Tag Archives: surreal poem

Crazy Shirley Gives a Ted Talk for NaPoWriMo

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For NaPoWriMo Day Three :surreal poem. jdb image

Music of the Spheres II: If Mankind Were A Thought Bubble

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Music of the Spheres II:
If Mankind Were A Thought Bubble

What else might nature have done
if it had wanted to have fun?
Could it have made a man, instead
of hair, with hands above his head?
To grab the brush from off the shelf
so it could simply groom itself?
Could the music of the spheres
have been reduced to human ears?
A sort of cosmic saxophone
that altered mankind bone on bone?
Kindness bubbling up from ooze
to be the quality we’d choose
instead of hate and greed and trouble?
What if man were just a bubble
rising through the ocean’s murk
to rise to air and go to work
to turn into a different sort
of human driven to comport
himself with generosity?
You for you and me for me
lost to perpetuity?
What a different world we’d see.
All for one and one for all
precluding mankind’s final fall.
How I wish this fantasy
was all that I would have it be.
Not just a dream within my head
but how things really worked instead.

 
The NaPoWriMo prompt was to watch this video and write a poem based upon it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX_xh2do3eM

And HERE is the NaPoWriMo prompt.

In the Garden of the Ice Goddess

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Photograph by Kelley Farrell

In the Garden of the Ice Goddess

It’s been a chilly fantasy living in your world.
In every tiny rosebud, an icycle is curled.
Though all of us are vying to try to win your favor,
every single day you require a new flavor.

When you ask us over to have a friendly dip,
we swim in your excesses and it’s an uphill trip.
With one toe in the water, you declare it to be frigid
and state the obvious now that the water has gone rigid.

You bend to lift your skirts up, revealing silver blades,
then glide most gracefully away in one of your charades.
Who can guess your motives or your next vain act?
What new futile effort do you wish us to enact?

Logic is not your forte and kindness not your thing.
You always cast asunder everything we bring.
One by one, we falter and we fall away,
knowing we too will turn to ice if we choose to stay.

Photo by Kelley Farrell. See her blog HERE. Prompt words today are chilly, swim, fantasy and vie.

If You Can’t be Real, be Surreal (I Just Get My Religion from People)

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I Just Get My Religion from People

She hooks one long red fingernail
and her left ear disappears.
She points the nail tip to her thumb
and the table rises into the air.
She wrinkles her nose and the table
comes down but the lights go out.
When they come on,
she’s gone but her shoes are still
under the table,
one toe pointed backward––
one heel broken.

Music shows in the air,
hung there by its black tails.
I open a window, blow
jazz to the corners of the room.
I open the door and her shoes walk
out on the wrong side of each other.
“How’s she doing today?” asks the doorman
on my way out.
“We’re getting her act together,” I say.
Catch up to her shoes at the
taxi stand at the corner,
hail them a cab.

For the dVerse Poets Surreal Poetry prompt.

 

 

 

verseVV

World Like a White Stomach

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DSC06818
Painting and photo by jdb

World like a White Stomach, Red Optional

My world does not move in circles
like your world.
It is so small I stand above it, head in space,
while a two-colored rainbow stretches in my wake—
its straight line an echo
of my unbent trajectory into the cosmos.

Three navels has my world
for the three births it delivers me to:
into this world, into myself and out of it.

Each is an adventure more easily seen
in a surreal world where things
do not behave.
Fish swim out of  water.
Birds more commonly walk.

In the distance is the mystery
of different worlds.
What if we were born next time
to a different universe?

Stop and go.
The green of earth.
The red that’s not our only option
as we look away, searching
for the countless worlds beyond.

 

 

This is an extensive rewrite of a poem I wrote and posted three years ago. The prompt today was surreal.