Why write?

Because it’s like having your finger in the pie.

That’s the funny thing. When you write, you have a finger in it.

The pie in the sky.

You could lick it. I could lick it.

And if you stop, the pie disappears.

Process notes: Writers Speak is asking us “Why write?”

Indeed, that’s what writers do. They write. If they don’t write, they’re out of alignment with their world. It’s almost like asking, why eat? You could go to a banquet and eat a lot. But by the next day you’ll wake up hungry again. When you’re hungry, you need to eat. I guess writers are very hungry people. They need to keep writing to feel alive. Because if they don’t, the pie disappears from the sky, and what you see is a blank. What do you feel when there’s a blank? Nothing. It’s like being dead.

So you want to keep having your pie and eat it.

things I thought about today

– the damn tissue you dropped next to the toilet bowl, which I refuse to pick up, because I hate having to clean up after you

– the thing that’s bubbling on the stove, before the pot ends up burnt black as soot, that’ll need a week to soak and clean

– the last mooncake in the satiny red box, because it’s not yet time to eat it, since we’ve ate through three out of the four in the box

– the texture of my washed hair, which feels a bit like hay

– the eight text messages left on my cellphone, and the time spent deleting them

– how good Saturday feels, having time to cook a simple meal and to put the house in order

– remembering how I just had to say my girlfriend’s name, and she would arch her ear, saying “what?”, like a curious cat

– the thing bubbling on the stove

– how my son bit into the cushion, which was exactly what my dog did

– that I should finish reading my current novel, and that makes me glad, and a little sad that all good things come to an end

– this not knowing what my next poem will be, just trusting it’s something I’ll figure out

– wishing the cacophony of thunder will go away

– that the meal is cooked and waiting on the table so we will be fed

– that it’s futile, so I picked up the damn tissue so I don’t have to think about it anymore

It will do it

Charles Bukowski on whether to do it.

a barely intelligible discourse in celebration of Halloween

I’ve been having agitating dreams.
Superfically, it must be Halloween
sending shivers through my spine.
If you really cannot resist, then
listen indulgently, if mockingly.

Perversely (because I’m a woman)
I’m supposed to be conciliatory
with fate, stayed the steely course,
through every gratuitous swipe of
berry fingers. Hardly a drunken sailor
steering far. Hardly a trapped miner
recovering from the scary deep.

I’m afraid to say, annoyingly,
I have to be a witch. No, not ugly.
I’d say a genie witch. That explains
a lot about the fluidity of liquids,
or the puffiness of frivolity,
or the unstoppability of an
improbable universe. Or even
the sly grin of a Hermit before
the absolute vapidity of Death.

(Look out everybody!
It’s not a troubadour
in costume but the Grim Reaper
come to lead the clueless morons
to a stupendous medieval
trapdoor. I say, Duck!

Horrid Slam!)

Process notes: Oh wow, call it prescience. But this fits the “masquerade” Halloweeny prompt over at Writer’s Island. Now the question is, do I have a genie costume? Summon some witchcraft! *oops, not working* Well, can’t wait to see everyone’s masks.

light becomes her

She thinks about photons
watching sunbeams with
nothing like regret.

A halo that radiates
a slatted resurgence,
touching like God.

Pink stillness, wispy
brushes of intensity,
your burning breath.

Toasty, meltingly good.
Peace finding love
in an eternal nest.

Process notes: I love the morning light that streams through the window, radiating and healing. Be awed by Julie’s inspirational experience with light in her writing camp prompt today.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Nothing really matters
Anyone can see
Nothing really matters
Nothing really matters to me

Any way the wind blows…
- Queen

My secret of life is to be synchronous
with who I am, feel it in my toes,
a slight touch of irreverence
a sea of genuflecting backs
will not deny. So much of life
is cerebral anyway. Do you balk
that I’m a chameleon changing
my stripes, awaking each day?
Words will see me through
thunderbolt and lightning.
Rub your hands in glee, expect
icing on a cake, a sly wink as
your heart melts. On the sidewalk,
we’re distracted, logo-driven
eyes on exquisite merchandise.

O! James Taylor sings a ballad,
since we’re only here for a while,
we might as well show some style,
something about flashing a smile.
Does it ooze animal sensuality
or Zen calm? Love me forever,
ease sweet obscurity nestled in
a sea of millionaires, living it up
or down, to each her philosophy.
All I see is prim and proper, no
matter, a goddess walking on water,
waiting to cross at a street junction,
genteel bag on arm, meekly to church,
so sacrosanct, no funky need at all.
Standing behind, here I am, damned,
giddy desires created by eternal
style icons, buying a Tiffany key to
a secret garden. Less is more,
everybody knows, if it’s platinum.

Over to the side, seeing the guy
playing riffs on a rarefied guitar.
How secretly happy now I’m strangely
in tune with you, helping me, again,
to see the sparkle of a silver lining
in a dramatic Bohemian rhapsody.

Process notes: Simply dramatic, Bohemian Rhapsody written by Freddie Mercury of Queen, comprises three segments, a ballad segment ending with a guitar solo, an operatic passage, and a heavy rock section. It’s as dramatic, complex, chaotic and spectacular as life is, I think. Doesn’t it send you on a trip? The lyrics melt you, “I don’t want to die /Sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.” Amen. Thanks to the writing prompt from Julie Jordan Scott’s writing camp.

my magnum opus

You gotta say like
you mean it mean it
when you say it

When I look in the
mirror what do I like
about mighty me?

