NaPM April 22, 2017

[Todd]

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 22: Write a poem that uses one of your lines from a previous NaPM 2017 poem as its first line.

Line requirements: 8 lines or more

[Lizzie]

There's always pain, the ache
of a hollow body, but it's mine.

Grandfather tried to shove
a Cheeto into my mouth.
He overheard mom and grandma whispering
about how perverse my mirror is,
how it must be replaced, and how to trick me

into eating again. He decided
that no trick was needed, only brute force,
his face contorted by disgust.
What was that look for, I wonder?
Because I upset grandmother?
Because I am ungrateful?

He never made much money
and my mother was often hungry
when she was my age.
But there I was: resisting
what he would joyously accept,
my teeth clenched and my body closed.

This body may be dying,
but it's mine.

[kolemath]

Beijing Internet Job

Somewhere on Earth it's night or noon.
Eastern standard time is mine,
twelve hours behind China time.

So when the day is lit sun bright
in Beijing or nearby,
street and table lamps are my only light.

I teach English to children,
cramming in our free time,
cramming convos, cramming dollars
twenty five minutes at a time.
Some whine. Some smile.
Some are more intelligent than I am.

Spoiler: I didn't join the site till May 2016, so I robbed the line one jem from ______.

---

...And just realized Todd said MY work from 2017..Oh well, hopefully I don't get sued for violating intellectual property rights..

[CRNDLSM]

Smooth curves, sleek and sporty
Soon turn over forty
Have my cake eaten too
By anyone but me
Freeze me to be a tree
Shatter compost bury
Stewing since I was two
The soup grew too wordy
Say goodbye to thirty

[Lizzie]

the fear is in the risk –
seed, water, weed, fence
cultivating love
and nothing grows

the fear is in the helplessness
of trying to change paths
and the other doesn't alter trajectory
until it's too late
and you're in separate orbits

the fear is in losing a battle
losing face
in front of yourself
in postponing the call to arms
until peace settles like dew
all on its own
without any help from you

[Todd]

I Have No Rain, and I Must Sing

They were technical advisors to Stanley Kubrick.
Not for that film—they didn’t understand 
how to search for God through the dark
matter of stars. They didn’t see
the world in 70mm spherical optics.
Their perceptions were tightly framed
and intimate. The universe seemed more real
when you couldn’t turn away.
They performed a director’s cut of their own
under clear skies in Lancashire. Until
they had surpassed the work
of the master causing the film to darken,
as they continued to look for God,
or Kubrick, whom they had never met.

[dukealien]

Repression


Surcease of wicked immortality,
love, let us tearless part and love forget
torch memory from when we first had met
and thought love overtopped morality.
Believing we had solved duality
we merged and melted, amorous duet.
But now we rue, remember, and regret
our foolish, lusty illegality.
Must we die to each other or the world,
or try to transfer what we both have felt
to other lovers, faceless, yet-unknown?
Let us instead encyst our passion, curled
beneath our hearts, a stone, a hardened welt
with no inside, no name but each our own.

[just mercedes]

Vita in their own words


In the library that is this world, faint weeping.
I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.
I have come to the conclusion, after many years
of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot
come to any conclusion at all.

I really feel myself in my tower, shut away.
But that is not the whole story ... he wanted
to lead his own life, parallel with the life of love,
separate, independent. He wanted to retain
his individuality, his activity, his timetable.

Julian, Mitya, David, Dark Man,
male, arrogant, alone, the bull.
My private sign, meaning Very Easy.
Few things are more distasteful than
veiled hints.

A damned outmoded poet.
They destroyed me forever.
My own image, within reach, beyond reach.
God knows, I gave you all my love.

I do get so frightfully, frenziedly excited
writing poetry. It is the only thing that
makes me truly and completely happy.
I really feel myself. My duality.

Homesick we are, and always, for
another and different world.
We owned a garden on a hill,
we planted rose and daffodil.

I hate safety, and would rather
fail gloriously than dingily succeed.
And still the strange meaningless
conversations continue.

I worshipped dead men for their strength,
forgetting I was strong.
I don't know what to say to you.
One must be businesslike, although
the glass is falling. Though you may wobble
in your orbit, you can never escape from it.

There was never anything but love
to keep us together, to clap the net
over the butterfly of the moment.
It is painful but also rather pleasant,
if you know what I mean.

