NaPoWriMo Day 9: POEM BASED ON A PROMPT BY ELIZABETH TREADWELL

TAINT

“Sir, having no disease, nor any taint

Nor old hereditament of sin or shame.”

My back slash is a source

of unintelligibilty.

My category confounds the wolf

and his pack. I sprout wings

to escape his predation. I taste like—

time’s up. 

NaPoWriMo Day 8

TRUE CONFESSIONS

That I want to throw my smartphone against the first person

that walks past. That everything I say is a wish for infamy.

That I like being common, for example this mouth of mine.

That I want to crack open a scythe against longstanding edifice.

That it all has force in it, which I don’t know how to undo.

That I’m still a child. That this child is fooling you. That this child

is abstracted away from your analyzing thumb. 

NaPoWriMo Day 7

The poet and translator Michelle Gil-Montero introduced me to Eduardo Chirinos, and I've fallen in love. His book The Smoke of Distant Fires has the energy I'm trying for in my own poems. Here's a poem I wrote based on his work:

“A Poem with a Line by Eduardo Chirinos”

what should I call this poem I’ll call it a rush of chambers         

to evoke the sound of the narcissistic black hole it will be           

*that was the only time the poem refers   to itself*      

the soul needs no self-reference           

it’s busy earning      pleasure and moral reason

holding us upright

we bear             so many               bricks                         

when all we want is the tang of souls    touching or

more    when we want more     so that our souls          

have to improvise        

one more thing about the poem           

is the word soul making you uncomfortable?     

it does me        which is why

I wear it  because it used to be heartbreak

which is worse  so small                   so empty

not heartbreak itself      but its valorization   

soul is the bigger risk    and now that I’m older

the more tenuous risk   soul      is what we leave

behind  and mine is useless       useless              that’s

not how I want to be    with you

NaPoWri Mo Day 6

Elizabeth Treadwell is blogging poems and using women's names as prompts. She suggested Gloria on Facebook, so I took her up on it. The only thing I'm totally committed to is the couplets. 

GLORIA

Gloria, act like no one’s watching you.

Gloria, hold up a newspaper showing today’s date.

I watched Gloria make a jealousy into a typhoon. Gloria, sweet Gloria.

We brought this upon ourselves. That’s what she told Gloria.

Gloria said, The wind that whistles like a warning, well I wonder,

if it’s possibly something mystical, which was really not her style.

There was trouble in the castle. My dreams are often in airports.

Gloria plays the out-of tune violin and it still sounds like velvet cheese.

They call her the Viper, that Gloria, because she knows

how to close a sale. Her secret is not feeling anything. 

NaPoWriMo Day Five

I’ve been talking a lot about a TV book that I’ve been working on, and I just made a big decision about the book today (one exciting only to me), so I worked on it instead of writing a new poem. It’s like a poem.

WATCHING 33

Actual news footage when it’s mostly cops walking outside of the crime scene tape.

When my most political act is passively aggressively not sending out thank-you notes after my son’s birthday party. The trauma of my petty Madame Bovarian despair is at the core of all my watching.

In true crime reenactments, when the actors are thinner or fatter or more beautiful or uglier than the people they’re playing, what authenticities does the director want?

All the moms and their bottles of wine. My mother’s sex life.

On The Walking Dead, it would smell terribly everywhere. On The Walking Dead, they probably would have terrible teeth. There should be many more flies on The Walking Dead.

The television show that’s about swimming upstream.

Andrew Lincoln played a schoolteacher on a British television show. He drinks a lot and each episode of the show begins with the weekday imprinted in some improbable place. His face is different.

When the shows melt together, which ones melt together like The Walking Dead and Lost or The Walking Dead and M.A.S.H.

The more they call them names, the more you know you’re beating them.

Television, so noisy. Lost my body in my spectatorship. I wish I could use my love of television as a way of making money.

Is this place secure from walkers? Art is never without consequences.

The hypertextual k-hole of watching shows on the computer. I can read about the actors, watch their sex tapes, find out their hometowns.

The shows that I hate-watch.

Leslie Knope: That Chimeric Democracy We Fancy.

The nerdy guy from Breaking Bad is the nerdy guy on The Walking Dead. Does he know this?

Intervention is a synthetic catharsis. The very best shows are.

Something is always happening on Gray's Anatomy. Shit is always going down. A character literally gets hit by a bus. A boy gets impaled by a fence, a plane crash, a train crash happens. A brain tumor, a hostage situation, an explosion.

The 21^st century sitcom feels like its written by the book, yet the post-ironic, neurotic chatter distinguishes it from its hammier predecessors.

TV, you have my permission.

