NaPM April 17 2016

[milo]

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month. 


Topic 17: Leanne thinks "rubber" would make a great prompt.  Write a poem inspired by rubber, rubbers, or things that bounce.

Form : any
Line requirements: 8 lines or more

Questions?

[just mercedes]

Dear Dorothy Dix


My husband has a fetish for rubber.
He says it enhances his enjoyment of sex
in the same way my vibrator enhances
my sexual pleasure. I'm not enthusiastic
about wearing rubber but once in a while
I indulge him. Recently he contacted
a rubber society. He spends evenings there.
They have dinner and nothing goes on
apart from wearing conventional clothes
made of latex. I'm unhappy about this –
what should I do?

Let your husband enjoy his fetish.
Since you don't like wearing latex
it makes sense that he fulfils that fantasy
in a club. However, it's important to reach
agreement about his club activities in your lives.
Negotiate frequency of attendance, and which
sexual behaviours are acceptable. In some fetish clubs
there are events where sexual expression ranges
from public masturbation to group sex. I'm not
suggesting that your husband is deceiving you
but new club members aren't always aware of
the erotic potential, or the opportunity for
networking. Fetish clubs provide support
and information for members, as well as
fun opportunities for "play". Go along, and learn
more about who, in the erotic sense,
your husband really is.




A found poem from a Pamela Stephenson Connolly column about Sexual Healing.

[RiverNotch]

Wait, isn't it topic 17 now?

[ellajam]

Wait, isn't it topic 17 now?

Must be your eyes. And don't pick on milo, he's all dizzy running on JM/Leanne time.

[Tracy Mitchell]

  Thanks Milo

Truly a hideous poetry prompt -
the seventeenth stinger in a row.
No simple similes are conjuring,
no mediocre metaphor knocking
down the door - let me in, look at me!
No rebounding allegory - nothing but
bikini galoshes and cheap jokes
galore.  Geez, even the search
for rhyme leaves me blubbering. Nada.
Nothing. My depression grows its
own toes in rows.  So recourse it is
to the never-fail go-to option - google
image search. Poetry-plugging images  
are my Holy Grail - images with some tail
shouting Hail! Hail! from the rail.
[Geez, I need a pail].   The search starts
with the word rubber.  Up come pictures
of tires, treads, then rubber sheets, rubber
ducks, rubber rubber, rubber, then a rubber
blow-up girl friend, and finally google
comes around to show pictures of boobs.  
The second search is for the word rubbers,
which brings up trojans and magnums,
color choices  and sheep skin, ribs, and again,
with a final certainty, settles into shots
of . . . you guessed it: boobs.  I don’t need
to tell you where the third and last search,
this one for things that bounce quickly lead. 
Thanks, google. I can report I feel much better,
lightened, uplifted.  My depression now wears
racoon slippers.  A rubber duck bounces
on my lap.  My blow-up girl friend
refreshes my bourbon.  My poem
still sucks, but who cares?

[bedeep]

LOL! Teagan! I was just about to use the google-fu approach.

(Now what am I gonna do?)

[RiverNotch]

I'm hoping I succeeded in this, making something that's neither funny nor sexual, as well as something super serious and political.

RUBBER

The pathologist poured wax plaster
over the peaceful face of the woman
who drowned smiling in the Seine,
afterwards saying, "Her beauty was breathtaking,
and showed few signs of distress
at the time of passing -- so bewitching,
that I knew beauty as such
must be preserved."
If he lived now, he would have poured latex, instead.

Juan Luna, meanwhile, used oil
paint, splashing and pouring it onto the canvas
like light striking a piece of film,
to create his masterpiece, the "Spoliarium",
apparently a thinly veiled protest
against Spanish oppression.
Some of us now would use a camera,
arranging the composition on a stage
with a dozen living models, but most others,
knowing to achieve his same expressive effect,
would prefer acrylic.

Here in the Philippines, his magnum opus
hangs in the main gallery
of the National Museum, where the gigantic scene
of gladiators cloaked in chiaroscuro
pulling away their dead for the next entertainment
would be the first work to greet visitors' eyes.
I've only ever seen it in the pictures,
though this girl I like once told me
seeing it through a screen
was completely different
from observing it in person,
intimately, feeling one's breath
bounce back from the canvas.
I nodded, and showed her the next week
my coffee table book on the Tretyakov.

Sometimes I wonder why I've seen
all the sights of other countries,
but not my own. And then I remember:
her father owns a rubber plantation
down south, in Davao. Just west,
in Cotabato, rice farmers
a few weeks ago went to rally
against a governor who refused to give them food
in the middle of a famine, not knowing
the reserves were already being sold
in the markets of Manila. Their bodies
still lie on the streets, I imagine,
their brothers too afraid to pull them away.
Nothing ever changes.

---

Stick it to the man, Teagan! YEAH

---

Btw, the quote there is genuine, but wikipedia doesn't say from what article, so I'm just gonna link wikipedia for that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Inconnue_de_la_Seine

[Tracy Mitchell]

LOL! Teagan! I was just about to use the google-fu approach.

(Now what am I gonna do?)

I don't know, bedeep. It turns out bourbon and rubber ducks work for me.

Thanks RiverNotch. Love your poem, and not just because it is a real poem.

[LunaDeLore]

The commercial rubber

Protect your loved one
From wild sperms
And other STDs
On the rampage

Buy Trojan for latex strength
And dependability
Today

Tomorrow
Your partner
Will love you for it

Even if that familiar
Lifestyle lambskin
is missed.

[bedeep]

Dystopia With Rubber

On duty at the Apocalypse Cafe
I find a pack of rubbers
in the loo.

