawers many times hoping the key would appear, even the ones filled with phone books and take out menus and rusted batteries. Maybe he could just break the bottle off at the neck, like they did when they christened a boat, and carefully decant the wine into a separate container, an empty vase or an old milk carton.
Then he spotted his brother's tool box laying on the counter. His brother collected arcade machines and their living room was something of a workshop where he Frankensteined old Ninja Gaiden cabinets to Bad Dudes joysticks and Street Fighter II: Turbo motherboards. The toolbox was open and he saw the spiraled metal probiscis of the drill sticking out.
He grabbed the drill and pumped the trigger. The bit squealed and spun around and he felt joy rush through him. He pressed the tip to the soft cork of the wine bottle and the drill ground through with ease. He popped the cork out with a deeply satisfying "thunk" and took a swig.
He opened the cabinet to find that all of their glasses were dirty. They didn't have any proper wine glasses, but their commemorative Muppet and Wreslemania cups were all in the sink brimming with a green stew of who-knows-what-refuse amongst the pans and stink of rotten tuna. He looked in another cabinet and found a measuring cup with a stout. He took it down, poured himself 100 mL of wine and went back to his desk.
He was not picky about wine and had an unopened bottle of 2005 Australian Shiraz ($6 at the gas station) sitting next to a plaster effigy of a religious figure. He couldn't tell you who exactly, but his Uncle said it was St. Joseph, and people commonly buried his statue in their yard if they wanted to sell their house. He took the bottle into the kitchen but couldn't remember which drawer the wine key was in because it was one of those utensils of very specific purpose, but vague genus and species. He looked in the silverware drawer, but it wouldn't be in the carefully shaped trinity of slots in the tray and he didn't see it in the little trough next to it where the wooden spoons and ice cream scoops and spatulas all ended up. It wasn't lurking underneath with the saw-toothed knives and graters. He looked in the drawer with the utensils made for bigger jobs; ladles, cleavers etc. and amongst the add-on pieces for various electronic apparatus' (beaters, blenders, bowls), but he could not find the key.
Wine Key. What an appropriate name! he thought. It unlocks a whole other world to you; A world of squashed grapes and finely chosen adjectives, of breathy, poorly thought out declarations of love, of headaches; A world of years or centuries of dirt and rot and wisdom.
He didn't know how on earth one would open a wine bottle without a key. It seemed like a fairly dumb business decision, to only sell wine to people who could afford a key, but then he thought the cheaper wines all come with the more user friendly twist off cap. Could he bite the foil seal off? By god, he might have no alternative. He picked up a steak knife and thought about the logistics of prying the cork with it. He figured he could probably push the cork down to bob in the purple sea if he had no other choice. He looked in all the drawers many times hoping the key would appear, even the ones filled with phone books and take out menus and rusted batteries. Maybe he could just break the bottle off at the neck, like they did when they christened a boat, and carefully decant the wine into a separate container, an empty vase or an old milk carton.
Then he spotted his brother's tool box laying on the counter. His brother collected arcade machines and their living room was something of a workshop where he Frankensteined old Ninja Gaiden cabinets to Bad Dudes joysticks and Street Fighter II: Turbo motherboards. The toolbox was open and he saw the spiraled metal probiscis of the drill sticking out.
He grabbed the drill and pumped the trigger. The bit squealed and spun around and he felt joy rush through him. He pressed the tip to the soft cork of the wine bottle and the drill ground through with ease. He popped the cork out with a deeply satisfying "thunk" and took a swig.
He opened the cabinet to find that all of their glasses were dirty. They didn't have any proper wine glasses, but their commemorative Muppet and Wreslemania cups were all in the sink brimming with a green stew of who-knows-what-refuse amongst the pans and stink of rotten tuna. He looked in another cabinet and found a measuring cup with a stout. He took it down, poured himself 100 mL of wine and went back to his desk.
15 July 2008
Communion
Everybody else in the yard sings Don’t Stop Believin’
though they don’t know the words.
They are looking for the magic.
We are all looking for the magic.
Some find it through drugs, or religion,
some through art, some
sports or music.
Some through love.
Wings aflutter, alone or together,
we are all beating
our way up to God.
The Summer air is charged
with static electricity
or maybe it’s streaming
through my veins.
Touch ignites my skin.
I can never tell if the spark
comes from me or the girl.
I guess we made it together.
A flower petal drops into
my glass of water and
I drink it up.
though they don’t know the words.
They are looking for the magic.
We are all looking for the magic.
Some find it through drugs, or religion,
some through art, some
sports or music.
Some through love.
Wings aflutter, alone or together,
we are all beating
our way up to God.
The Summer air is charged
with static electricity
or maybe it’s streaming
through my veins.
Touch ignites my skin.
I can never tell if the spark
comes from me or the girl.
I guess we made it together.
A flower petal drops into
my glass of water and
I drink it up.
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