Published June 20, 2013
My writing has finally picked up again recently, and I’m just trying to get back into the swing of things. Every once in a while I feel like I actually wrote something decent, and I’ve realized something. I’ve never really shared with people that I “write,” other than here, but I have something to say, and if I’m going to dig it out I need to know I’m being heard…somehow, but someone.
So I’ll be posting piece here now and then, nothing will be very…polished…but maybe I’ll find what I’m looking for and gain an audience in the process.
Climbing Backwards
The lighthouse is drowning. Slowly.
Brackish brown waves seep over and over and don’t turn back.
The beacon once shone on a mile high cliff and the tide
was slower than watching the grass grow or your grandma
aging in her rocking chair—knitting needles, game shows, and all—
wrinkles deepening, skin transforming into pale roadmaps, bones becoming brittle.
If the moon would spin backwards, spin a different pattern and churn out
different cloth, maybe there would be more lighthouses in the pattern—and
if more lighthouses, more second chances. But if the moon would drag the sea away,
kicking and squirming and splashing like a toddler instead of a mighty beast,
only salt would be left, and a lonely lighthouse without its child.
The cliff didn’t come with roadmaps, thin lines in swirls and eddies crawling
like a column of ants that swarm around the cities, stroll through suburbs, and
never carry a watch. Anthills don’t come with clocks. Clocks. Wall clocks, word clocks,
pocket watches, alarm clocks, wrist watches, grandfather clocks. Tick-tock
there’s a clock in the lighthouse. A windup clock that will
stop
right
How to Summarize your Life in a Single Phrase
A putting green in the middle of a busy highway?
A highway in the middle of a busy putting green?
Or your country:
Where are the cowboys and the “supersized me’s?”
(The philosophy is, “There’s more of me to love.”)
Never mind, those are real, real and everywhere
like so many tanned Pillsbury Dough Boys, minus the giggle,
eating everything from a paper bag.
Is a piece of paper, which we may or may not
follow, the only thing left that makes us great?
The greater the heights the longer the fall, and
we’re gaining momentum, speeding past the continents
in a vertical free fall off the earth.
If you keep fast-forwarding, eventually you
run out of tape, or caffeine.
Once upon an honest-to-goodness long time ago,
God invented languages.
But not English. English was definitely
man-made. Maybe that’s why so many
people speak it, for all its homonyms
and exceptions and half-baked rules
that change every decade or so.
Think of the sky as a map of the air, and
air currents moving with the shape of the land.
Maybe the future is written in the sky, and we
should turn to the daydreamers for our answers.
They’re as wistful as clouds.
Or outer space, where you move by the very
act of existing—therefore both living and moving
must take less effort.
Here we are, part of one writhing mass,
striving for identity and importance, an endless
competition to shout louder than the static
consuming anything without enough money or
passion to appease it.
Or color outside the lines. Find the white space
that doesn’t know your language but longs
to hear your story.
The editor-in-chief with the god complex
may threaten a gag and a lobotomy.
So go back to your putting green and enjoy
the monotony of leisure instead of in a
mass-producing factory, churning out stuff and
status and portability. Foster non-relationships
of convenience, like marriage.
Or,
Or.
Leave anonymous graffiti under bridges and
along train tracks and be content with
unenthusiastic infamy. They know your work,
maybe even appreciate it, but only because it’s
red, white, and blue: blood, sweat, and tears.
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Canary word: Present
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140,623 Literary Works • 673,564 Reviews
Charleston
No one lives here. Shop-keeps drive in from tiny towns and put up in
shabby motels on the east side, away from swept streets and deceptive traffic,
and lofty mansions that whisper antebellum years but carry not one speck of dust.
Everyone strolls and stares; everyone has a camera and a sack lunch;
everyone goes to church.
The gravestones hold no grief and the cobblestones no familiarity, and
no grass. They haven’t seen a dandelion in decades.
Beautiful and fenced in, encased in glass, littered with signs
(hours “--”; do not touch; no unaccompanied children; no pets allowed)—a moving postcard anyone can walk inside, complete with rainbow houses, dolphins in the bay, and naked statues. Babies beg to be photographed by the gimmicky pineapple fountain,
spring breakers capture their dramatic poses by the bay,
mommies and daddies read everything and elaborate on the history with their vast historical knowledge on every subject.