No I don't; I pretend I do.
Finding goodies
from the bye-bye world
is just a sweet dream.
Sometimes it hurts
to remember but
sometimes it's worse
to forget.

Time is rubbery now,
days and nights bounce or stretch
depending on who walks in the door
or whether anyone does.

We got calypso on the jukebox!
We use one quarter
someone found.
The jukebox runs
on whatever we can burn.
So far anyway.

The air always smells
of burnt rubber, too.
I guess rubber's
the damn theme of my days
in this here Apocalypse Cafe.

We do bounce back
but only because
it's that or die,
and dying looks so hard to do.
It's some final stiff deal
struck mean and clean
with no wiggle room
for mind-changers,
no jiggle room for Jesus
neither, you're rubbed out.
Nothing rubbery in that.

So I guess this is
our only chance.
But hey, here we are!
Wanna dance?

---

RiverNotch, I love what you did. I was thinking about rubber plantations and doing something along those lines but TBH I am too lazy today, and glad to let others do some of the heavy lifting. So to speak.

[Todd]

The Three Wives of Chuck Taine

I married her after she died,
a widower on my honeymoon,
not something you easily bounce
back from. She told me, and
she told me of the android,
and the light that peeled back
her skin like an opening flower,
till the petals frayed, burned away.
How she walked together on a field of stars,
looking over her own shoulder
to where all things end,
each footfall more distant than the last,
till she separated from herself,
had to walk alone, had to stop,
rebound to another path
with her center missing.
Now she lies on each side of me,
and I bury her again, and adjust
my shape to fill the well
of our grief and joy.

[Leanne]

When I was eighteen I was claimed
by latex attached to grunt and sweat,
and not much else. It wasn't hard
to peel me away from I taught you your
ABCs, I know what you'll never be.

Each day, a centimetre more
would pour over my skin. The layers
grew thicker, less sensitive,
comfortingly confining.

On the day I couldn't breathe,
I was reborn. There was I,
flaws polished out, hard and cold
against the bed. One of us
left; but I have no way of telling
which of us it was.

[Tiger the Lion]

I got stupid this morning
and started reading inspirational memes
‘til I threw up in my lap.
 
I don’t want to bounce back.
 
I want to wallow with Morrissey,
drink wine and wail
like I just stubbed a toe.
 
The opiate is hurt
and I’m not ready to kick
myself when I’m down.

I don't want to bounce.
 
And who do I bounce to?
Another her?
Another you?

[Leanne]

Just gonna stop you, I think I've heard that one before

Nobody better to wallow with, frankly. Mr Shankly.

[Tiger the Lion]

Just gonna stop you, I think I've heard that one before

Nobody better to wallow with, frankly.  Mr Shankly.

One of those days. I can feel the soil falling over my head. 

[milo]

Brianna Black had rubber skin
and in our class she fit right in
for we were too absorbed to ask.
She also wore a rubber mask.
Her rubber teeth, too soft to chew
and so she didn't bite. A few
rude boys might stop to beg
for her to show a rubber leg
or maybe on the way to class
they'd try to palm her rubber ass.
Nothing bothered Brianna Black.
when she was down, she bounced right back.

[Keith]

Donor

You opened me up
as if to take a kidney,
from front to back
a perfect curve.

You leave me
until I start to heal
naked and cold.
But your claws
keep finding me,
just deep enough
so you can drink
but not enough to kill.

I hear your approach
and offer you my torso.
How long will you keep
me this way,
before I only heal myself
so you can cut new flesh,
how long must we do this
in silence.

[Achebe]

The motel in Dubbo (with a passing reference to rubber and Erthona's poem)

When the theme is 'rubber' people naturally think of sex
but poets try to be clever, and discourse about other
things only tangentially related to rubber
like a children's model Tyrannosaurus Rex.
I won't do that here, instead 
I'll talk to you, reader, about a dirty little motel in Dubbo, bed
and breakfast, 10 rooms about 5x5x3, such are its specs.
At reception, sits a little white girl in a minidress
(everyone should dress so, who doesn't have hairy legs)
behind her, a ridiculous stuffed egret 
with a rubber beak that's a refashioned dildo.
Behind the bird hides a dark secret - 
since the owner went missing last fall
no one bothered to search for him bricked up in a wall.
He's alive, but bereft of a meaningful occupation
since January has gone into aestivation.
It doesn't help that the little white girl flashing her long
legs (everyone should flash so, who doesn't have a schlong)
has cranked up the heater for her little white butt to bake
thereby ensuring that the owner doesn't wake.

Meanwhile, a hundred miles away, an undiscovered party
of Aborigines of the Kurri Kurri clan are stealing upon a power station
on Lake Macquarie. For years they were dreaming in a cavern 'neath the lake
when a longwall broke their slumber. So dispatching the miners they walked out the adit
and found their sacred lands overrun with rabbits. This they didn't like
and turning their ire on the Eraring power station
seek to avenge the ruin of their nation
on the Hunter turnpike.

In a hour or two, they will rain down their woomeras on the maintenance crew
and trip the boiler, which will send a blackout rolling through country NSW,
upset the anti-coal lobby plastering 'likes' on Facebook pages 
extolling the lifestyle of simpler stone ages,
turn off the heater, whence the little white girl will put on her habit
(she's a nun, really), then hear the wall whisper, its owner awake
asking for water, anything really, for a few months' thirst to slake.
But she will think it's the devil, his whisper the rustle of a snake,
and shoot a bullet through the brickwork, and the brain of the owner shall grab it.

[bedeep]

^ Wins.

[Leanne]

If that's the T-rex statue that's in Coonabarabran, that might be my dildo...