Tag Archives: poem

Personal Journeys: NaPoWriMo Apr 2, 2018: Point of View

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Personal Journeys

I am the emptiness in you that glues the parts of you together.
I form those other worlds that are the universe inside of you.
I have a language all my own that speaks through your voice.
There is something holding us together, something keeping us apart.

You are that part of me that only I can search for.
You are the part I wrap myself around.
You are the mystery that forms the game of my life.
When I am alone, you create in me the opposite of loneliness.

They are the full cast of her life.
They  come together when she is willing to let both of them go.
She lets them take turns being her guide.
It is in getting lost in them that she lets herself be found.

The NaPoWriMo assignment: Write a poem that plays with voice. For example, you might try writing a stanza that recounts something in the first-person, followed by a stanza recounting the same incident in the second-person, followed by a stanza that treats the incident from a third-person point of view. Or you might try a poem in the form of a dialogue, which necessarily has two “I” speakers, addressing two “you”s. Another way to go is to take an existing poem of yours or someone else’s, and try rewriting it in a different voice. The point is just to play with who is speaking to who and how. 

Naughty Little Pleasures: NaPoWriMo, April 1, 2018

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jdb photo        

Naughty LIttle Pleasures

Naughty little pleasures, secret little games—
they are our private treasures, these solitary shames.
We never can admit them to family or friends,
for fear that doing so would  bring about their ends.
Childhood is when our private pleasure starts—
not stifling our sneezes or holding back our farts.
Eating the last cupcake or hiding Grandpa’s teeth.
Watching skirts on windy days to see what’s underneath.
Torturing sister’s Barbie Dolls and kidnapping her bears.
Reading Daddy’s magazines underneath the stairs.
Guzzling ice cream from the carton and milk right from the spout.
Opening sister’s love letters to see what they’re about.
Telling mom you’ll help her because she’s running late,
then licking all the cookies you’re putting on the plate.
If being perfect were more fun, then probably we would,
but there’s little pleasure in always being good.

For your listening pleasure, my friend Christine Anfossie added music to the poem and sent me a copy to share with you. Listen to it here: 

 

The NaPoWriMo prompt: write a poem that is based on a secret shame, or a secret pleasure.

Michoacan: In a Time of War

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Water Park—Uruapan, Michoacan, 2003 jdb photo       

Michoacan in a Time of War finalfinal-page-001

The word prompt today is faceless. 

Listen

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Listen

If you would be captivating, learn this lesson well.
You won’t be so admired for the tales you choose to tell
as for the ones you listen to with your whole attention.
Your questions can define you as much as what you mention.

 

The prompt today was captivating.

Five Bananas

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Five Bananas

I was on my way home from the weekly market today, going to my car to get a thermal bag to buy ice at the corner liquor store,  when I passed a big truck selling fruit and vegetables.  I asked if they had bananas that weren’t green.  He got up in the truck, showed me some and I said “How much?”  He gave me a price for 2 kilos (about 4 lbs) and I said, no, I didn’t need that many and thanked him.  I realized then that he probably just sold in bulk to small grocery stores in the area.  I got in my car and drove a block away to another small fruit market and just as I was going to open my car door, the truck pulled up beside me.  The window next to me was rolled down and the man held out a bunch of five bananas.  I asked how much and he smiled and said, “It is a gift” and they drove away. Later, I saw them in another store and asked if I could buy them something to drink from the cold case, but they both said no.  

Some days are worth getting out of bed for!!!

Listless

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Listless

I don’t have any strategy, I don’t have any plan—
no recipes for muffins, no plots to meet a man.
My life is so unstructured that I have nary a list.
With no clearcut tomorrow, my future’s in a mist.
If I were only twenty, I guess they’d call me fickle.
To be so directionless would land me in a pickle.
At seventy I’ve joined the list of lives that are expired.
I’m finally giving up and saying I’m fully retired!
My alarm clock’s in the cupboard––abandoned. I don’t need it.
I gifted this year’s calendar to someone who will heed it.
No meetings on my calendar. No notes upon my fridge.
I don’t attend aerobics. I gave up playing bridge.
How do I fill my life out now that I’ve come unwired?
Now that it’s gone unplotted and its furnace gone unfired?
I’m letting every day I meet just unwind and unravel.
Letting fate determine what pathway I will travel.
My compass needle disengaged, I’m floundering in “free—”
All things now determined by serendipity.