(heavy pause)
my pouty mouth
(is that funny?)

stuff my fat cheeks
like a swishy chipmunk
in a pink preppy tee

ratatouille sounds lovely
even if I’ve not been to
sun-drenched Provence

my robin egg blue pen
still stuck in chapter one
in that tome, Les Miserables

and nothing I like better than
looking at flower terraces
holding your hand

someday somewhere
it’s curtain time
to walk into the sunset

Process notes: The same three notes played over and over. So says Mr Holland in Mr Holland’s Opus. Inspired by Julie Jordan Scott’s writing camp. I still remember a music lesson many moons ago, how we had to listen to the same notes in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony over and over. Marvellous how repetition and variation will carry us through life and poetry. Hope I don’t sound like a broken record. It’s ok to repeat motifs in my poems. Absolutely a-ok.

Here’re two scenes from Mr Holland’s Opus. Two songs, John Lennon’s Beautiful Boy. and the other, Jean Louisa Kelly’s Someone to watch over me.

And here’s a ratatouille recipe.

Err…I write like James Joyce

I am not an ambitious reader. I can’t get into James Joyce. I’ve circled around Ulysses and I’ve balked at ever reading it. Nah, not ambitious.

Then I tried out this website which lets you paste your written work and then analyses it, tells you who you write like. Talk about hubris! The result? I write like James Joyce. Five times. How wrong can it be? I gotta start digging that dude James Joyce.

I was also pleasantly flattered when it said I wrote like Stephen King. Once. (It was my write of Red Riding Hood Revisited.)

Surrealistic, horror… Hmm…I think I’m ready to join the dark side.

Here’s the website. You know you can’t resist…knowing the hidden famous author in you.

shooting at the moon

The cypresses point heavenward

Take purple
     the archbishop’s royal robes
     lavender fields in waiting
     the crayon that Harold used to draw lines

crawling from his bed to the moon
the story read   over and over

first there wasn’t any moon
then there was

first there is no you
then there you are

and I follow
     the moonlit path

If you forget me does it mean
     a frog has swallowed the moon

a disc-shaped shadow moving across
the moon’s face is an eclipse

     the Laotians thought if they shot at the moon
     the hungry frog would disgorge it
     back, they believed fervently in gunfire

which left rippling moonlight on the Mekong River
and the dead carried away on stretchers
     decimated by angry gunfire

How if Harold drew something else instead
it would become another landscape

     another path, and if we could
we would just draw another

story altogether
     if you came to Vietnam
     you would have been a soldier

you would have seen how
crazy it was with dogs yelping
     shooting at the moon

but it happened anyway

Afterward
When you’re back home
you can’t help seeing

     cypresses like candles
     every time you looked out your balcony

civilization looked askew
as if the frog had swallowed that story too

Process notes: I wanted to write about anger for Big Tent Poetry’s prompt but I ended up writing about the moon. The old hurt is the Vietnam War. The title is inspired by this book about the Vietnam War (or well the secret war, because Laos which isn’t in the war but near Vietnam was carpet bombed and remains this day the most bombed place on earth, and landmines have and continue to maim civilians). The book by Roger Warner, is called Shooting at the Moon: The story of America’s clandestine war in Laos (1996). And there is reference to the 1955 children’s book, Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson, which I used to read over and over to my sons as bedtime story. Obviously the form is not a pantoum. I’m grateful I wrote something. I’ve been feeling rather poem-less of late and want to electric shock myself into writing anything.

doorway to a poem is a dam

I am trying to remember a poem. Lines across a page. Poems are boats. I used to take a white sheet of paper and fold it across the centre. I folded mechanically until the folds became the boat’s rib cage. The final flourish was magical. You flipped it so it became a boat. A smile would lit up inside me. Then I can’t wait to set the paper boat on its course. I went to a nearby ditch. If the water was placid, the boat would undulate gently. If the water flowed like a rapid, the boat would be carried away in the torrent and usually capsized.

Helder Magno’s photostream

I dreamt about a poem last night, but I can’t remember the lines. The poem is denied its entry into the undream world. Who is standing at the door to the dream? Are angels the guardians? Only one line stood out, amidst a few stanzas laid out like neat blocks. Oh, the fog of dream obscured even that one line. Isn’t it pathetic? I was smitten by the line which uses repetition. My mind inside the dream went, I must remember this line. I’m desperately trying to recall words, which were repeated, with a comma in between. My mind inside the dream went, This is beautiful. All I feel now is blindness. This is really a process of unrecall.

(When the sluice gates are opened, anyone swimming in the languid blue beside the dam would be carried away in the fierce current to certain death. Maybe angels do not want us to drown in our dreams. Or our poems.)

Process notes: In response to Wayne’s prompt at We Write Poems. The magic word is (*drum roll*) “Doors”. But after being so inspired by the thought of doors, I couldn’t write a poem. I encountered a dam. So I wrote about a dam. Or a poem that was dammed up. And about drowning, hypothetically. And about a dream. You will be forgiven for thinking my mind is alliteratively ordered. Oops, I just remembered that this is also a response to Writer’s Island prompt, The Blind Side.