Silk, Cashmere, Linen

15 Mar

These are my seasons:

Silk
slippery and smooth
it does not stick
no matter how hot,
silent caress on my skin,
weightless, as if I were naked.
Silk is a surprise kiss,
goosebumps along my neck,
dinners and slow dances.

Cashmere
the soft, warm hug
I can wrap myself with
and daydream in
when you are not with me.
Cashmere is leaning back
against your chest,
feeling your heart beat,
fast then slow.

Linen
crisp, fresh breeze
my hair pulled up
off my neck
your hands circling
my hips like a busy bee.
Linen is lemonade,
swinging on a front porch,
our legs intertwined.

Interesting prompt by Brian over a Dverse Poets Pub on Thursday. In his post, Meeting the Bar: The Blind Poet, he encouraged us to write a poem using all of our senses except sight. This is what I came up with.

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Invictus

8 Mar

A confidence was betrayed
My innermost thoughts were mocked
So I shut up what was left
and the song inside me was lost.

Today, it is over.
I can forgive, I will forget.
And now’s the time
to put things right
my sword is a pen
my enemy, regret.

I have decided that
it’s time to set the captive free,
because far too many years
my beating heart was stifled,
locked up with a rusty key.
With its new found liberty
it marches forward boldly,
across the hills, to the shores
in search of poetry,
and with its renewed beat
this emancipated heart
declares its rebellious creed:

I will harbor fugitive thoughts
and nurture them
until they are ready
to slip into society
and gather comrades
to join in the resistance
against the mundane
and prosaic.

I will hold high the torch
passed down to me
by Viking minstrels,
Irish horse thieves,
and Spanish windmill warriors,
and keep it burning for all
that stumble down this path behind me,
though it may only illuminate
just barely ahead of my feet.

And always,
I will bring passion
to the table, home-brewed
in a glass salt shaker,
and sprinkle it liberally
on everything I feast upon,
and never be afraid
of the long-term effects
it might have on my heart.

Because I am not a gambler,
and I am generally risk-averse,
but when it comes
to matters of the heart-
I have set the captive free
and the risk is worth the purse.

image

This is my poetic manifesto, in response to Gay’s prompt over at Dverse Meet the Bar: Movements and Manifestos. I highly recommend this exercise, because it is very inspiring and enriching. It’s funny, because I have been thinking about this topic for a while: the whys and wherefores of writing poetry, and the experiences and people that have become my muses over time. Just so happened that Anthony and Gay both consecutively took different angles on this topic. My manifesto isn’t bound to inspire any poetic movements, BUT for me it’s about letting my heart speak again, because a long time ago something happened that made me give up on writing.

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Away with Words

4 Mar

the words came over the mountains
as we rumbled around blind curves
on the dirt roads of the Andes
heart lodged high in my throat
trying to read a book, needing some air
because it all took my breath away

the words came over the mountains
the ones I could not capture
with the short lens of my Pentax
the sparkle and hues of the valleys
majestic yet humble pastoral scenes
punctuated by colorful forms with bent backs

the words came over the mountains
honking their horns before hairpin curves
casting a golden light on the clouds at my feet
nestling in the furrows of the patchwork hills
clinging to rocks like lichens above the treeline
catching my eye with your smile from the backseat

I was unaware, but those words became everything
everything I wanted to capture
everything that touched my soul
everything that made me yearn
everything that made my heart sing
everything I wanted to share
everything that brought me to my knees
everything about you
inspiring everything that was me
and wanting, wanting
to somehow give it back
wanting to whisper it in your ear
but never knowing how

Today, Anthony Desmond over at Dverse challenged us to write a poem  that is influenced by certain times in your life that made you the poet you are today. I can trace poem-writing to when I was 8 years old, but the desire and need to write poetry sprang up somewhere in my mid-teens. I can remember distinctly wanting to express things in a way that I had not figured out yet. So, this poem is about that time in my life, specifically about a trip through the Andes, or rather several trips that my mind has put all together into one.

“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment… by writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.” – Walt Whitman

*Note about the photos: I originally posted a pic of my brother and I at Ingapirca because I thought that all of my other photos of the Andes were all gone. Well, the very next day after I posted this poem, while I was going through stuff, preparing to move, I found this set of photos that are all from that very trip that my poem is about! Serendipity 🙂

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Ode to my Bicycle

28 Jan

Your two wheels
and metal frame
have penetrated my brain
my two feet no longer
can catch up
to racing thoughts
that swoop on
spinning faster
rounding corners
jumping curbs
coasting
coasting
coasting
down the slightest slopes
you make me fly
with rubber wings
pushing me harder
pumping muscles
steely minded
wind whistling
past me around me
dodging raindrops
and ever increasing
my peripheral vision
pumping euphoria
through my veins
while I dance
on your two wheels.

Look Ma, no hands!

Look Ma, no hands!

Posted for Open Link Night at www.Dversepoets.com. Come join us and share your poem!

I have a love affair with my bicycle. These days it is my main mode of transportation for errands and such, which is great, because I love getting out of the house and being outdoors. When I hop on my bike I always end up feeling exhilarated afterwards. Thankfully, everything I need is within a 6 mile radius of my home. I have often quoted the line from the movie Singles, where the cyclist from Expect the Best says, “I just like the way the world looks from a bike.” Me too! I used to think that it was only on sunny, blue sky days, but it’s wintertime now, and I have found that I like riding my bike even on cold days.

I have been reading a lot of Pablo Neruda’s poems lately, and this poem was inspired by his odes to common things.

