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 |   Poetry in April -- in celebration |
 This is my Second Book of poems. I may not have eaten the plums from the icebox, but I am guilty of writing poetry without thinking too much, without laboring over words and lines. This Is Just to Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold by William Carlos Williams You, too, forgive me for I only love the writing process; the result is secondary...And please never mind that I am also aping William Carlos Williams's false apology.    From where does the title Beetlebung and Kettlehorn come from? The name Beetlebung and Kettlehorn has to do with ancient whaling practices and Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. During the nineteenth century, because of its dense white wood, the tupelo tree was used in whale oil casks made of copper. Beetle was the mallet made from the Tupelo tree and bung was the stopper in the cask hole. In Martha’s vineyard, the Tupelo tree is still known as the Beetlebung tree, and at Chilmark there, is a Beetlebung Corner, with shops at Chilmark Center, from where roads lead to other interesting points. Kettlehorn, as well as being an ancient surname, refers to a piece of equipment resembling to but much bigger than a shoe-horn, used to stir the hot blubber and separate the fine oil from the denser particles. Whale oil was a popular commodity and, as a fuel, was used for lighting the dark, burning to provide heat and as an aid in cooking. After the whale was hunted, men in a boat cut strips of blubber from the whale's back, tied them together and rowed ashore. There the fat was cut into smaller pieces to be boiled into oil in large copper kettles. In addition there exists kettle corn in Cape Cod which are corn chips fried in kettles and sometimes mistakenly called kettlehorns. For some reason, way back when, the words Beetlebung and Kettlehorn were used together and, at one time or another, were given to shops and other things that go together as titles. I adopted the name for my on-the-spot poetry in reference to the idea of blubber. "Poetry the shortest distance between two humans" Lawrence Ferlinghetti |
| to become rock hard like granite that I can ‘t do it even if this body has evolved breach after breach then glued together with crack marks and if I had a hundred gigantic eyes to see all creation rise and eclipse, still, you’d find a way to lull me to sleep with your tattered siren songs and lean close to draw a crystal sword, and slash whispering in rapture’s lexicon to carry me into the night torn in stars as I said I can’t do it despite a hundred gigantic eyes to become rock hard like granite and look deeper to see your shadows -------------- Prompt: use/adapt myth, legend, folklore, faith tradition From http://www.theoi.com/Gigante/GiganteArgosPanoptes.html "ARGOS PANOPTES was a hundred-eyed giant of Argolis in the Peloponnese. Once when Zeus was consorting with the Argive Nymphe Io, his jealous wife Hera appeared on the scene. The god quickly transformed her into a white heifer but the goddess was not deceived and demanded the animal as a gift. She then appointed Argos Panoptes as its guard. Zeus sent Hermes to surreptitiously rescue his lover. The god lulled the giant to sleep with his music and slew him with his sword. From this conquest he earned the title Argeiphontes "Slayer of Argos". Hera rewarded Argos for his service by placing his hundred eyes on the tail of her sacred bird, the peacock." |
| finally, as if famine loomed in my kitchen, I taught myself how to make jam it began when the excess apples in the bowl, fully ripe and bright, begged me to translate their beauty thus, depending on memory, I cut them up as I had always done with all crisp things in my life, then added sugar to the pot and waited for tears on the fruit, and when enough, I set it to boil, mixing with lemon juice cinnamon and spice. when this medley simmered down and cooled, the fruit in faceted crystals shimmered and melted on my taste buds for the inner me needing sweetness --------------- prompt: newly discovered/acquired talent/skill |
| Even this late, you hear the seething time, stepping out of sequence chiming in spheres and you think it’s your cell phone, and let it answer itself, but no, for sounds gather in crescendo, as a celestial tune pours into your sensitive ears sending gentle solace for things you couldn’t do. Even this late, in sweet yearning, you listen to its consoling tones winding up promises to prepare you for tomorrow’s silence. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/coming-light "The Coming of Light Mark Strand, 1934 - 2014 Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath." ---------- Prompt: respond to an existing poem & provide a link to it |
