hats & plaids

This isn’t a documentary about hats
with nice trims. It’s a monograph
on one face, a bleary-eyed morning
with three fingers on a mouth.

How does a girl wear her hair?
A chignon pinned with elegance
or crossing three sections
for a thick fishtail.

*

The drawers open a history of hats–
metaphorical coverings for
the Shakespearean stage play.
Some hats we lose, gusts over streets.

That movie about hats opening doors.
It’s like saying, a singular world
contains streets of possibilities
through different doors.

*

Some doors are stories, intersecting
landscapes making a tapestry.
Reading is a daily dalliance
with doors.

It’s like God is saying,
you make up the narrative
by putting on hats.

It’s the flip way of our world,
sweet with melancholia.
What’s blacker than black is
infused with a deep violet.

Flat black is boring,
but weave an interesting purple,
and it becomes a poem of plaid,
all intersecting lines,
a convergence of lives.

Process notes: Did not follow the prompt’s instructions strictly, about intersecting words with lines. But it was the starting point. So I’m posting this to Poetry Tow Truck’s Of the Plaid Persuasion prompt. Besides, I really like plaid.

Protected: god & goddess

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Protected: walking on sunshine

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someone to watch over you

The high stool fell like a sledgehammer
on baby toes, hurting bones still soft.
None broken, except fractures too small.
Green-robed in the radiation room, wordless
you cried, barely stifling panic. Wound
buried deep beneath ragged cuticles,
you even said you don’t remember.

Barry Manilow on the radio. Who would’ve
thought that sound is a wound I’d licked?
A time waiting to be amazed, in happy new
sandals, only seventeen. Now I’d been
hung upside down, I could see how wounds
settled inside everyone, like a deep red
heat felt by a healer’s hands. Haha,
Barry Manilow meant absolute cheesiness.
I’d gag like a dry well suddenly gushing.

Now that I’m a wise woman, like they say,
implacably burrowing inside old places,
that sit like empty molars, hollowed out
and crowned like artificial root canals,
those incurable cuticles hung like a sign.
I’m meant to be someone to watch over you.

Process notes: Hurts so good, says the prompt at Poetry Tow Truck. It’s true what Donna said, injuries are usually memorable events when they happen to us, but also when they happen to those we love. They’re not just physical but psychological events we don’t forget. I’m not entirely sure why Barry Manilow got into the poem. Hrmph…

auld lang syne

We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
filled with lemon tanginess made
delicate by an industrious hand.
“Will you walk with me today?”
We’ll listen to twittering birds,
the Teide volcano in distant snow.
Passing a bar, there’s that Norah Jones
song that feels like home, as we ran over
the cobblestones, trailing a voluminous kite.
Listen to the blackbirds, up on the tree.
You tell me, the bowl should be ready
for the sizzling symmetry of some
lentil stew, toasted garlic croutons,
a snip of parsley. The day briefly gone.

Process notes: Poetry Tow Truck asked us to write according to the rules of an Elizabethan sonnet. I didn’t follow the traditional ten syllable line requirement but I wanted to follow the directed words/images/ideas in each listed line.

Line 1 – A line from a familiar prayer or song

Line 2- the name of a fruit or vegetable

Line 3 – At least one three-syllable word

Line 4 – a line of dialogue

Line 5 – an auditory image

Line 6 – specific name of a place

Line 7 – pop culture reference

Line 8 – a fear or something forgotten

Line 9 – a favorite childhood toy

Line 10 – an imperative

Line 11 – a household object

Line 12 – an alliterative phrase

Lines 13 and 14 – rhyming couplet

Protected: Napowrimo #30: A love letter to poetry

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Napowrimo #23: skin

I am not a beauty junkie but
for a woman, the light that comes
from within, needs sustainability.

There was a time when skin
became blemished, imperfectly
red, lacked translucence.

But I will not be another bimbo.
Surely, light comes from an intellect
that shines from a face devoid
of illuminating miracles.

I still remember, though,
how soft that youthful skin,
pink and glowing.

Slowly I came to know the lie of doing
absolutely nothing. I now believe in
a miracle jar, the algae that will turn
back the self-deprecating clock.

