Category Archives: Poetic flux

Tell me your side of it.

Cover-art Triptych


Hergé: Prisoners of the Sun

Seven Crystal Balls break first, with terrors—
Lightning vaporizes Rascar Capac
And leads us south into Andean errors
While the maidens chant to Pachacamac.

You have to have read it to have known it;
The Inca splendor, glimpsed in perfect art.
Truth recognized, and Hergé has shown it . . .
Calculus and Haddock: both play their part.


Hermann Hesse: Demian

For this gnostic nonsense, I drank and smoked alone. . .
wore scarves, became a misfit, took drugs, lived Art;
wandered at night in some existential zone
and saw myself a sufferer who dwelt apart.


Laing: The Politics of Experience

This Scottish doctor made me lose my way;
The psychedelic artwork had me fooled.
Yet I love the cover-art to this day . . .
(Though it took me a while to get un-schooled.)


PROMPT #1:
try to write a poem based on a book cover

Beastly Limericks Prompted

I’m lacking motivation for National Poetry Writing Month, April 2023.

The inane prompts will bring on paroxysms of poetry-rage… I already expect that.
But at least I can bring forth from my storehouse certain drafts I have had sitting around since last May, as well as attempt to follow some of the prompts.
This first one is tolerable enough:

Bonobos and Seahorses mate
in a very peculiar state.
First they raise up a flag—
then they dress up in drag
to attack and accuse and berate.

Let the rainbow resume its old role
Or we’ll have to call damage control;
It’s a sign from above;
Yes, it’s true God is love,
but He may not forgive your lost soul.


EARLY BIRD PROMPT:
write a poem that plays with the idea of a fun fact.