A paint-chipped gazebo leans awkwardly yards from the sculpted avenue of sycamores.
He is gray, she is in a white pantsuit, and a justice rambles—glancing occasionally at the watch on his book, and the sedan on the roadside—hands them a document and a pen. Marches away and flies around the corner. They stand blown in the breeze he left; eat a picnic; pick up briefcases and keys—just another day, “wedding” crossed off the to-do list.
Obituaries
He swallowed them all white and hard and dry clogging his throat and listened
To the choking say goodbye to the fear and bitter taste
So wet and warm like the moment she was born but now she breathes with
Lungs because she doesn’t feel young anymore so she’ll close her eyes and plunge
Ropes and planning and tears and a beam that was strong enough because
He would never ever ever ever be and would never ever be beautiful until
Cigarette burned arms always cold and swollen brain with all the questions
She’s been torn so many times it no longer hurts when she swallows the pistol.
Will these ghosts have their revenge? Will they be happy? They don’t even know what it means because they swallowed the feeling with their first infant cry. Will they be in love and never be lonely? Will they matter?
Start dreaming children.
Hey, Adna. I'm just dropping through to leave some comments on these poems.
1.
I don't really like the humor in this line compared to the eagerness of the rest of the poem. A poem that can repeat all the kinds of clocks and still have it come off as serious and toward a deeper point is shaken up and knocked off course by humor like that, I think. I liked the image of knitting these lighthouses. It really brought coastal life together for me in a new way.
2.
This poem exudes so much anger that I am familiar with. I love especially the stanza about "God" inventing a lot of languages, but definitely not English. I think that's a nice aspect of hate for America that isn't really picked up on a lot: forcing a language on the world. However, from "think of the sky" to "lobotomy", you seem to have lost me in weak, image-less language that doesn't pique my interest. Consider trying to tighten this poem up. What can you bear to lose?
PM me if you have any questions or comments, or if there are specific other poems in this thread you'd like me to take a look at.
Eleven
Crouched on the edge of the ceramic bathtub at midnight, waiting to be discovered.
She can hear snatches of their voices,
her parents,
cutting in and out like a fading radio station. The whirring white noise of fans
plays the role of static. Her feet rest on the counter like a dashboard as she sways absently
to the lazy rhythm of voices. She starts to hum. The tune is about how her mom spoke to her today. It’s sad and drunk and frighteningly excited.
Mom told her to go to bed at 11, to get enough sleep.
Instead she lay on the driveway in the dark, pretending she could stargaze through the trees.
She thought about her mom’s words. She went in the house before she’d get locked out.
She thought about words. First words. First words in four days.
In the bathroom she hums and slides another bottle into place, forming a halfmoon of green glass around her. Time for dreams.
Eleven bottles, 11 matches, 11 little fires of wine.
Time to put her head down and hum to sleep. Mom told her to sleep.
She didn’t make her but it’s a start. She will sleep. And dream about telling secrets, laughing, getting dirty, lying—everything she did when she still missed anyone.
Ohh, I loved this.
I feel the idea of the poem, and the power it has.
I like the end; They know your work,
maybe even appreciate it, but only because it’s
red, white, and blue: blood, sweat, and tears.
instead of something such as America, it shows that some things take work, and not just pride.
I did enjoy reading this.
I can't seem to find an error, and though I wish I could (To tell you), I can't.
I would love to see more!
Thank for for this amazing piece of work!
Thanks,
pegasusgirl2
Dark, emo, and melancholy; these poems should be made into a rock song.
Mommy
It sounded like you were pouring rock music down the garbage disposal,
tearing up the raunchy rebellion with a speeding blade and pouring it
down their throats as baby puree for goats—all the time you were
saying, “I am the big bad wolf. I am the troll under the bridge.
I am the vegetables hidden in your food and my own worn,
abused alarm clock.” All the time you were raping
their ears with a blunt steak knife til they laughed
and gurgled—your babies, your precious babies, yes—
til the scar tissue stopped up their minds and you thought, “Now,
now they are safe.” Still, you burned all the maps and drank all the
gasoline dry. What would the world do after all but teach them that in
fairytales there is a “good guy” and a “bad guy,” and seduce them slowly
with its kaleidoscope view and a million desperately beautiful memories of pain.
Open your eyes
(I hate the first line.)
