he woke this morning into yellow [Hannah]

Comments and suggestions are always welcome!

---

April 1st, 2010;

Is my purpose enough?

Tittering bushes rustle and blend with the dressed petticoats as the maids circle,
like vultures with flowers tucked between their feathers and beaks washed with dew.
Beady eyes glint in the search for Flora as she darts between blades and trunks
packed up with all but the tattered shirt sleeves that hang out, shriveled like drained plums
from may baskets left to dry on stranger's doorsteps while the baby girls were brought in.

She grew from the stoop to the maypole,
as if she had been trained to waltz in rings rather than wear them. Her mother taught her
to sway her hips as she pranced to make circles in circles and rings within rings,
but when the dancing was done and the ribbons fell slack, she always returned to the stoop.
When a man with a small beard and a large hat stopped by,
her eyes watched the brim as it bounced, skipping over air as the girls skipped over their feet.
"So, miss Mary, I'd like to propose" she didn't hear as she pointed and flexed her toes.

The clover was trampled by coalfeet and a few pieces dropped off of the men's coats
which they hoped was not a telling sign of a collapse to come. The women hoped, too.
Mary hoped, as she watch the parade pass her home and into their own doors,
that the flowers and the ribbons and the dirty black faces weren't all she would have
because being bundled in with fresh baked bread and cheese when she was born
gave her a feeling that she was entitled to more. When the light faded behind the pole,
she watched it rise up and disappear into the sky and the faces come out from the bushes.

Heyyyyy. THIS IS SUPER PRETTY despite all your claims. I only really want to change stuff in the first stanza because it took me three tries to read said stanza, my eye kept sliding off and I think, I dunno, you must need more verbs or punctuation or something because I keep turning the sentence around and losing bits of it.

This was good. I appreciate the turn-of-the-century nostalgia and the polluted innocence of this piece. I'm reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith right now, and this reminded me of the story. I feel, however, that there could be more here. The description could kick a little more.

-Kylan

April 2nd, 2010;

There are no bars here

She sits in her room and knots her fingers and cracks her knitting,
tangled in a blanket she vomited up herself, pouring out bile night after night.
On the cot she reclines against the propped up pillows, just thinking,
and resisting the urge to press the button to call the nurse to end the solitude
that shoves itself down her throat so she can breathe.
The gray curtains laugh with winter down their throats.
Flowers wither, shake, and moan by the window.
The blanket isn’t the only thing growing upon itself.
When she dreams she dreams of him in his close room,
and she stands behind him and they watch the printer spit page after page
blighted with dark lines that strike crooked and straight and in vile arcs,
chanting words into his silence that hums with possibilities and restraint.
He sits on the bed at her side as a bus passes by, spewing smoke,
and her fingers are still and her eyelids press against each other,
which tell him in minced words that it’s okay to press his hand against hers.
The simple dance beat of the monitor makes his heart thrill
when his mind races, too, because he knows she’ll never know he was here,
and he knows he can press his lips to her faded cheek without a mark,
so when she wakes into the sanitized world, a little of the Earth
will whisper in her ear “if you ever get out of this place, I’ll take you to my cage.”

April 2nd, 2010;
snatched from the thread box poem thread

drop those scissors.

he says he's afraid to get his hair cut
because when the movies play and the heroes cut their hair,
it means they're hiding or warping or dying.
for the longest time, i hid from my mother and wanted to cut my hair.
it was long and grew raspy like voices with too much smoke,
so i never brushed it and tried to punish it by curling it up
and hiding it behind my head.

one day i decided to cut it and leave it behind and somehow
it kept me myself instead of letting me drift off to be a slut.
somehow it fit me better than my jeans did, so that i felt
that if i walked naked in the mist, my hair would stick out
between the water molecules and proclaim "i am here. i am hair."

I must say, I love your poetry. I can't wait to read what you'll come up within the next 28 days.

Two solid poems. I think I like the second better than the first, although, despite the fact that the second has huge potential, it needs a little tightening. The first piece is a subject familiar to me -- I've explored it many times, so it has lost its spark with me. The second has a phenomenal closing line, but a shaky start.

I look forward to more!

-Kylan

(I knew it was slippery when I finished it, Helppants, so I'll try to fix that when I edit it. Kylan, I agree with all your comments and I really appreciate the things that you point out to me. It's good to have you around this year. Also, thank you, Tori! ^_^)



April 3rd, 2010;

Sometimes, I Don't Sleep So Well

The projector in the corner is dark
and its lensepaths are empty, bleak
like his brain as he tries to dream.
As his eyes race back and forth,
trying to escape the chase of the day,
his mind stutters, sputters, fails and falls
on the pillow, an ember that jumped
from the fire place and did a clumsy
swan dance into the piles of the red rug.

