do I dare disturb the universe? -- Jack's NaPoWriMo Thread

This time I'm going to finish.

#1 nineteen-hundred

the smog stops its suffocation scheming
the machines halt their chattering,
and for one brief, cherished moment
the street is quiet like ancient times

until the world opens with a scream,
with blood, with colour, with noise
he falls headfirst from his hometown
and everything turns inside out.

inhale
(the shapes dance and twirl;
nothing he has have ever dreamt
comes close to this)
exhale
(everything before this has been an echo,
a shadow, a nothing)

trembling like a newfound volcano
he creates his own cacophony

#2 george

twinkletoothed children in scruffy uniform all alike
marching to hell and back like little soldiers.
tiny bones in the industrial fortress
scurrying quicker than mice into bloodsmeared spaces

he gets his education in back alleys,
with smokercoughs and battlewounds,
they bounce pigskins off red-brick walls

on the weekend they scale the hills and pretend
they are in another world.
at the summit the ragged crowd survey their kingdom
forests of chimneys in the mid-morning nebula
industrial swords scraping the pure sky.

one day, he tells them all, I'm gonna own all of this.
for fragile seconds as the sun sets over the northern range
his fantasy is indulged in hushed voices
and then it breaks with shouts and fights.

old age is as distant as African deserts
as they roar and wrestle in the night-time mud.

at home, by the inglenook, in the evening warmth
he dreams of sparkling cometdust scattering like amnesia
amongst the formation of terraces;

in the morning the headlines drip with disaster
Haley has poisoned us all

at work he breathes in a deadly dust of his own

I really love these poems, Jack. I enjoy your style. Also, hooray for TS Eliot title.

george is brilliant. You've got a lovely contemporary style -- new and hip, with a dash of classicalism, without sounding too dissonant. A few lines are reminiscent of the chaotic imagery in Plath's poetry. Keep up the good work.

I want to eat all but stanza five. The 'african desert' bit and the 'night-time mud' sounds boring in comparison to the rest of the language here.

-Kylan

#3 the only ball in town

playing bayonets in the meadows outside metropolis.
superboys cackle as they crack sticks on heads,
a loose regiment of troublemakers
who wish they were old enough to use real steel
in french fields;

each morning he pretends to be his father:
tiptoed tall and searching his babychin for little spikes.
he escapes out to the town square and envies
the boys at school with their premature beards
standing out like golden tickets to the only ball in town.
some days he & the other kids almost sneak in
with inflated chests and drawn-on moustaches,
they imitate deep voices and swear like old men
but it's not enough, it's never enough --
the war is passing them by.
so sometimes, in a whisperthin voice
by his bedside
he prays with an ounce of guilt that
it will all last past christmas and beyond --
There's plenty of Germans for me to Kill too
(his midnight mantra)

by the next summer they tire of childish games.
zeppelin pests buzz over the city chimneys
fireworks light up the cobbled streets
and the war is no longer a distant dream.

outside the grocers
he watches a man in a grey suit burn to death

one day he visits the bathroom mirror
and feels a furry edge to his soft skin
his back shivers

I really enjoyed these poems. They are like little stories. Can't wait to read more

Oh, wow, Jack. These are luscious.

Some little things stuck out at me: In george, I do like stanza five, but I don't think it fits quite right. In the only ball in town, I love the homage to the phrase: only game in town, but the punctuation is questionable.

I love the smoky, urban yet romantic (as in glorification of the ordinary and mundane) feel these poems exude; sort as if Wordsworth and Robert Browning had a baby.

Ta,
Cal.

the only ball in town: loveliness in three parts

1. The word "metropolis"

2. The third stanza has nice sonics.

3.

they imitate deep voices and swear like old men
but it's not enough, it's never enough --
the war is passing them by.

etc. etc. ^_^

And yet, you find a way to top yourself.

Although, I can't help remember a time when you critisized me for my combiningofwords. Maybe it's for poetry and not fiction. Regardless, I love it here.

-Kylan

A/N A response to Seamus Heaney. Hence, the shape of the poem and syntax of the lines
are stolen from the poet. Clearly, this is borderline plagiarism. But I'm not publishing
it; only abusing it for effect.