The prompt today is strategy.

An Evocation

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(Enlarge all photos by clicking on any photo.)

An Evocation

Your life catches in its static house.
Nothing but the lightest footfall betrays its presence.
The door to escape, the ocean’s edge,
tempts you to leave yourself and enter.
This echo of the ocean is the dove in you
that carries the message that you want to fly.

Motionless dove, I want to flush you
to the crack of sunrise—to its flower.
Forget your lone compulsions.
Leave your comfort.
Desert the logic that has frozen you.

If you could let this sick time pass,
you might grow less diverted as your distance from it grows.
Time’s ricochet might drive you to the canyon’s rim,
revealing to you that you no longer fear the fall.

The stress of guilt slows down and if you choose to let it, lags behind.
You will pass and repass it on your round journey,
until its memories finally fall away.

Time will devour your guilt, no matter how grand its scale,
revoke its sentence and set the guilty free.


This poem, much edited since I first wrote it five years ago, is a “distilled poem.” The distilled poem can have any  line length or meter, rhymed or unrhymed. The only “rule” is that each stanza must have one less line than the stanza before it.  If you want to play along, send me a link to your poem.

The prompt word today is evoke.

for the dVerse Poets Pub

Torn Love

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Torn Love

Still standing close,
each on our own side of this terrible rending,
how can we see things so differently?
This little flap of skin
you keep pulling open
wants to close.

This is how cancers start—
this worrying and worrying of an old injury.
My darling. Leave it alone
and let us heal.
This is only a biopsy
of our changed love affair.

If it is cut out of us,
it will be by your decision;
and no number of late-night arguments
will ever change that fact.
What you need to remember
the next morning,
you will remember.

If it were up to me,
we would still be friends,
but if you need an enemy
to console you in your actions,
I guess I must be that too.
I always was a figment
of your imagination.
Believe that
if it makes this easier for you.

II

Cicatrix

I know better than you
what lies buried under
my healed-over self.

The raised part of me
grown to protect the wound
creates this distance
that I once warned you of.

I need to thicken that part of me
where part of you remains,
and if for this time you gasp for air,
it is my thick skin growing over you,
like an orb spider winding you in my web

until you become
the one in me hidden so deep
that even you
believe you’ve disappeared.

 

Yes, another reprint of a poem from over four years ago. The prompt today was torn.

Winged Elegance

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Anyone who has seen the flight of a frigate bird knows that it is the epitome of grace and elegance. This is a poem I wrote three years ago at the beach in La Manzanilla.

The Magnificent Frigate Bird

They polonaise up higher,
far above the rest.
Not once dipping to the land.
Do they ever nest?

I never see them fishing,
foraging or chewing,
as though their wings are made for art
but are not made for doing.

A gentle crease within their wings
looks folded and unfolded,
but keeps its shape no matter what,
as though it has been molded.

This rhyme is not so fragile
nor so graceful as these birds.
I guess such elegance as theirs
cannot be caught in words.

The prompt today is elegance.

The Knitted and the Purled

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The Knitted and the Purled

Nothing in this world can exist happily ever after.
A house is built of lows and highs: foundation before rafter.
Up and down’s the truth of it, the brilliant and the dark.
No week is composed totally of Sunday in the park.

Existence is a pendulum that sweeps across our lives.
Worker bees die every day in service to their hives.
Good seems finely balanced by a constant lurking evil.
Roses have their aphids.  Cotton has its weevil.

There is so much that’s wonderful in the world we live in,
but no one wins at every game. Sometimes we have to give in,
playing with the cards we’re given—flush or straight or fold—
sometimes in the heat of luck, sometimes out in the cold.

Ups and downs create the whole of our amazing world,
its surface formed by contrast of the knitted and the purled.
Sometimes we’re given what is sweet, at other times the bile
as we choose moment by moment to live happily for a while.

 

Rewrite of a poem from three years ago. The prompt today is knit.