Mirror, Mirror, in the Cosmos,
Where is True Love we may osmose?
n.e.s. #71 of 480
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Kip Poe Syl II: the Acrostic
In a previous post I did a poem intertwining Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath. “Kip Poe Syl” lent itself to an acrostic, but I did not do one. Now I do.
Kip Poe Syl
Khartoum beckons. Reaper reckons. Lass
Keeps fiendish company as love takes pass
Into Manhood-proving fateful fray
IF NEVERMORE & Daddy go away
Pip Pip hooray Bedeviled eggs go well
Parboiled plenteously here in HELL
n.e.s. #70 of 480
Nowadays, Friends, there seems to be a switcheroo in progress: Invention is the mother of Necessity. Invent a way to make lots of cars for cheap and a mere hundred years later the population explodes sevenfold, there are conflicts on a global scale, and some guy eats a bat and lays millions of people low. (That last is perhaps merely a rumor, but the disease is real.)
People in the arts MUST make things up as they go along, to slake the thirst for Newness. So here we are. Where are we going? We chase Tomorrow to find out.
Kip Poe Syl (NaPoWriMo 2020)
Day Fourteen, and here is a paste of the prompt:
“Today’s optional prompt asks you, like Alice Notley, to think about your own inspirations and forebears (whether literary or otherwise). Specifically, I challenge you today to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets, and other people who inspired you to write poems. These could be poems/poets/people that you strive to be like, or even poems, poets, and people that you strive not to be like. There are as many ways to go with this prompt as there are ways to be inspired.”
So I thought of the poets, and there are too many. Then my inner acrosticist took three cards out of the Rolodex: Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sylvia Plath. All left their mark. All were driven and bedeviled and haunted. And they haunt me. I know the opening lines of “The Raven” and “Daddy” and I know all of “IF-” And Kip, Poe and Syl uniquely identify them with three letters. So there may be an Acrostic in the future…but I’m not feeling Acrosticky right now. But let’s see what happens.
Kip Poe Syl
Rudyard and Edgar and Sylvia Plath
Let us be shaped by this odd Threefold Path.
Let us get Kip for the blood and the bone,
Firmly embed in Testosterone Zone.
Poe is for Passion so darkly uncomic,
Endlessly rhymed with a beat metronomic.
Syl’s so unsilly, such willies she gives,
Pouring her hope into such porous sieves.
Put them together, you get KipPoeSyl,
Mournful and frantic as Hank’s Whippoorwill.
“Hear the lonesome Whippoorwill.
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
Hiram “Hank” Williams, Sr.
n.e.s. #69 of 480
Once upon a time, 1935 or thereabouts, Ogden Nash wrote a ditty about Sigmund Freud, thus:
Who’s afreud of the big bad dream?
Things are never what they seem,
Daddy’s derbies, Mama’s thimbles,
Actually are shocking symbols.
Still, I think, a pig’s a pig–
Ah, there, symbol-minded Sig!
I miss Ogden Nash.
n.e.s. #68 of 480
Memorializing A Sacred Kerchief.
Don & Doff
I’ve been wearing a mask when I go out. It looks like this on me:
Some people don’t wear masks going out, despite convincing evidence that they slow the spread of COVID-19. I was thinking about that when I conceived this acrostic. “Off/On” is as binary as “Doff/Don.”
It is a bit uncomfortable to wear, but Friends, I’d rather be uncomfortable than in the ultimate relaxation and comfort condition known as The Dirtnap.
Don & Doff
Danger! Cee*Oh*Vee*Eye*D
O how Bug does Dirty Deed; O
No wonder we’re put off
& can’t STAND a Scoffer’d SCOFF
A Trio of Triolets (NaPoWriMo 2020)
Friends, National Poetry Writing Month is in full swing, no matter how many earthquakes or tsunamis or volcano eruptions or pandemics try to stop it. Here is a compilation of the three Facebook posts I made for today, Day 12, including prefatory and postpoem comments. They get increasingly political, you will see. My country, Number One in the WORLD for total COVID-19 cases, and total deaths, is being mismanaged horribly, and my poetry cannot but be affected. I am urging my fellow Citizens of the United States of America to Vote Blue this November, all ways that I feasibly can, and my poetry is at the service of this cause.
****
National Poetry Writing Month 2020, Day Twelve. Challenge: Write a triolet.
Triolet: Iambic tetrameter, eight lines, abaaabab rhyme scheme, lines 1 and 2 are repeated (or nearly repeated) with lines 7 and 8, and line 1 is also repeated (or nearly repeated) with line 4.
In a perfect Verseworld I would now write a trio of triolets. Trouble is, it’s been a long day, I’m physically and mentally beat, and I only have juice for one, though I have the key words for all three. So I’ll do one, call it a night, and let my refreshed brain tackle the other two sometime before midnight.