| I try not to preoccupy so I smile, then I better-smile, circling about lingering on thoughts hanging overhead improvised in a thousand variations hour after hour, day after day, on standard despair or certain knowledge that winds can be restless and I might lose my balance, my nuts and bolts, then jump, barefoot, shrieking, my gray hairs snared in bad temper and syncopated bobbling like a solitary oracle, mourning my uselessness at the end of my years with the climate change, world peace, and in raising organic cucumbers. ------ prompt: your current preoccupation(s) + comedy |
| veiled by summer’s foliage cravings crisscross sending crimson pulses in delicate petals arising, towering above the rest revealing the fire that will soon extinguish itself in this finite universe for having a soul means to fold on principle yielding your frame to oblivion in silence ============= flower, blossom, possibly poppies.. |
| "Live!" meaning what, breathing in and out or holding on a moment, without croaking? don’t you see I’m trying and that’s why I went for a blood test early this morning? maybe, you meant oxygen but anyhow, I’m a mortal and live or die is not up to me, or are you assuming the Creator is you? yet, probably, you mean well so… "Laugh!" at what? what’s the joke? and must I laugh non-stop or occasionally? Don’t you see I can’t laugh at a funeral, at someone’s weeping or when children die because some tyrant gassed them? Then, maybe I can laugh at you telling me what to do, without regard to all things that go awry so now time to move forward to "Love!" is blind and I have sight granted, I’d like to gain, additionally, insight or foresight and possibly more chocolate, and, what if I fall for love, and no one picks me up? Then without a partner, shall I love the whole world? Who do you think I am! "Live, laugh, love!" your words may sell like hotcakes in gooey syrup but who are you to order me around without knowing who I am? You must be enthralled with yourself! ----- Prompt: disrupt a clichéd phrase or image |
| Carmen kneads a golden sun faking to make corn tortillas and spreads her gifts at my feet with sighs or smiles. Her forms, a nourishing discipline smitten with rhythm, feeling, and life arranged in light with her fingertips perennial like roses yet full of tricks, and she circles the wayward muse thorns of irony in her eyes, singing of lines, pattern, or refrain as she meters my heartbeats humoring sarcasm or star dreams that my wrinkles and ridges crave. Then, her backbone, rod-straight, she copes with my scars and hopes as she’s my personal support in satin, a sacred antidote for darkest times or a perfumed lunatic, soul-feeder, for Carmen is a poem in Latin. Carmen = ode or poem in Latin ------------ Prompt: use, hide, or translate a word or phrase from another language |
| start with the ability to perceive break it in small pieces next, add them to the spread of colors around you, mixing in respect a pinch of this, a pinch of that, after sieving off any debris and leftover contamination from open-air pollution or oversight like refractions of fear or delusion since odd alien bits impact a color’s clarity and the artist's reflections also, make sure your canvas is stretched with generosity and always remember this there are no ugly colors --------- Prompt: a recipe poem |
| News: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nhl/2018/04/08/stanley-cup-playoffs-schedu... On NBC Sports channel, Stanley Cup Playoffs today! As an odd-man rush, memory trails back, far-away, when to support a five-year-old on his first time on ice, I stood wobbly on the glistening ground until his skating teacher arrived, while feeling like a seduced butterfly dangling on the side-rail of the attacking zone, in Superior Ice Rink, Kingspark. Challenged by lights hovering above like praying raptors, I tried to slide a step or two, and slashed the ice, falling, searing my skin as if in a pantomime play or a speculative Olympic act. Later, for the first time power play on his side, my son declared to his dad “Mommy broke all the ice.” How such moments turn a heart to a warm shelter, and how things change on the fly and we crash and faceoff on the edge of ice, full-strength goals, penalties, years then freeze the puck! Hockey terminology: odd-man rush, butterfly, attacking zone, power play, change on the fly, dangle, faceoff, goal, penalty, full-strength, freezing the puck ======== Prompt: respond to the news (Rattle, Poets Respond) https://www.rattle.com/respond/ |
| I've taken a thousand turns on a thousand twisting roads to figure out this frail world but always failed the count except through books surfaced the numbers The Catch-22 of it was A Thousand Splendid Suns The Tale of Two Cities with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea The House of Seven Gables or Twelfth Night by the Bard numbers in books, a delight yet, at times, with the hand they are dealt numbers line up like ruins in miserable shadows of sorrow with people perishing in ghettos or on the road to Terezin or by chemical warfare… number of broken hearts, worldwide number of things to regret, infinite ---------- Prompt: use number/s in some way |