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Epiphany

23 Jan

It took about three times
before the pattern was clear:
walk with me
stop talking
no I don’t want water
no don’t touch me
and that’s when my husband realized
that it would be best to just
sit and shut up, rub my back
hold my hand, walk with me,
obey my commands
it is not in my nature
to be that way, but
my mind was on other things
rocking back and forth
moving to a deep rhythm, within
while everything without was a distraction
because when that time comes
there’s no turning back
nothing will stop it,
and my brain starts focusing on
just one thing:
get this baby out!

My fifth time through
while I was two months shy
of the waters breaking,
my mind could still focus on
the things around me
which was a good thing
because my father was dying
and none of us knew it
because just as when that water breaks
it came suddenly, and
there was no turning back
for three weeks, he tried his best
to engage in our conversations
and humor our loving intentions
but his mind was on something deeper, within
I struggled to stay positive, to hold his hand
rub his back, tried to offer him some water
but it wasn’t until 58 days after
he said goodbye
when my baby came
one freezing morning in November
that it dawned on me, a true epiphany
all those 21 days in August and September
my father was in labor
which takes being mentally focused
without distractions
until the birthing is done.

The first day in the hospital.

The first day in the hospital.

Brian at Dverse is asking us to tell him a story today. There’s not much of a plot to this one, but it’s a story I have been wanting to put into words for a while, and this prompt gave me the encouragement to give it a shot. I seem to write often about my Dad, and I think that it is because we had a beautiful father-daughter relationship; we were very close. This poem is mostly about the process I went through trying to understand how hard it must have been for my dad to make the decision to go into hospice one week after his diagnosis of stage-4 esophageal cancer.

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One Last Thing

10 Dec

Please, let me kiss you
before the summer bids us adieu
while its glow still warms through your eyes,
while your mouth yet beguiles me with smiles,
and our youthful hearts still beat true.

Let all that has been done, undo
and let nothing witness it but the skies,
as we give in to the sweetest surprise
if you please, let me kiss you

like we fear no pain anew
with nothing to lose, we’ll gently construe
from lips to lips, with words implied
honey sweetness, on a rising tide,
imparting volumes with our sighs, how to
please, let me kiss you.

And with one
electric shock,
as the dawn
dissipates the dark,
I promise
I will do naught,
but kiss you.

altantic_beach_morning_flower

Since Tony Maude over at Dverse Poets Pub introduced the rondeau I have been working on this poem. My biggest challenge was the rhyme structure, which for this rondeau is a 15-line poem with rentrement (aabba–aabR–aabbaR). I call mine a rondeau+ because the last stanza is not really rondeau form, more like a parenthesis or an afterthought, in a Cummings kind of way. I welcome your comments on how it turned out!

 

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10 am, Thurs Nov 14 2013 – American Sentences

14 Nov

A distant sun gives me the cold shoulder: Indian Summer’s over.

I sit, trying to collect thoughts, while little fists pound the bedroom door.

3 loads of laundry, but the washing machine won’t stop leaking water.

On my desk, incessant telephone haranguing keeps me on my toes.

Is it too late to run home, slide into base, where I can be called safe?

Never mind that look in my eye, I really am listening to you.

Ahhhhh ... Freak Out!

Ahhhhh … Freak Out!

More challenges, this time in the form of American Sentences, which is a form of haiku created by Allen Ginsburg. This is a new form to me, where each sentence has 17 syllables like a haiku. You can really write about anything, not just nature. I found some interesting websites about American Sentences, most notably this one by Paul Nelson which really inspired my to do this more often. This is my very first attempt, and it wasn’t easy, but I am realizing that I like challenging myself with form. According to Nelson, “I find it an amazing way to sharpen my perception and learn how to eliminate unnecessary syllables. It aids in a sort of pre-editing that supports my spontaneous writing practice.” That intrigues me a lot, so I will probably try to do this a little more often, since I can use a lot of pre-editing and elimination of unnecessary words in my writing.

This is posted  in connection with a prompt by Gay over at DversePoetsPub, in which we use American Sentences to describe a scene happening now.  SO, welcome to my world today!

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Beware the Poets

12 Nov

Beware the poets
they put all of their loves,
encapsulated in words,
in pithy boxes,
enshrined.
Little wolf-spiders
in sheeps’ clothing,
they hang out in corners,
unassuming spectators,
ready to trap you
in a moment
tangled, spun
into their invisible web.

image

Kind of dashing the image of the romantic poet here, and poking a bit of fun at myself. I do feel a little guilty sometimes, because all is fair in poetry and writing. Found this ickily beautiful banana spider hanging on its web above a street parking pay station at Spanish River Beach in Boca Raton, FL.

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Moi- a list

7 Nov

Lupe
aka Lupita
Lupi
Lulu
Lups
Maggilu
and Lu

But never, ever, Guadalupe.

image

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Night at Sea

11 Oct

At sea at night
we smell hulking ships
miles before
we see their lights.

Are they coming or going?
Will they cross our path?
Green and red and white
dance against the black
while rushing velvet water
against the hull, slaps.

Radar screen
glowing green
offers little support
and radio silence
fails to report.

I grab the mouthpiece
to hail the captain,
across the airwaves I repeat:
“This is SV Fellowship
northbound vessel to your starboard.”


Silence.
“Do you see us?”
Silence.
“Do you copy?
Over …”

We sleep in our life vests at night
because the ocean is a serious thing

and there is a reason why
I avoid rollercoasters.

Bedtime stories at sunset offshore

Bedtime stories at sunset offshore

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