NaPM April 20 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 20: Rivernotch would like to see a poem inspired by watching a neighbors yard through the fence or jumping into their pool so write a poem about that or inspired by voyeurism.

Form : any
Line requirements: 8 lines or more

Questions?

[just mercedes]

I saw heaven while stealing lemons from my neighbour


Full moon had flooded our yards with light
that showed no colours, just shapes of grey
and deep shadows where something moved.
Above his lawn an oval shape shimmered
like a ripple in the air. I could still see
his garden through it. There was another scene
behind it, or in front of it, at the same time,
as if I looked through a window into some other
time and place, where colours bloomed in lines
and waves, merged and blended, on the verge
of becoming, then gently dropped, and dispersed.
Myriad points of connections flared
as the coloured waves passed, and music
built and fell in unearthly union as if
I looked into the workings of the universe
and it breathed with my pulse, my breath.
Mesmerized, I walked towards it, and tripped
my neighbour’s motion-sensing security light.
The shape seemed to contract in pain, fizzing
like salt on a snail, and vanished.
I turned back. I had lost my taste
for my neighbour’s lemons. The purring
of the perfect universe
was gone.

[Achebe]

Will be back

[Todd]

Predictable Patterns
 
On Tuesdays, you wear red when he comes
to your home. He presses you against
the semi-opened blinds. Your neck tilts
back, mouth open.
 
On Wednesdays, you wear black
for me, intricate lace up your legs
that I trace with fingertips on the fog
of my window.
 
On Thursdays, you shut the blinds.
It is a death, not knowing.
 
I place my palms against
the frame of your window.
The house breathes beneath me.
 
On Fridays, you return
wearing nothing. It is a sour taste
to see, and then see everything.
What is left?
 
On Saturdays, he takes you
for a long weekend,
as if he owns you. What I do
is a sort of theft, I imagine.

[Achebe]

beautiful, Todd

[Todd]

Thank you Achebe

[Tiger the Lion]

Predictable Patterns
 
On Tuesdays, you wear red when he comes
to your home. He presses you against
the semi-opened blinds. Your neck tilts
back, mouth open.
 
On Wednesdays, you wear black
for me, intricate lace up your legs
that I trace with fingertips on the fog
of my window.
 
On Thursdays, you shut the blinds.
It is a death, not knowing.
 
I place my palms against
the frame of your window.
The house breathes beneath me.
 
On Fridays, you return
wearing nothing. It is a sour taste
to see, and then see everything.
What is left?
 
On Saturdays, he takes you
for a long weekend,
as if he owns you. What I do
is a sort of theft, I imagine.

Todd, you wrote the same poem I was working on. - Only better. I'll start again. 

[LunaDeLore]

Thank you Achebe

It is really quit good Todd...

[Tracy Mitchell]

Summer Night in Calumet

Behind the bench, beneath a shrub
they grope.  Either turpentine or whisky
streaks her flesh.

Further back from the streetlight
a man fastens his fly.

A girl crawls near enough
to snap a picture of all three.

Skin reflects
in the camera’s catch, catches
in the camera’s throat.

[Keith]

Following the hay wain

We found the Shire horse smashed,
his leather straps and wooden cart
a hollow casualty of another late night row.
He stayed at home while she went out
and came home legless, dropped off by a
different car each week.

"She's all fur coat and no knickers"
mum used to say, and then look at dad
as though he was a dog being trained
not to eat biscuits.

The morning after the night before,
found four young boys sitting on top
of our garage roof, pubescent in anticipation.
Beno had been chosen by natural selection
to go to the phone box on the corner
several minutes before.
The neighbours phone sat on a window sill
right next to the driveway
and was hidden from view,
unless you were on our garage roof.

It started to ring, each burst tingled with tension.
her stage was set and the curtains were up,
the whole audience was holding its breath,
fledglings perched on the edge of the nest
ready for their first flight.
On the tenth ring she stepped naked into the light.
Four voices in barbershop precision trailed off a,
fuuuuck mmme just as the sheet of pressed asbestos
gave way.

Hello, Hello!, who is this? she sounded angry.
With my arse hanging exposed inside the garage
I could just make out the pips bleeping as Beno
feverishly fed coins into the call box.
Hello, who is this? she demanded.
Beno's voice broke from a giggle
into a raucous "show us your tits"
and although I could hear every word.

I had to imagine her arm as it moved,
intimidated, as she covered her breasts.

[bedeep]

Looking, Not Finding

Timothy (let's call him) sighs, puts on his shoes,
and with ears bleeding sadness he wanders
out into streets among yards and houses
seeking his kind.

Instead what he finds are lit windows
where everyone inside seems fit
and pleased with their moment,
their lives. Busy, clean,
worthy -- tiresome.

Somewhere someone is scraping
thrown food off the floor
after another's fit or their own,
somewhere someone bleeds into a cab on the way
to new misery or the same one,
somewhere someone wants to be dead
or soon will be. Timothy knows about this

but all that he sees
are those tidy lit windows
with such bright order inside
he can't even bear
to press his face to their barrier.

He can't even find
the small children of sorrow
who gather round with each other inside him,
repeating the stories they know
while they try one more time
to sing. Here comes the doctor,
here come the cops here it comes,
the end, the beginning.

One time a kind face
lit up for a moment but since no one
knew what that was, they threw stones
to make it become just like them.
So sorrowful Timothy carries them
blindly invisibly all alone
back home to bed.