#4 Death of a Generation

All year round mustard tingled the corpses
In the fields; ghostwhite and jejune
Faces absorbed into the dead brown earth.
Daily they sweltered in the beleaguering sun.
Batteries groaned coarsely, blackflies
Buzzed a perpetual beat around the forgotten land.
There were countless rats and mice, legions of lice,
But worst of all was the cold murky mire
Of blood and piss that multiplied like unchecked fire
In the sewage trenches. Here, every morning
He would scratch lies onto little
Postcards to send to the carefree streets
And quiet doorsteps of home, and wonder whether
The schoolboys still lined up like lambs waiting
To sign their innocence away. Lieutenant Walls would blow his whistle
And the Sergeant next to him called Bull
Would croak orders and hundreds of little sheep
Leapt up against every law of nature and this was called
Slaughter. He could tell by the rattling enemy gunfire
For they were yellow from afar and red
Up close.

Then one cold day when he woke in the night
With sweat drowning his body the angry screams
Invaded his memory; he hid under the hospital covers
And listened to every death he had every heard
Before. The sound was ripe with a quiet whimper.
He had forgotten how to climb hills and chase footballs
Or how the starlight glittered on a winter night.
His head was a cauldron of cracks and cries. Sometimes
He wished the grenade had ripped open his guts
And sprayed them over the craters. Half
Alive, ethereal, he floated through existence
Fragile like a early Spring afternoon.

A/N -- Not my favourite. But gotta write something.

#5 Let Us Be Lovers, We'll Marry Our Fortunes Together

He smokes forty on the ferry
Gazing across the endless atlantic horizon;
Cramped like ants in the lower decks
The patrons build and kill dreams in card games.
Sweaty hammocks crawling with possibility
As they ride the wishboat to New York City.

He met her in downtown London, nineteen-twenty,
Yellow dress, hopeful eyes,
He promised her plenty;
In the night-time she holds him when he cries
Out. The screams are so real
They are almost best friends.

In the docks they are suffocated
By unnatural towers, flooding the clouds;
Every hometown chimney becomes a child
As he gazes in wonder at the loud
Modernity. They lose themselves in the wild
streets, gripping hands like they are falling.

In his cousin's apartment, that night
He watches glowworm streetlights sparkle;
They tangle themselves in the cold bedcovers
Like lovers in a wayward land, toes tickling,
Swallowing skin, awake till sunrise:
Sharing a cigarette with knotted thighs.

The foetal odyssey, freshly sown,
In the distant world unalone:
He smiles for the first time in years.

#6 the sins of greed and lust

After work, the old and young snake to old barstools
and mutter secrets to the wrinkly bartender.
Storms thunder on street corners where rules
flow straight to the drain like raindrops, where
the rattle of dice and tommy guns breaks
the arid silence of a humdrum existence.

It is loud. The speakers vibrate the roof
tiles. He is entranced by the dancer's legs,
smooth and soft like bourbon. He envies her youth,
her unashamed beauty; at home the lemon juice
tastes warm and bitter. In the city
every drink & every woman is spiked
with cream and irresponsibility.

At midnight the full moon shine
loses its golden taste and he tramps home
through dustbins and the surreal wastage;
he almost dances and smuggles to avoid the crowds
lining up to eat any silver downtown scraps. Loud
automobiles roar and scream round and round
jazzed-up dancehalls.

The skyscrapers are old furniture:
accepted monoliths with staircases into
the gutters of heaven. On the 34th floor
he finds his pale-green door
and collapses like a wounded soldier
on his wife's conservative decor.

Your poems make me happy.

#7 a man's best friend

alone with a foxhound in tornado country
snapping at his bare ankles. days as black
as springstorms raging in shanty towns.
they walk arrowstraight like railroad tracks
through cottonfields energised by swirling dust clouds.
the world is empty and quiet. he can't
remember how he got here. the dog is proud
but he begs like a thirsty man
lost in the goddamn sahara;

puddlefulls of heatcracks line the way to the horizon,
they sleep in woodshacks crawling with centipedes
and crackingly cold in the long nights.
he celebrates his birthday coughing up tumbleweed
as the foxhound chases imaginary dreams
of rats in the rotting foundations
of ghost towns.

he eats it four days later
shoots it with the last bullet in his old revolver
and skins it in the shade of the ash groves.
tough and brittle like his tired bones
the meat fills his stomach with a sadness
so raw he staggers like a pensioner.

the beard on his bonedry chin grows like a forgotten meadow,
and his eyes are a crusty red . farm work finds him
bleeding sweat through his middle-aged limbs
and mumbling curses into the silent earth.
he drifts like a butterfly breeze through the same old towns
and sees his dead wife in the haunting glances
of every scared folk that crosses his path.
sometimes on his own he pretends to dance
like they used to in the jazz halls,
hot and feisty all the way to the bedroom
but his muscles ache and mourn
until he falls into a hopeless lonely trance.