When he wakes up he watches his dreams
play out in black and white
on the projector that the night switched "on".
Faces are distorted through the corner,
but the words are clear enough and they sing:
"Nuh nuh nuh nuh watch the lights flash by
as you speed down an empty highway under an empty sky
and the rhythm underneath you drives you mad."
And each girl and boy swings on ropes hung from trees,
but when they jump down to land in the long grass
they disappear and leave only nooses like pendulums,
back and forth beneath the craggy branches of the tree.

He sleeps and outside seagulls scream,
back and forth, crowding each other
like fat, smelly men at a peep show
with only one hole drilled into the wall.
But at the foot of his tangled sheets,
a bald eagle sits and waits until the blood
seeps from beneath its feather and leaves brown stains
that he can never bleach out:
not with clorox, not with time, not with elbow grease.
From the shadows a man steps forward
and slits the bird's throat
just as its head turns into a man
whose eyes turn to compact discs and shine
with desperation, buzzing as the first light of dawn
peeks through the curtains, then turns away running.

Trippy. I loved the first stanza, especially the first three lines. Your second stanza is decent -- though I don't care for your noose simile -- and your third stanza digresses into weirdness. Although, that may have been intentional considering the tone and topic of the poem...was your purpose to outline the descent of a mind into sleep-deprived madness? If so, well done. If not, the final stanza doesn't fit with the rest of the poem, and I don't care for your fat man simile, though it's colorful and strong, and the compact disc eyes clashes with me. Other than that, good job.

And thanks for your critiques on my last two poems!

-Kylan

April 4th, 2010;

In secret spaces, She might relax

She wants to wear blue and red and white
but not together, because patriotism is a sin.
she wants to let her cuts bleed out and purge the dust bits,
but not at once, in little pieces that are more lady-like.

When the men stop at her door, she whispers to them
through the cracks of the door jamb, where the hinges shake
in the wind from the heat of their words and at night
they creak so the man upstairs can hear their tattle-tales
as they slide between the sheets with him, ruffling the white,
and he can ignore them because he cannot face them.

She wants to smoke a thin cigarette and hold it
between her second and third fingers, pinky out sometimes,
but not in daylight because the smoke will not stand out
as it would against the darkness of a nightly-purchased room.

She wants to wear men's suits after she wakes with them,
picking them wrinkled from the floor, pinky out sometimes,
but not the trousers, just the jackets, so her bellybutton
can observe the world from where it's been hidden
and burried its face into her soft, unspoiled skin.

Because if there's one altar she keeps sacred, it's not
the church on West Adams Street, and it's not
the church between the butchery and the police station,
it's her small intestine as it breaks down with acid
the fat she's picked up from the day's cheeks
when they blush to fuzzy peaches and she can't help
cutting flesh from flesh, breaking contact, as

he sometimes breaks the threads in her blouse,
trying to take it off too quickly:
a blur of rosemary in bloom that fades to dirt.



April 4th, 2010;

Cause of Death: Consumption?

It was hard to chew and he'd taken too much in at once,
but still the cup was on the table and his hand reached for it,
then retreated like the dance of a dying chicken.
His ring finger was a stub, where they'd cut the head off,
and he lets her feel the scar as it rises from his skin:
mountains and hills pushed up and out, not worthy
of the volcanoes that boil beneath, blood-red

BUT he's too busy to pay attention to the way her soft fingers feel,
or the way her hair has gotten longer, or the way
she struggles to add or multiply and leaves answers blank,
because he's feeling other things, things inside.
He feels the bread inflate and then compact,
like snow that spreads with breath and melts with heat,
but warmer, and more malicious, browner and with crust.
"It's nothing. It's not that bad so I don't need help,"

BUT soon the flour dissolves through his cheeks
and rises up, filling, filling, bursting
until he spits his attempt out onto the table and resolves
to never eat again.

NaPoWriMo is a time for experimentation.

First off, take out he/her dynamics. Completely.

Wait, disclaimer. Yes, you write pretty, and you know this, and everyone knows this. If you want to escape that cage before it starts eating your air, do as follows.

First off, take out her/her dynamics. Right now you're in a pattern of defining forms based SOLELY off of your character's intent and emotional circumstance. Destroy this. Some ideas...

Start a poem with "I" and make your "I" an inanimate object, explain your relationship something else as though it were an emotional conundrum, but write it as a letter. he/her to I/you.

Next, tenses. Most of these are written in the same tense. Try another tense. Try it with the I/you. If you were to do this to your poems currently, they would sound flat. Why is that?

Chacterize inanimates through their interaction with their surroundings. "The darkness, kissing the walls, drapes like a bad cough to the floor, and the flem still surrounds this room."

This replying to a post with several poems in it is really daunting for me. so I'm going to focus my attention on the penultimate one, and then maybe come back.

