Post Punk Kitchen Forum

Yay, poetry! I've been into it lately--well I'm always into it but I've been focusing more on prose writing the last couple of years, but I've written three new poems this month and they're all right!

I've just poemed a new poem, on my flight. It's very weird, and I hope it will be slam-able. I'm working on two more poems I'll be able to do if I make the Grand Slam (I find out tomorrow, or maybe tonight after midnight).

Do you guys have typical topics you write about? (I hate when people ask me this, but I'm a hypocrite)

I write about whatever strikes me. Usually it's weird shiitake and I can't explain it but lines start running through my head or I get fixated on an image or idea on a certain topic and I start to work it out in poetry-like words and images and that's usually how it happens. Like if someone wanted me to write a poem (I always get nervous that one of my sisters in particular will ask me to write an "occasion" poem) on a topic they came up with or that resonated with them and not with me, I wouldn't be able to do it. I wouldn't be able to bring it, you know. Not their way. Whatever it is that strikes me inspirationally, I'm at it's mercy, it dictates me, it's not the other way around. Anyway, that's usually how it comes with poems for me.

mom, I'll call you back after class.

are you getting my texts?
if you stopped talking to me I would kill myself
i'm worried
you are selfish
if I got sick you wouldn't even take care of me
would you even take care of me if I was sick?
the voices are loud today
you're self-centered
stop talking about work, I don't have a job
what am I going to do?
I can't pay the mortgage
I'm dissolving my retirement
they'll take my house
thank you
sorry
I hate the way I look
I'm disgusting
stop telling people about your childhood
do you talk about me with other people?
I never hit you
I never hit you
I never hit you
did your father say anything bad about me?
do they hate me?
does she hate me?
does he hate me?
do you hate me?
I'm depressed
I can't get out of bed
you have ADD
you are unsupportive
do you love me?
I don't even know anymore, you never say it
It hurts me when you tell them what I did to you
when I get old you'll have to move somewhere close by to take care of me
you won't be able to dissapear like you want to
what is the point of getting up anyway?
I have no one other than you
I would kill myself if you stopped talking to me
are you getting my texts?

^It's very sad, boober, but I love it! I feel very touched and moved after reading it. <3 <3 <3

Really interesting poem, Boober. Sad, but good. I kind of love the ideas of text message poetry.

I'm silly and wrote a sonnet.

Willing

My love for you is like this earthen cup
that time has faded but made smooth to touch.
Each day you drink from it, I fill it up,
though sometimes there is little, sometimes much.
The brew runs strong then weak with changing hue,
yet when it’s sweet for you it’s sweet for me,
its bitterness shared out between us two.
My love runneth over, not bottomless,
as dreamers dream in youth, and yet refilled
if tended, if each breath we whisper, “yes,”
for love is not fixed or fated but willed.
And so I swear, I will, my love’s a cup:
I only put it down to pick it up.

I dig poetry, took workshops in the past, considered getting an MFA, but other things have gotten in the way. I do more writing *about* poetry these days, but I still like to write my own stuff sometimes.

Is this thread still going?! This is from a little over a year ago for one of my classes. Sadly I haven't been doing much in the way of writing lately.


Jesse’s Jazz


I

Boom, boom, boom, snap-hiss
and he’s off. Jesse comes
from the side and out
the door.
Into the cool.
Night, fool with women, fast
display of desire and strife followed
by police on the beat, those languid
attackers of pavement.
Ten-pin bars lined with
short-order Geiger counters.
A place for the meeks,
the freaks,
the jeeps,
the pinks,
and the peeks.

Jesse’s here in style,
arriving with baseline
time.
Do you hear him trumpeting?
He’s that cat-under-car,
the wet-dog-barking.
He’s the moon-lit youth,
uncouth youth,
surveyor of the new youth.
A keeper of hands that caress
the supple bosom of tomorrow.
Keeping Her close.
Keeping Her fresh.

She’s the movement of time.
The swing, rhythm, and
rhyme.
The coming and going.
The never stopping.
In ever feminine grace the girls
follow,
boys with blunt manliness,
and
Jesse leads the band.

II

Now the tempo slows.
Jesse and the boys sway,
looking for a beat.
A feat?
Perhaps.
Some staccato movement to usher
on in driving youth.
A cause.
A justification for fit and squalor.
A reason for the thinning,
the beer-drunk swimming of skin,
the ever growing lust of..

They’ve got the swing of things
now.
They’re keeping up, holding fast, going for
The long game.
Jesse’s feeling right,
plays another, one more, this is
the last one,
he swears.

III

They’re painting in the dark.
Laying lines with grace like cedar planks.
Noise pollution.
Not mass confusion but they’ve lost the melody.
Upon every balance beam a cross-hair-waiting
And Jesse is fumbling fast.
He can hear that sound in the chamber,
the serving of another round.
The hissing of starved serpents keeping
time with ease.