| to my laundry room, she'd enter slipping away, reappearing while I am uselessly fearing this shadow of a repenter as if sheets, folding her anger, toward girl talk perhaps gearing, to my laundry room, she'd enter, slipping away, reappearing, rising slowly to the center, a message to me she’s bearing “drain your suds and pains,” while sneering, “so the veil isn’t your tormentor” to my laundry room, she'd enter Form: Rondel (13 lines, 8 syllables a line, ABba abAB abbaA rhyme scheme) ---------- Prompt: ghost, ghost story, or ghosting + 13 (somehow) |
| Living akin to abashed, injured beasts, I trace my own blood in an endless loop, Wasting my time, fumbling around at feasts, What an expert I’m at jumping through hoops! A trick-pony, pacing a tiger’s town, Failing to see the forest or the tree, Cordoning off my interior space, With shocked survivor’s air, I wear a frown Shadowed in dark, holding back tears, to free This clueless woman sporting her clown’s face. Form: Ode Blank verse with ABABCDECDE rhyme scheme ---------- prompt: a failure + some kind of challenging form |
| it’s been a long time that time has turned on me but once, I did my public duty by zipping along the week in my trench-coat and stilettos so sane, so well-adjusted, so boring despite the blister on my big toe and the pounding ache over the left eye for I was laden in the work lagoon with opaque options and oversights, balancing on log-rafts of pretexts now, a blurred memory my battery-power fizzing out fluttering with a last gasp of air on murky waters like a Common Moorhen… the way I dismantled myself every Friday ===== Prompt: a day of the week |
| symptoms: a pricking sensation as if a presage not yet named its first signs pins and needles then burning jabs at the throat making the patient utter piteous moos of distress then, letting the words flow out unprotected the pain though brief is often severe causes: varied and numerous ranging from relationships to government, weather, cars, house, and little things like Windows 10, palmetto bugs, daily mail, robocalls, violence on TV, buzzing din, and worst, people who complain too much. risk factors: communicable liable to become an epidemic culmination of self-hatred disgust, hostility, and brain rewired for negativity treatment: little to none patient is made comfortable or ignored better yet, alert the centers for disease control aside: quite an expert I have become on rants for being a former patient. ======== prompt: rant |
| the world is wily and the lizard that you are you press firmly to the floor your bottom half grounded you think? but are you? you know you can do no harm as the light still holds and you move alone throwing shoulders back side ribs forward chasing away ensnared rage this tilting within yourself through the spine like a gut string, twanging then jerked tight distributing the backbend looking to the skies opening the heart |
| since you’ve stopped looking the other way, you closed the book on him and dropped your empty moans now, you are a rock loose from the ledge losing the sky and the stars and you let yourself fall into a deep trench in the sea shivering with an animated thought that you cannot ever roll back ----------- prompt: a change of habit |
| inside our closed porch, salamander doesn’t fear for its life while crouching by the pool’s edge peeking at the water where colors flow into one another outside, a similar level of fluidity flowers raging in magenta pink, carmine, scarlet spilling over each other against the dense green watching from the window I think of the divine light upon salamanders, flowers, trees, and suspect I must be missing the lot in day-to-day tilts of things ----- Prompt: indoor/outdoor + mixed feelings + poet in the background |
avoid? shift gear, maybe, away from violent tides, train wrecks, danger, frayed nerves… but someone or someones? millions of them with scars beneath their skins, waiting for renewal? no! instead, each one I would, --if I could, in my meekness-- swaddle with blessings and my heartbeats ===== Prompt: someone or something you should avoid |
| a sight tucked inside my occipital lobe: skin showing no wrinkles, worry lines cheap bargains bad trades tear stains or that scar on the brow when I fell but the mirror spews forth its capsized illusion an old woman heavy-limbed and slack in half-hypnotized trance cackling at mishandled time ==== Prompt: optical illusion |
| inside the room, the panic of social abyss... still, I watched in rapt incomprehension the fateful scene without veto when Jessica, the fourteen-year-old in hand-me-down shorts and tee, handed her baby over to Millie, with a false smile and stuttered, “he sleeps through the night.” ---- Prompt: hand-me-down, hand-me-up, or hand-me-over |
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