The first two lines really got my attention: Patriotism is a sin. That is such a bold statement. Its got so much behind it... like patriotism is maybe putting your nation before God and that's wrong, etc. etc. Anyway, the next two lines totally killed the momentum. It was off in rhythm and in diction, and just needs some touching up. The best part in the second stanza was the portion about tattle tales, and the ruffling of the white. The rest of the details were kind of... bored and uninspired.

I love the third stanza, smoking a cigarette just because she likes the smoke. I like it.

I like the fourth stanza too, more than the second but not as much as the third.

I like the fifth's geographical details about the locations of the church, but I thought it could've ended stronger.

The ending is strong and... kind of sexy. I like the character you create in these verses. I think this poem is the most successful thus far....

April 5th, 2010;

Just The Babiest Fragments of Notes

I drive the tuningman mad,
stretching and contracting,
even with the subtle heat of his breath in a sigh of content,
because how dare he make me worthless
and feel pleased at the results?
He tries to climb and I dissolve like salt into water,
sand dunes made of sand particles of the tiniest differences
in circumference, and I’ll have him measure them all
and move them, one by one, with tweezers.
I am the imperfections that I compose
and he comes to make me perfect again.


April 6th, 2010;

but I've never lived there, only touched the edge

Sometimes Chicago breathes and other times it dies from lack of oxygen.
What suffocates is:
the boys sling their arms around the girls’ necks and press them against their ribs.
the small apartment rooms with their windows closed,
shutting out the sounds of the fire escapes that sing as they hang,
the sounds of the people that walk down the alley because they want to get lost,
the sounds of the students that flit around the park like centipedes, leg after leg,
running to catch the next great spot of sunlight that the hobos left generously free.
the old men and women that shout at the escaping past and tell it
to come back right now before the dinner gets cold, or no dessert!

And as I watch the city, I carefully record the way it fills itself with grime
by taking some for myself and swallowing it, swilling it like sophistication,
tasting each patch on the sidewalk made from discarded gum.
Sometimes, I get to taste a bit of dust as it falls from an artifact
that lived somewhere in the world where they had real dirt!,
and I’ll taste the history before it gets shut away inside fancy marble buildings,
choking and abandoned like the rest.

HANNAH BANANA KATANA (pronounce it so it rhymes!)

I really like the title of your latest poems, "Just the Babiest Fragments of Notes" -- Babiest, that just reels me right in, what a word. I adore most of the lines in the poem, especially just the musical sounds they make -- "the tuningman mad".

The only lines I don't find pleasing to the reading of them are these:

sand dunes made of sand particles of the tiniest differences
in circumference, and I’ll have him measure them all
and move them, one by one, with tweezers.

The repetition of sand, I feel, doesn't work, and the word tweezers feels too jarring and quirky, out of place, to fit in with the rhythm and sound of the other lines. Some rewording maybe.

But the ending is strong, and works very well.

Now April 6th, 2010 --

Sometimes Chicago breathes and other times it dies from lack of oxygen.

WOW. HANNAH. I LOVE YOU. That is the most amazing line, I want to replace Chicago with New York so I can relate with it and tell it to people, the line is that uber amazing and phenomenal to me.

And actually, I'm crazy about this poem in general. The imagery of tasting history -- I love it. It's such a painterly poem almost, I have visuals and all my sense reacting to it. It makes me love NaPo, for giving rise to this.

Your first April 4th is lovely. A wonderful poem. Perhaps a little on the dry side, but your closing stanza is magnificent. I also like the title. You second April 4th poem is average...I like the extended bread metaphor, but I don't care for the chicken simile -- it shatters all that lovely delicacy and yellow mutedness.

april 5

I'm with Clo. The title's pretty cool. The poem itself doesn't thrill me a whole lot, but I like how you wrapped it up.

april 6

Maybe I've read too many poems about the city, because though I wanted to really like this poem, I didn't come away from it with a whole lot. Perhaps it was the mention of hobos -- ah, that's it. There's an air of humor in that last poem that just clashes with me, or maybe my expectations for your poetry. I also want a little more lushness. A tad less exposition, and more loveliness please.

Thanks,

-Kylan

April 7th, 2010;

On One Thing We Can Subsist

Thistle-whisperers are wrapped up tight in robes of periwinkle
as their heads are tossed and swayed by grand ideas, ideals, and dreams,
but they get ripped up and dirt falls in speckles from their roots.
As their slender green waists shake and shudder, as
the rooster screams and tells secrets in his subtle inhalation-song,
it's not the dancers that are killed, but the waltzes that spawned them:
winging in blurs of aqua and rose and dirty, impure emeralds
cloud themselves in the faults of trust and hope.

As the daughters rise into a sky and into a new awakening,
they scream down at the cracks where the lucky poppies grow,
"Where are we going and what is this here? Why does the sky
peer down with a long nose and lick his lips with his swollen navy tongue?
And why in the corners of his cheeks does he hide coins
that melt and reform with the heat of his predictions?
And where are his hands taking us, and

is there music there?"