The snap comes.
Fast then slow,
dragging out.

The back beat.
The dull thud of progress leaving him behind.
The band plays on while
Jesse sits in smoke and stupor.
His trumpet is worn and besides,
his solo is played out,
his turn is over.

Hooray, more poems! <3 This thread is always going!

Guys! I love the work that's been posted. Boober, you break my heart.

These are the slam poems I did in the November slam at my university. It's just posted in the order they were performed. Ignore my awful physical blocking.










I'll be performing a new poem at my University's Grand Slam this Saturday, so if you're in St. Louis, you should come out. A lot of my really talented poetry friends are competing, and they are such beautiful writers.

NIEV!! those are amazing! mad props, and where in st. louis are you going to uni?? if you're still doing slams next fall I'll come out!






I wrote two different poems about the same thing and I still can't figure out how to say anything out loud.

---
If I send you myself as a series of texts will you forgive me?

I’m sorry

If I could be with anyone right now

I’m sorry

It would be you

I’m sorry

I thought I was better

I’m sorry

I thought I could fight it

I’m sorry

My hands are still burried deep within the burning entrails of my past

I’m sorry

I can’t hold your hand, I’m covered in blood

I’m sorry

When I cut off my eyelids to see the truth I didn’t think I’d ever have to close them to kiss you

I’m sorry

I didn’t realize things could hurt that much

I’m sorry

Without melting the ice around my heart

I’m sorry

I am still antarctica in the winter

I’m sorry

I am a stone

I’m sorry

There is no ore here

I’m sorry

Cold grey through and through

I’m sorry

All mossy patches and crumbled dirt

I’m sorry

Lichen only knows how to live

I’m sorry.


----


why won’t I ever tell you how I’m feeling.

It took me 5 years

but I know why I walked out that door when he told me he wanted to be with me forever.

I couldn’t stomach a world where he loved me only because I didn’t want the taste of my name to turn to poison on his tongue.

I couldn’t live through him spitting my bile on the floor

If I didn’t let him taste what loving me was like, he would never hurt me like she did.

pebbles at the bottoms of saucepans

you can’t make soup from me.

I still sometimes have difficulty determining the difference.

she taught me love was only loud

that it cannot control itself.

she taught that within a misspoken word it can curdle to contempt

broken coat racks

holes punched in plaster walls by the sharp curve of my shoulder blade

I didn’t know yet why I couldn’t trust those words

because the only person I was supposed to believe

told me regularly

that I was selfish and cold and unfeeling

a prophecy waiting to fulfill itself

that I wasn’t empathetic enough

to the struggle of her life

and that nothing had ever happened to me

I figured if no one ever knew me so well again that maybe they wouldn’t see what kind of person I am

what kind of person she told me I was.

I’ve been periodically convinced I was a sociopath for 15 years.

(so many years before when I had yet to break the habit of breaking my own skin

I used only serrated knives.

because pain

will never renege on it’s promise

to hurt you.)

years later and 11 months before I met you,

I stood in the doorway and asked a man who knew my secrets how he hadn’t grown to hate me in the week he had spent in my presence.

I consoled myself that I was, perhaps, an excellent liar.

and you look at me sometimes like I’m water just turned to wine

like years of moss scraped off ancient memorials

what are you but the fresh spring rain bouncing against my artifice?

you can love a stone

but it will never

love you back.

The DIY Ouija thread reminded me of a poem I wrote ages ago for a poetry workshop back in my school daze. Our assignment was to write a poem inspired by a story in that week's paper so I wrote one about Prince William telling a paparazzi to eff off which was the one I presented to class but I also read in the same paper about a local fire in the community which was the beginnings of this fire recollections poem. I also think, somehow, this and the Prince William poem were once the same poem? And then I split them into two? I should get my working notebooks from back in the day out and see how that happened because the final results of each one couldn't be more different. I was absolutely working on them at the same time, going from one to the other--I do remember that. Strange how things work in writing!:

HAUNTED BY ZEN

Fire, I have always feared fire
I believed in God when I was a child
Praying for hours that our furnace
With it's steady blue flame
Would not burn the house down
Fire never came.

One of my girlfriends, back in eighth grade,
Her house caught fire--with luck, she was saved
She smelled like bacon for at least a week
An aura of smoldering hickory.

My first encounter with a Ouija board:
Girlfriends summoned a spirit named Zen
Who perished in a fire in nineteen-twenties Hong Kong--
His body charred to ash
His spirit rose above all.

Zen knew many things he could not have--
It was really strange. He flung the
Ouija placode clear across the room
In a frenzied spelling rage--
We never played again.

My neighbor's child likes fire, so he told me
I asked him why but he could not really say

I had to ask: "But you don't want to light one, do you?"
"Oh, no." he assured me.
"Good," I said,
"Because people could die
and they'll never come back again."

He'd just learned of resurrections
and I forgot about Zen.

EH - January 10, 2002

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