NaPM April 24 2013

[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 24: Write a "bitch" poem, as in, there is something that someone does that annoys you, "bitch" about ti poetically.
Form : any
Line requirements: 10 lines or more.

Questions?

[Todd]

Behind an Old Man at the ATM

He is pushing buttons
like he's having a seizure.
It's 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and Hal refuses to dispense money.
He is banging the keypad with his hand,
presumably to decode Nazi transmissions,
and finally win the damn war.
A child begins to shriek behind me
with the intensity of a carbon monoxide detector.
The man has started talking to the machine
in low threatening tones.
The child turns the volume up to twenty-three.
A lesser goldfinch stiffens,
and falls dead to the pavement.
I can see the withdraw cash screen.
I shuffle closer.
The man starts yelling, and waving his arms
in a Fred Sanford heart attack.
He won't pay a fee for his money.
His voice blends with the child's
in unholy cadence. I expect
tentacled old gods to break through
the pavement. The man ends with a fit of coughing,
and then announces that this is not his bank.

[cidermaid]

So many things I want to rant about... there is a lot of anger in rural cidermakers


Piggy banks and Juice makers.

I know you are sitting there, all smug.
A self satisfied, corpulent domestic feline.
Reaching out, from your financed safety zone,
to snatch another pre-prandial snack.

You toy with your victims, extracting interest,
for the sake of it – just because you can.
Wringing every last drop of hope
out of 34.9 increasing cuts;
whilst claiming disability allowance.

Holding your pudgy, cash stained paws out for more.
You take the cream off the top, of the national pot.
And whilst your back is being patted, you pocket
the pensions of a few more train wreaked victims.
Adding a few more fat faggots of rolled notes
to fuel your off shore retirement fires.

From the comfort of your easy chair,
you stare at the half time pitch through the stream
on your wide screen and reach for another slice
of the juiciest, finest fruit of the land.
One quick suck to extract the best and the rest,
the quartered remains, still breathing and dripping juice,
are tossed into the jaws of the liquidator.

Please! Don’t get me started on the juice extractors!

[justcloudy]

so this one started as the instructions poem, but then I realized it really is a bitching poem. so now it's kind of both.



Big Brother’s guidelines for education

Sit those kids in endless rows of desks for one
mirror the individuality of bubble form tests
by forbidding hunched backs to group in class.
Divide those kids by month and year;
progress and preferences are naught
to their stamped date of manufacture.
Creativity is to be discouraged; lateral thinking
is a sign of future disobedience to society.
Let the stocked libraries grow dusty and vapid,
don’t show children what magic words can bring.
Above all, make learning a chore, an obvious evil,
and push them through and up and up
until those kids lag so far behind expectations
they opt to leave at sixteen.

[rowens]

References to an older brother worthy of looking up to has been a general theme in your work, I thought this was a story of how you grew up, went into the education system under your brother's guidance, then left the country after realizing his corrupt agenda for the future of American society.

Then I realized you were making an allusion to the classic 1940s Orwell novel based on the hit CBS reality show Big Brother.

[milo]

sometimes you reach to touch my dead-clasp hand
I cannot stand
the empty of the crisp and white
I cannot write.
cannot mar the perfect page. I loathe
those exact corners. perpendicular
like some exalted cross-borne.

I need to rend and tear, scribble-scratch
and scrawl, slam my fists or grab a match
and watch
as it explodes with a wolfram burst.

don't talk, don't speak, don't even look.
paper should be exiled to books
or better yet tossed to filthy up the streets
like outcast brochures, hated
like flyers selling 20% off next month
at the gym.

if I am back in bed, lost in the disarray
of sheets
and tangled covers as night chews up the day
retreat
don't. don't. don't sneak a look. don't
make so much noise sweeping
up the broken dishes, the shitty-cheap
candle holders, the scattered folders
don't turn the table over. don't bother.
don't ever, ever, ever wake me.

[justcloudy]

rowens, you made me laugh. ;p and believe it or not I've managed to live my life up to now without seeing the show that so inspired Orwell to write such a classic. guess I should get on that...

and milo, you made me laugh as well with your poem, but in more of a "shit I know what he's saying" kind of way...

[milo]

rowens, you made me laugh. ;p and believe it or not I've managed to live my life up to now without seeing the show that so inspired Orwell to write such a classic. guess I should get on that...

and milo, you made me laugh as well with your poem, but in more of a "shit I know what he's saying" kind of way...

yah, it's the type of poem I would never normally post for review and certainly would trash in 'serious' as I just ran out of time and had nothing to say so I ranted. One of the things I like about NaPM is it does let me step out of character or comfort zone in ways to write some stuff i wouldn't normally write.

oh, and ty.

[rowens]

rowens, you made me laugh. ;p and believe it or not I've managed to live my life up to now without seeing the show that so inspired Orwell to write such a classic. guess I should get on that...

Made you laugh, eh? Maybe you have a sister, girls like the funny men, that's looking to leave the country too, might want to take me along for the hell of it?...Don't you have a twin sister named JustGoldy?

[justcloudy]

haha, no twins, but yep I've got three, though all of illegal age, so sorry ;D

[milo]

Playing God

The tedium of daily life
is filled with things I can't control.
Traffic. Rain. The impolite.
And then there is the daily toil;
day by day the days they pass
monotony will take its toll.

With my hands I can play God.
Press and palm; mend and mold;
my hobby is to clay-make voles
and little buildings, streets
and signs; statues, bridges;
the common and the slightly bold.

Once it happened, buildings fell,
in the place of pearly voles.
Some voles were broken past repair;
some streets completely crumbled there.

I know it was the brown voles who
destroyed the white in jealousy.
The brown voles, they all look the same;
they're oily, smell bad; cowardly.
I shook my arm and smashed the brown;
knocked their bisque-made buildings down.
One thousand browns for each pearl lost
as browns are evil they bear the cost.
Whites are beautiful and brave
and pristine as the Virgin's hole.

[NakedBear]

Daily have we tread upon a pi,
of a man four times your stature,
who by himself is reckoned even greater.
And every inch of this small space
is laid in with my corpse knocked down
by words, heavily swung above your head.
I’d say aloud all you’ve said
but guess our neighbors crowd
beside our door: schadenfreuden
So I’ll say instead: mind your mouth
or I’ll knock it from your head.

(pi is suppose to be the fancy math symbol; it doesn't copy-paste, it seems)