[Todd]

Looking, Not Finding

Timothy (let's call him) sighs, puts on his shoes,
and with ears bleeding sadness he wanders
out into streets among yards and houses
seeking his kind.

Instead what he finds are lit windows
where everyone inside seems fit
and pleased with their moment,
their lives. Busy, clean,
worthy -- tiresome.

Somewhere someone is scraping
thrown food off the floor
after another's fit or their own,
somewhere someone bleeds into a cab on the way
to new misery or the same one,
somewhere someone wants to be dead
or soon will be. Timothy knows about this

but all that he sees
are those tidy lit windows
with such bright order inside
he can't even bear
to press his face to their barrier.

He can't even find
the small children of sorrow
who gather round with each other inside him,
repeating the stories they know
while they try one more time
to sing. Here comes the doctor,
here come the cops here it comes,
the end, the beginning.

One time a kind face
lit up for a moment but since no one
knew what that was, they threw stones
to make it become just like them.
So sorrowful Timothy carries them
blindly invisibly all alone
back home to bed.

This one is really good bedeep. I love the idea of ears bleeding sadness, as if they've collected an abscess from listening. I also liked the throwing stones part, and the entire idea of judging others' situations externally and your own internally, and how you will always come up wanting. There's just a lot here that rings true.

[bedeep]

Todd, thank you so much. I felt better after writing it. (Been a rough couple days.) Was very unsure of this one as in a way it is so abstract, but wanted to keep the flow going.....

[billy]

Autumn covers next door's pool
in gilded oak leaves-

During spring's air the young woman wore blue
water splashed; a tailless bikini-clad mermaid
threaded through the rippled stage.
Sometimes she'd stand in the shallows
head back, arms stretched, watching.
A laugh, a flick of wet straw hair
before submerging to glide away;
no longer here.

[RiverNotch]

Man, if only between us and our neighbor's there was a fence, not a wall -- there were windows, not curtains. I'm not looking to be titllated (already got the internet for that), just looking to see what all the fuss is about, having neighbors on one side hated by the community, on the other supposedly distributing contraband....Of course, I wasn't really thinking about all this when I asked for the prompt, just Adventure Time. HAHAHAHAHA

But dang, all this stuff's good! I especially like Todd's, since it feels like a good mixture of scenes from some somewhat innocent pubescent infatuation, and emotions from David Lynch's Blue Velvet -- basically, a practically perfect (and not too creepy) poem on voyeurism! Man ---- and billy's and JM's, too, because they capture the whole domestic aspect without having to lean too much on its more unsavory side ---- and bedeep's, because damn that piece is haunting!

[bedeep]

Thank you, RN. They're all haunting, to me. Great prompt!

[RiverNotch]

LA LUNE

the neighbor's pet
the lobster squirts
the yellow salt

into my eye
the backyard key
watching the girl
swim naked on

"for whom did we
collect this pool?
not you, she-wolf
unplanned!" the dad
declared as I
withdrew and she
arose to crack

a smile a shell
a pinching cry
arose that night

when out her thigh
a bloody hand
began to choke
the loomy gloom

[Leanne]

There was no house next to ours,
just a vacant lot with a shed on it
and two horses.  The men who looked after
the horses were Gordon and Dave.  The
horses never told us their names, so we
gave them different ones each week,
depending on the adventure.  

We all got bikes for Christmas one year.  
They looked brand new, but I knew that
my Dad had salvaged them from the tip,
painted them up, scrounged for some tyres
and polished the bells until the rust was just
a memory.  The bikes gave us new stories;
we could ride around the yard like wildlings,
and the names we gave our wheeled steeds
matched that day's name for the real horses
munching through the weeds a fence away.

It was an old post-and-rail fence.  You couldn't
see through it, but you could climb right to the top
(we weren't allowed to stand on the top rail,
but when has that stopped a child? You can't fall
when you're that small.)  We would carry handfuls
of our grass -- better grass than that wild and weedy
stuff next door -- and the horses would know what
a treat they were getting.  They crossed the paddock
for three blades of pure green goodness.  We could
pat their rough-maned necks, feel the velvet of nose
and lips against our fingertips, look into great brown
eyes and know that the horses wanted to be with us,
instead of waiting for Gordon and Dave to visit again.

From the top rail of the fence, it was hardly any distance
at all to drop onto the back of a horse.  There was a bond,
and the taffy (who this day was called Thunder) would
understand.  I could slip onto his back and we'd sneak away,
me and horse, no longer stuck with less than we deserved.
I didn't that day.  I didn't the next.  I would, of course, one day.

The taffy returned to his weeds, and I went inside
to sausage, potato and peas.  I changed from hand-me-down
jeans to hand-me-down nightie after a bath shared with my sister.
Afterward, the family gathered around the kitchen table,
now covered with a tartan blanket, and played Canasta 
until it was time for bed.  My dreams were of second hand horses
and shiny new bells, and I never ran away.  The house
was warm, and the back of a horse is no place for a child
who has never learned to ride.

[RiverNotch]

Edit, part 2:

Essentially the same with L'Etoile, only less radical, since I think the original version had something going for it, however little -- but ultimately, it does feel to me like it dies down, like it gets more and more inauthentic as it goes, more and more caught up in trying to present something weird.

BLOODY NEIGHBORS

I'd wish it off,
their light, their noise,
every damn night
either partying or arguing --

more distracting than the moon,
than the howling of the bitches
and the crawling of the crab
out my sex --

if I knew its futility
wouldn't just distract me,
just lead me down worse circles round
this loomy gloom --