To That Thing

Woman, thy nastiness to me
Is like old Nikes on the floor
Where sweat and mildew disagree
And force me to the nearest door
A stench I can’t ignore.

Your heart weighs less than styrofoam,
Thy stinking feet, thy scowling face,
Belong in some state nursing home . . .
Free me up some breathing space,
You mean-hair clipped-face gnome.

Lo, in yon dark recliner-chair
How meatloaf-like I see thee slump,
Upon your wide immobile rump,
Ah! Harpie of the greasy hair
Unholy Frump!

 

 


PROMPT #3

Find a poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite.


To Helen (E.A. Poe)

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!

Poultry in Motion

Shout–out to Audrey H.  (R.I.P)

 

The dawn is nigh at hand. The clouds
begin to lift above the grange.
Arise, O Phoebus, bless the crowds –
let poultry roam the range.

I’ll bind a broom of gathered hay
to sweep the hen-house free of hate.
Let roosters hail the crack of day
and chicks with cocks tempt fate.

A fractured self and a challenge hurled:
they left the shell – but found it rough
because our bigoted barnyard world
cannot get queer enough fast enough.

They flutter through the breeder’s farm
subverting gender’s useless role.
We feel their pain, and mean no harm –
yet question this progressive goal.

They cluck a brand-new barnyard song:
Gender Identity Obsolete!
(As long as they claim God hatched them wrong,
biology signals their defeat.)

While poultry scratches rhymes for “hen”
and chicks are combing crests for cocks
let’s ring the dinner bell and then
we’ll synchronize the global clocks.

Let Mankind’s unmanned race delight
at Jesus’ gender-free return.
Soon Africa shall see the light
and Araby’s sun more brightly burn.

Then dawn shall break o’er Russian plains
to liberate the Tartar races;
loose their limbs from Gender’s chains
to stride with polymorphous paces.

China too, and Southeast Asia
swift shall follow in their train
celebrating sex-aphasia
joining in the West’s refrain.

Hindu multitudes will rise
to vanquish gender, caste aside
and shake the slumber from their eyes
with metro-ambisexual pride.

Carib isles, with Latin kingdoms
From the tropics to the mountains
Shall announce they too are Wisdom’s,
drinking from de-gendered fountains.

Juveniles, raised to simply be
shall pioneer new modes of life;
explore horizons happily
set free from biologic strife.

Then shall our earth, in glad array
spade dirt upon Tradition’s tomb;
unshackled from that dark dismay
to grieve – but nevermore exhume.

Alas, the global dreams descend.
We’re back in the barnyard, gender-queer…
where hens have cocks and eggshells bend
transcending Nature’s reign of fear.

The henhouse still votes hetero –
their eggless chickens cluck for rights
biologists, ex utero
are born to further futile flights.

(Because I was almost one of them
I’ve earned the right to make fun of them.
Time alone will tell if the trend
remains coherent to the end.)

 Gender Fork Gent
IMAGE CREDIT: genderfork.com

Palm Sunday 2023



And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city—an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of Jerusalem.  And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone and shaded by Judean palms, there sat a woman, and I looked, and it was—Ann!  She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly, and I said to her at length: “So, then, I have found you at last.”

Thomas De Quincey

What The —


     What is forgetting ?

A chapbook of dull poetry gathering dust, unread . . .

 

  Today’s prompt asks you to begin by picking 5-10 words from the following list.
Next, write out a question for each word that you’ve selected (e.g., what is seaweed?)

owl / generator / fog / river / clove / miracle / cyclops / oyster / mercurial / seaweed / gutter / artillery / salt / elusive / thunder / ghost / acorn / cheese / longing / cowbird / truffle / quahog / song

Now for each question, write a one-line answer.
Try to make the answer an image, and don’t worry about strict logic.
These are surrealist answers, after all!

After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers. You may find that what you have is very beautifully mysterious, and somehow has its own logic.

In my opinion the above prompt is unworthy of a response, and shows what is wrong with modern approaches to the very concept of poetry. But you do you . . .

 


The problem you have is you’ve nothing to say
These MFA promptings are good for a yawn
So scribble some shit and then call it a day
Since most of your readers have long since moved on.