[Donald Q.]

The Goods
 
A train station opens. Books and water
burst from the baggage car like an arcane
ritual for platform 2-B. Locals boycott
the rail service but still the carriages
come in, erupting with cheese and
wild ferrets. Staff strike but the empty
engines are undeterred, loads arrive; pistols,
anchors, chewing gum. Neighbourhood watch
sabotage the line and rip out the buffers
but still the incomings hurtle the bent
metal and plow upside-down through
the polished arches. Soil and off-brand
energy drinks fill the ticket office,
curtain hooks and lenticular artwork
destroy the concessions stand. Soon
the assortium runs miles down the
track, worlds of freight between burning
locomotives. Most residents have sold
at low prices; the town is silent save
the regular crashing of new arrivals.
The remainers make their home in
the railway detritus, lulled to sleep
by the breaking waves of rolling stock
decimating itself on the station shores.
Fountain pens, hangers, goldfish pellets,
warheads, laminate flooring, orphans,
sunrise, crocs. Boxsets, five irons,
crampons, condoms, horse hair,
paper, nun-chucks; the goods.

[Franklin'sMan]

The economicon

For this is something more than need
bleeding from a dandy lion’s stalk
knocked about the grass. It’s fusion
shunted vast expanses; a cataclysmic
trick on us -- fundamental forces
coursing through to petals and flesh,
meshing forceful hooves and my neck
wrecking my vascular pathways:
days in the sun are feeding the grass.

Speaking of being wrecked, I'm starting to feel that way.

[ellajam]

Vita in their own words


In the library that is this world, faint weeping.
I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.
I have come to the conclusion, after many years
of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot
come to any conclusion at all.

I really feel myself in my tower, shut away.
But that is not the whole story ... he wanted
to lead his own life, parallel with the life of love,
separate, independent. He wanted to retain
his individuality, his activity, his timetable.

Julian, Mitya, David, Dark Man,
male, arrogant, alone, the bull.
My private sign, meaning Very Easy.
Few things are more distasteful than
veiled hints.

A damned outmoded poet.
They destroyed me forever.
My own image, within reach, beyond reach.
God knows, I gave you all my love.

I do get so frightfully, frenziedly excited
writing poetry. It is the only thing that
makes me truly and completely happy.
I really feel myself. My duality.

Homesick we are, and always, for
another and different world.
We owned a garden on a hill,
we planted rose and daffodil.

I hate safety, and would rather
fail gloriously than dingily succeed.
And still the strange meaningless
conversations continue.

I worshipped dead men for their strength,
forgetting I was strong.
I don't know what to say to you.
One must be businesslike, although
the glass is falling. Though you may wobble
in your orbit, you can never escape from it.

There was never anything but love
to keep us together, to clap the net
over the butterfly of the moment.
It is painful but also rather pleasant,
if you know what I mean.

"To clap the net over the butterfly of the moment" is such a standout line. The title is "in their words" so I assume it's not all Vita. Who else is mixed up there?

[Keith]

Then came the last days in May

The night had begun to trust him
its light came out from corner clouds
and found him somewhere near Phoenix
with enough money to buy himself back.

A chased return to his roots,
he hoped to find her there
gathering berries for a winter bed,
a bolthole to lay a low head.

The car swerves and drifts into the desert
he can smell the ocean on the creosotes,
the wild cats are calling him home.

He salts a tomato
and prepares to eat it
like a poison apple,
knowing he's lost too much blood.

[nibbed]

Orphaned


A just man
died last week
who was kind, genuine.
He was rightly named
(by his mother
who died too soon)
after beauty's
evergreen valances.
I defended him
when others riled
or seemed cruel;
I haven't cried yet,
but I suppose
I need to walk
to the noisy part
of the sea tonight
and ask God
(even though
I already know),
why orphans
must live so long
with ever broken hearts

[Tracy Mitchell]

What I Can’t Say

I have long considered myself
the echo of a song
from which a wind might find its way.
Not this aging carcass
or wizen purveyor of empathy
for those close to me. Nor my
awkward emptiness.

But beneath the layers of blessings
all of them and beyond
where gray may light up
like the western edges of clouds
just before sundown.
Where things vibrate
without words.

[rayheinrich]