Finding lots of change today,
Brown, green, silver clanging, shivering;
Cold, and hard, and old, and imprinted with the faces of the past,
Representing the names we look back on and up to???
We together, as one, both revere and another word for treat as role models.
Men pass through our hands from day today and sit in open jars on our dresser and
Distribute good luck from the chalky sidewalks and damp alley pavement.
From the chalky sidewalks and damp alley pavement where our shoulders
Are too sore to bend any further and our faces are already pressed to the ground and
All we can do is crawl towards the dry brown grass a few feet away, scraping our bodies,
Slowly inching, change littering the path on either side of us and cars soaring past with deafening
Speed as we slide like abrasive brown worms with nothing in front of or behind us but tunnels and tunnels.
I am a Pragmatist
Did we move too fast, down the steps into the woods that scared me out of my depth,
Scared more than staying intertwined with a stranger to the tune of Saturday night?
Slow to take the hand, quick to draw it back because I saw a tall dark stranger in the distance—striding out of the dusky movie theater light, he gazed at me from under his fedora for five seconds. Quick to draw back my hand before it was trapped by time and comfort and the vice-like grip of a crack addict who found his heroine.
His Mind is My Thrift Shop
He shops exclusively at Good Will, carrying his thoughts
in a cheap plastic Dora backpack—this all-American boy who
plays baseball and eats as much as small army.
No guitar, but the voice of the Beatles in 21st century carrying
with it the drugs of this century, poison for politics, scorn for this
generation.
We’re morphing into a DIY world, wearing our glittery Mod Podge
shoes with pride, declaring
I am not the factory-produced garbage of this race.
We worry about where we’re wearing.
I am a beautiful, unique snowflake.
Do we pull over for the ambulance or just for the cops?
Bruises and whiplash prove that we're not about to be
Cut off by anyone. So what’s our message to the world?
When what we love gets taken from us, what do we do?
He whispers barefoot into the wind, a charismatic stork
picking up stage splinters and igniting curiosity with his
innocuous sass while his promises slip into the backseat of your mind.
Hi there. I am aouther2b and I will be reviewing both pieces today.
Hang in there!
What I like about "Climbing Backwards":
1. The flow. It had a very systematic way of flowing from one line to the next as well as stanza to stanza. I was able to read it without going to fast or going to slow. Great job on that.
2. The diction. Each word in this piece had a meaning and each meaning was very strong. It was a colorful and intresting poem.
3. The imagery. I loved how you set the idea of the grandma, the ocean, the light house itself. All of the images were crisp and vivid.
What I didn't like about "Climbing Backwards":
1. The connection. While each image was strong and vivid the only one I felt had any connection to what you were talking about was the one about the grandmother. I don't understand and I can't seem to find the importance of the lighthouse (which usually symbolizes warning or safety or guidence) withing the poem itself, which is a shame because you use it so heavily. The symbols don't match the ideas.
Overall for "Climbing Backwards":
While the words you used create a brilliant flow and image, you failed to connect each thought back to the main purpose of the poem, which isn't really even addressed.
Now for the second poem.
What I liked about "How to Summarize your Life in a Single Phrase":
1. The imagery. Again you paint such vivid pictures. I love it so much.
2. The flow. Like imagery it is once again well mastered, not to fast and not to slow.
3. The diction. YOU are the MASTER of choosing words that capture the readers attention and make their mind whirl. Well done, very well done!
What I didn't like about "How to Summarize your Life in a Single Phrase":
1. The connection. This is a major issue. While your word creating striking pictures one idea doesn't connect with the next. You seemed to jump around a bunch of times within the stanzas. One in particular was the one about english language. You bring to attention this brilliant idea that the English language is man made and not God like, but that is all you do. You failed to expand on the idea leaving me wondering, "So what? What does that have to do with anything?"
Overall for "How to Summarize your Life in a Single Phrase":
Although this was anything close to a single phrase it was surely enjoyable and thought provoking. Consider once again paying attention to how each idea connects with each other as well as the overall idea of the poem.
Overall Overall:
You have some strong suits and some not so strong suits. Take a look at how you want your messages, which are brilliant in their own right, to be seen and brought about. Also look at how you end your poems. They are ended abrubtly and it can be confusing. Otherwise GREAT WORK and keep writing. PM with any and all questions!