The voiceover is subliminal self-help, but Meredith’s strange lisp distracts me.

How will the show reinvent itself after they move on to other hospitals? On television, jobs are purgatorial affairs.

I read a book while I watch the show. When I feel vigorous and shining, I like the way Gray’s Anatomy plays as backdrop to all of the work I do. I can drop in and out while I fold laundry.

We don’t need a time machine when TV wrings so much from tragedy.

Television drama: not catharsis but flattening the fluttering and frenetic self to a tidy archive. The show sells the evolution of self, a redoing. The television show is after all a language event, an accounting of the self.

The more…beating them- Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife

Art…consequences-Bertolt Brecht

NaPoWriMo-Day 4

This is a bit of a cheat, a revision, but I was glad to get back to it.

ON TELLING THE CHILDREN

I will be apprentice to this study for her. I mimic her gaps

for context, retrace the irrevocable meander of her logic for empathy

because I was born her fair to poor copy and she’s my polestar.  

Inside her: gaps and bursts. Most days the bursts

are heartbreaking. Other times we circle the same gaps,

and I try to be as I know she was with me once, our bleak

and common future to reverse the sphinx.

That you don’t know her is your misfortune. To know what she was, 

which was a hot planet’s core, a late summer’s best light

is a gift reserved for a small cohort; my mother will die

thinking I’m a dream or another version of herself           

Language was always between us, so my job is also to bear

the information for all of us. I seek it out as if it were a hunger,

then recite it back to her like a lullaby or a curse.

I tell my children her brain is pocked with illness, and I summon

up the softest image to tell the story. It’s a soft pink vulnerable jelly.

It is translucent and contains the future. In this reverie I hold it

in my hand and against a lamp because this is my form of intimacy.

My nails trace the brown spots that mark her losses. Beautiful

and sad and strange, I tell them because I need to make it into something else.  

Thinking today about doing something more story:

THE CYCLE OF LIFE: A TALE

The sun shook its audacity loose and a cloud devoured the old wanderer’s

pond with the sun’s hubris as power. A steam rose from that uproar in the form

of a spirit in search of a body to inhabit when suddenly a child-oracle

appeared, etc…

The sun shook loose the onus of its blinding charisma and all the families

were driven into their lead-lined attics where they ate canned stews and where

everyone—the children, the parents, and even the old crones—became as blind

as moles, less adept. They sorted out their failures through touch, et al…

The sun had no magic, had become like the grim plastic bag wrapped around

the neck of a bird soaked in the oils of our sins. We lived in and among

the giant pits of unidentified flammable liquids we also drank for survival.

The pits shot up narrow flumes of fire we clambered when they froze during

the winters that had really become, literally, something else.

The sun became our nemesis. The sun was a fucker. The sun decided suddenly

to leave for another galaxy. The sun had a face that mocked us. Although some

thought they knew how that would go, they were mistaken. It went like what

the old conspiratorial pagans suggested.

The sun became emblem, and we worked hard to describe this,

but without eyes and without ink, and without hope and without the birds

to sing to us and without a shared rhetorical schema, we were left telling

really primitive stories with empty tins and with the unabashed and earnest

desire to create something like in the caves we would soon pollute

with our breath and our fluids and our overall ruin, which we still believed germane . 

DAY TWO

I sometimes ask students to write a poem by transcribing an existing poem backwards. The syntactical relationships are loosened, and something new is made of the poem's lexicon. The exercise will be in the next edition of Wingbeats.  With Laurie Ann Guerrero's permission, I transcribed the poem "Babies Under the Skin" from her new collection A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying and wrote this new poem:

The Under Babies

Touch of nourish, turn us

living. Stay the thought of

milk as muscle, as mother to

yearning babies. To my fingers,

meek and musty, your kiss is a nipple,

a grasp to reach the wet pink and papery

lipskin air of mouthfuls swallowing

death in even the most rooting of mouths.

Fish, wind, and water birthed you, so I celebrate us

and also the other, each the need for

the strangers we are and for when

unsure and shy you come. 

HOW

Poem One

for Robin Reagler

I grew up lower middle class             and on account of this            

an infinite sinkhole of envy             and grunting want

I grew up profligate             something of a gambler            part one the gaining on you

and part two            is the ship cast loose             like the gull’s filthy feather

Oh my god, you’re a dream            I promised            myself one day

I grew up on the edge             of your electrified fence                        like a weed

your melodic             beddy-bye            harshes through doors            I loved/hated your mom

Once we were a suburban gang            and like that             like magnets

a            new classification            to resist                        to abandon

You had a fat mouth            morning cloud            and it kissed me

with wet  dew            which I drank like blood            for its magic            attributes