The three words are FORMALDEHYDE, ACETYLENE, and INCOMPREHENSIBILITY. So here comes
formaldehyde
formaldehyde plays hide and seek
it poisons and yet it preserves
it makes those things in jars look bleak
formaldehyde plays hide and seek
it humbles, silences, makes meek
as doctor jekyll hydes and swerves
formaldehyde plays hyde and sikh
it poisons what it then preserves
And on that cheery note, Friends, good night and sweet dreams!
Here’s Number-Two-Of-Three of a trio of triolets for Day Twelve of National Poetry Writing Month.
acetylene unsettling
take oxy and acetylene
to spark and now you have a torch
to weld an empire’s mezzanine.
take oxygen and fettled green
and cee-oh-two and ways unclean
and now your scene may heat, may scorch…
that oxy and acetylene
sparks conflagration with its torch.
Here is my third and final triolet, completing my Triolet Trio for National Poetry Writing Month 2020, Day Twelve.
inn comm pre-hen sib ill: a tee
incomprehensibility
enables bafflement and crime
with podium non-jabber-free.
incomprehensibilty
is reprehensible as we
descend into a fear-fraught time.
incomprehensibility.
in free-fall it is hard to climb.
Yes, political. Vote Blue. Because we Libtards, we Card-Carrying Commie Socialist Globalist Illegals-Loving National Workers Party Ninnies have another mess to clean up, just like the one we inherited in 2009.
n.e.s. #67 of 480
Rinse hands. Soap up. Make your hands wrestle while singing twenty seconds’ worth of John Prine’s “When I Get To Heaven.” Rinse. Dry hands. Use what you dried your hands with to turn off the water.
the fickle delphinium (NaPoWriMo day 11)
Friends, I’ve written a poem a day in April for National Poetry Writing Month 2020, but this is the first one I’m sharing here. I may post some others, or do an “anthology” in a future post, but here’s this one for sure.
Each day there has been a prompt. Here’s a copy-and-paste of today’s:
“Our optional prompt for the day is based on the concept of the language of flowers. Have you ever heard, for example, that yellow roses stand for friendship, white roses for innocence, and red roses for love? Well, there are as many potential meanings for flowers as there are flowers. The Victorians were particularly ga-ga for giving each other bouquets that were essentially decoder-rings of meaning. For today, I challenge you to write a poem in which one or more flowers take on specific meanings.”
And here’s what I wrote, and originally published about twenty minutes ago on my Facebook timeline:
****
the fickle delphinium
i blossomed and woke up in a crop
of my bachelor’s button brothers
who had yet to bloom.
“pardon my dust, buds,
i am going to work my magic
and go look for love.” with that
i shook the potting soil from my roots
and went mobile.
almost immediately i saw HER.
Great Horticulturist, but she was
as pollinatable a thing
as ever tickled Georgia O’Keeffe’s fancy.
but by the time i got there
some showoff hollyhock was already sidling
and giving me a sidelong sneer to boot.
didn’t matter. i moved in.
soon we three discovered
how fickle a flower could be–she played us,
dismayed us, and stem-to-stern near-flayed us.
she LOVED being fought over. she could use
a simper like a whip, a sigh
like a blowtorch. “cage match, boys,” she half
DEMANDED as she sun-seekingly spread.
“winner take all.”
well, he had the brawn, but i had the wit,
the speed, and the wherewithal. got in
some sepaljabs and jabbered into his
pistil-holder, “dude! bet you don’t even know
what rhymes with delphinium!”
“like i give a steermanure,” he growled.
“you should, holly hock-a-loogie. delphiniums
LOVE poetry.” i twined off a petal of his.
“she loves you KNOT.” i queen-anne’s-laced him
to the soil. he was melbafied. (toast.)
WOW, was she ready to cross-pollinate. I found
that her breathy oxygenated coo jazzed me more
than a swarm of bees. “i DO love Poetry,” she cooed.
“what DOES rhyme with delphinium?” uh oh.
NOTHING does, according to the rhyming dictionary!!
think fast, buttonhead!!
“my darling, my dearest delphinium!” one line down,
four to go. retrofit!!! “i see you’re….deLICIOUSly…”
whatwhatwhat–AHH! “,,,SKINNY! YUM!” (whew!)
dammmm, was she throwing pollen!! the scent
was flaring my petals!! “a blossom so lavish/i’d
LOVE to enravish…” NOW WHAT??! void! blank!!!
–AHA!! “let us DUST UP a posh CONDOMINIUM!!”
and, though fickle as hell, she was thus made mine.
****
Hope you have an April-Flowery day, Friends!
One with Clay, Image and Text 