NaPoWriMo Day 14: Vaguely Insulting and Not Very Good

Clerihews for the Unlucky Few

Lin-Manuel Miranda
got dark circles like a panda
only owns a single sweater
best achievement was rhyming Burr, sir

Tara Madrone
Got a new case for her phone
Purple is the color she likes
Spends all day working with tykes

James Teebes Kelso
Likes to fly solo
Never will he pass up a pun
Does that really make him fun? 

Larry Dennison
Well, he's pretty fun
Very good at cooking
But rather less good-looking 

Rick Dennison
Taught me how to make a pun
His record collection is off the hook
But has he ever read a book? 

Robert Downey Jr
You'll find that he's no amateur
If asked a question at Sundance or Cannes
He just says "I am Iron Man" 

Chris Evans
Is a gift from the heavens
If you're funny he'll grab a left boob
In some ways, he's just a loveable noob








Notes: So I learned a new type of poem called a clerihew and I'm addicted. The first line is a name, the second line rhymes with that name, and then the last two lines are a couplet. They're usually about famous people and should make fun of the person a bit. Try it! It's very fun.


 

NaPoWriMo Day 13: English Voodoo

This Is How To Fall In Love
 
Beetle-black, a misnomer, did you
ever really look at that exoskeleton?
sometimes we wear our bones on the outside
iridescent as an oil slick
nothing sticks to a rolling stone
I'm told

Where are the points that connect us
when blood is a nursery rhyme
all the things we remember
have gone up in greenstick fractures of flame
In Bottletown, even our tears flicker like jewels.
Broken windows are an eye to the soul
or was it the glass-lined streets that reflected
scintillating, like a universe of stars in my gut?
ignorance was never a luxury I could afford

This is the secret of how to die:
live, until someone shoots first
retell your story until it works
like summer grass growing higher than my head
follow the bug compass and there I am
waiting
sometimes we get the words wrong
keys stuck in a lock, jammed
I'm sorry
There are a thousand things in this room
and I'm and merely
one of them



Notes: the truth is I will never stop writing about Vurt. It's a problem I don't know how to solve. Count the references!

NaPoWriMo Day 12: A Dramatic Utterance At A Moment In Time

Kennings 
 
Last night I was walking home, it was late
streetlights yellow islands
one headphone out, listening for a siren's song
raiders on that wine-dark sea, the growl of a motorcycle
woke me up, thinking
on my left the hard reality of a car
on my right the growl of a motorcycle
slowing
flickering islands far from view, but I am fast
my feet can follow the whale roads
faster than they know, but
no
it is only the local grocer
wanting to know why I haven't visited
I was sick, I say, he nods, sympathetic
leaves me to my thoughts
tripping between lights  and wondering if next time
I'll stay so luck



Notes: my 11th grade English teacher always said a poem was "a dramatic utterance at a moment in time" so this one's for you Chris.

NaPoWriMo Day 11: Locus Amoenus

Locus Amoenus

Somewhere, there is a garden,
of what I suppose is the regular sort.
It hides between stumbling walls,
a conflation of control
and chaos, each fall of blossom a barely contained exclamation

Somewhere, there is a path,
winding from a door that opens with a kick,
timbers warped from the seasonal shift of warm to cool, dry to damp,
there and back again.

Leave your shoes, your fears,
regrets, memories, leave them by the door
once again stuck fast.
The grass is cool and soft.
The sun is slanted and golden,
filtered through a ceiling of reaching leaves

Somewhere there is a lover, waiting
arms outstretched like branches toward the sky
fingertips of petal and willow
honeysuckle lips
like a late summer moon.




Notes: Locus Amoenus refers to a beautiful place, usually cultivated, a fenced in bit of the wild. As Chaucer writes:

And when, in the summer, he wanted to pay

his wife he debt, he and May would

go there, no one except those two;

and things that were not done in bed,

he successfully performed in the garden.

NaPoWriMo Day 10: Mythological

Pursuit Of

In dreams I am Daphne, roots reaching toward solid ground
skin bark-hardened under the glare of that Apollo sun
trading blood for sap as my soft reality
shifts to heavy heartwood


Cover with green earth, this heart
its home in mountain passes
Let blossoms sprout from my eyes
until all I see
is yellow pollen sky


Stretch my starving arms like antennas
tuned to your affection
These bones are the foundation
of a promise

Fly
I would, if I were someone else
but a tree must be what it is
that frustrating reality
of nature

Notes: I've always adored the bit in Metamorphoses where Daphne becomes a tree, that moment when he can still feel her beating heart under the hardening bark, and so I just spun off from there.

NaPoWriMo Day 9: Rhyme Scheming

With Bare Feet We Walk to the River

I once heard a whisper in the willows,
when the moon was bright and clean
Delicate sussurus, words like dominoes
snip-tapping down to the river so dry
When the moon glowed like the silver screen
A leaf-rustle murmur, a gentle sigh
The sky so dark but the stars aglow
Willows told me the secrets they'd seen,
when the moon herself taught the river to flow.



Notes: I should have written this back on the 9th so here is a poem with nine lines called a Nocturna. The form comes with a rhyming scheme and it also must be about the night or night-related things. I want to write more of these, this was really fun.

NaPoWriMo Day 8: And It's All Just History Repeating

In Circles and Circles

I wonder about history
Did they
dream with the same pounding hearts as I
Did they
imagine the world made better, made clean
and bright

and circles and circles

Comes back to the same routine
What are we but
messy collections of water and worry
A cucumber with anxiety

and circles and circles

Mind tracing the same pettersns
the same routines, like
believing in impossible stories of what we could be
and making them true.



Notes: The prompt was to use some sort of repetition. I feel like this needs...more...but I'm not sure what that is yet. I'll come back to it. Perfection is not the point of napowrimo.