Process notes: The above follows a prompt which Donna shared, which goes like this: (stanza 1) tell us what you are not (stanza 2) say where the light comes from (stanza 3) give three details about the hardest year of your life (stanza 4) tell a lie about who you are (stanza 5) tell us something you remember involving light (stanza 6) share a good memory (stanza 7) admit to the lie (stanza eight) describe an object that exemplifies who/what you are.

all I ever wanted

The invincible wind,
the howling wolf,
the way to live
is through wildness of soul,
a harbinger of self-mythology.

Again and again,
the lure of the sea,
pulsating with movement,
in the fish net of happiness,
as if by osmosis, we will lift off
into air, and this self-annihilation
will be trapped instead.

The bench where we’ll sit,
the pebbles of experience
paving every soul.

Process notes: In response to Poetry Tow Truck’s “Vacation, All I ever Wanted”‘s image prompt. The image of Cape May, New Jersey here.

mirror mirror on the wall

Today is ordinary as pie. I wonder why
last night’s dream regurgitated
the case I was on, like lumps of yeast rising,
with no particular significance
except the rising.

I am not the evil queen. I do not
look into a baroque mirror,
asking, Who’s the fairest of them all?
I see me, with the shock of recognition,
asking, Do I know you at all?

The answer is within me.

There are so many things as inconsequential
as yeast. There are degrees of suffering
and my thinking about that will help no one.
Still I do think everyday, including about
perpetual motion and electric sound
in pachinko parlors and video arcades.
There’re as many ways to skin a cat
as to shoot imaginary monsters.

Perhaps this poem is just another.

I am not the poem. This is hardly autobiographical.
The words take on a meaningful lustre,
just by being words. Say it.
Don’t the platters of finger food
on the side table look fabulous?
Now does it make you feel a tiny tad
hungry? What you yourself never say
out loud anyway, even if you lay
in a wreckage of tinsel and foil.

Words that resonate with joy.
Oh yes, I’m a goddess, lighting a candle,
in darkness, a shadow stepping into
a reflective pool of light.
I want to dazzle you with degrees of joy.

Today is all you’ve got, even if it looked
as if the only thing rising is yeast.

The ordinary is really extraordinary.
Our tastes, you realize, are the same.

Process notes: Piece together a poem from 10-15 phrases from your old journal, says Poetry Tow Truck.

With apologies to the guys reading out there, most women know what the title of this post means. It’s when you clean out your dressers or your closet and find clothes that you forgot you had, clothes that got buried or pushed to the back that you haven’t seen in a long time. It’s like getting a new wardrobe without really going shopping. We are going to adapt this idea for our purposes today – we are going journal shopping.

The phrases from my notebook are “The ordinary is extraordinary”, “reflective pool of light”, “a wreckage of tinsel and foil”, “degrees of suffering”, “the platters on the side table looked fabulous”, “you are a goddess”, “a baroque mirror”, “pachinko parlors”, “resonate with joy”, and “ordinary as pie”. Strange poem you may say. I’m still reflecting on it myself.

jishin

When the sun goes down,
a fog of death, hordes swimming
to the other side.
Death by water,
jug jug jug jug,
death by fire,
burning burning.

When the sun goes down,
unreal city tapping
the footsteps of the hungry,
plucking each a way home.
Hope streaming down
the surreal faces as
survivors wait on rooftops
in a sea of splinters.

When the sun goes down,
a reason for judgement
letting it all go to seed,
rain tears of hyacinth.
Everything shall pass
into suffused chants
after darkness. Repeat,
Let there be light.

Flickering searchlights.
Tiresias, not far behind.

Process notes: *”Jishin” means “earthquake” in Japanese.* Poetry Tow Truck wants us to use anaphora, or a repeating phrase at the beginning of sentences. I used the phrase, “When the sun goes down”. In the poem, I tried weaving elements of T S Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, especially since the waste land described seems to have a kind of foretelling quality of the apocalyptic situation in Japan. And I wanted the poem to end with Tiresias, blind soothsayer, who is the narrator in Eliot’s poem. Does an extreme apocalypse force us to become existentialists or mystics?

Towards the survivors in the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011, we send our collective healing thoughts of succour to avert further threats of radiation and aftershocks.