loquacious-cephalopod

[loquacious-cephalopod]

Here comes your ghost again; it crackles, it caresses, it cuts. But you’re a beautiful monster, a sea that rages no more.

Once upon a time we were singing. Once there were mountains and once there were sun birds, and once I could never be down.

If I could hold onto things ‘til I was full grown, feel the heal of time, I could name the very moment when it had begun. And one day I’ll be damned to name the final hour.

As much as I remember, I must forget.

18.05.2020

Poetry Prompt: Creative Inspiration From HOAX Publication Source: @quoaxquoax

[loquacious-cephalopod]

Cut with a clean knife into little pieces with perfect ease. It does not resist. The rest, so easily affected by manipulation, is discarded, merely being less, undesirable (there is no important difference). Let it burn close to the flame. It will be necessary to be scraped off from time to time, cleansed scrupulously. It will not be easy.

18.05.2020

Poetry Prompt: Of Ink, Crayon, Etching, and Color Source: The Invention of Lithography by Alois Senefelder

[loquacious-cephalopod]

Icarus tried to completely suffocate me. Teeth bite nothing, floating and rootless. Something fine will leave and I, sadder, closer to desire, feel nostalgia. Incredible, blue with wandering and homesick, always. I know you.

10.05.2020

Poetry Prompt: If I Could Turn Back Time Source: Letters Home by Sylvia Plath

[loquacious-cephalopod]

I give flowers attention in the dark of night. Nature is becoming marked by sadness. A predictable cycle.

This is not what you asked for or needed. This is not our mass grave (hands and legs and arms and human ladders).

You cannot return to the moment you were in before. There’s no way back to a toothless life. Believe me.

09.05.2020

Source: Tumblr dashboard

[loquacious-cephalopod]

To continue being alive is also an art. A strange little intricate ritual. I don’t care for it.

21.04.2020

Source: Tumblr dashboard

[loquacious-cephalopod]

Difficult one. Must be less idiosyncratic and more useful.

[loquacious-cephalopod]

I have run away from everything and everyone.

Hidden. My books, peace, no telephone, forget-me-nots.

Only cactus grow well here.

23.02.2013

[loquacious-cephalopod]

Just after dawn the blind perch. For a while he makes his machine-gun call. His towers, I think, are fussy about their arrangements.

His eyes are a striking blue. [The] sheer obsessive few amass thousands of mirrors— almost anything bright and shiny.

These things please.

07.12.2012

[loquacious-cephalopod]

23. Write a seven line poem that begins with “it’s true that fresh air is good for the body” (from Frank O’Hara’s poem “Ave Maria”) and ends with “this is our body” (from Gary Snyder’s “The Bath”).

It’s true that fresh air is good for the body. Our lungs fuel us with oxygen— 2,400 gallons of air to oxygenate blood pumped through the heart daily. Without this, our cells would quickly die and leave the body to suffocate. This is our body.

17.10.2012

Source: National Geographic

[loquacious-cephalopod]

22. What is the first car you bought/drove/remember? Write a poem about it.

The most handsome car ever produced, they said, waving at one as it swept by them and shouting “Hey, Charger!” It had a modern, almost space age quality about it, and it created a cliché that haunts today’s owners.

10.09.2012

Source: Wikipedia

[loquacious-cephalopod]

21. Select one of the poems you’ve already written as part of this challenge and revise it by choosing all new verbs.

If the moon crooned, she would terrify you: the woman in the ambulance whose red heart rots through her coat so astoundingly. The smile of the snow is white.

And I envy no face; I have wanted to obliterate myself. The vivid tulips embarrass my oxygen. I’d disappear if they followed me; I could just fasten the locks and turn back and metamorphose into a tree.

The light shivers chalk and cold. My mirror is worrying over— A few more breaths, and it will whisper nothing at all. It is I. It is I—

Grinding the bitterness between my teeth. I am bitter? I’m averse? I couldn’t speak for a week, she was so cold. And I shall be useful when I break down finally.

From their fond, final, infamous decay, the idiot bird cries out and drunken sways atop the broken universal clock. It was a dream, and did not suggest a thing.

10.09.2012

Sources: Poems by Sylvia Plath: The Rival; Poppies in October; Wintering; Tulips; The Arrival of the Bee Box; The Everlasting Monday; Last Words; Three Women; The Tour; In Plaster; I Am Vertical; The Dead; Doomsday 

[loquacious-cephalopod]

20. Write a narrative poem detailing a specific childhood memory.

The needle point is pressed into the flesh, advanced along the trajectory of the needle’s curve until it emerges, and pulled through.

26.08.2012

Source: Wikipedia

[loquacious-cephalopod]

19. Imagine yourself performing any household task/chore, then write a poem using what you’ve imagined as an extended metaphor for writing: an Ars Poetica.

Run back and forth while hot over a sheet of paper. Leave for one hour then wipe off.

Don’t socialise with friends (only makes them larger and uglier).

Reinforce by darning heels and toes. Whisk vigorously to make sure there are no lumps.

Ammonia restores brilliance to diamonds but it does not soak into the paper.

25.08.2012

Source: Molly Dye’s Survival Manual

[loquacious-cephalopod]

18. Write a poem without any end rhyme, only internal rhyme.

I do most of my reading in the oven among the lingering smells of pizza. It’s warm and womb-like, with enough room to rest.

Crammed into the oven, my lifeless hands still. Like father, like son— you can be certain that I did not die of the flu. You never again need to wash your hands.

14.06.2012

Source: Chuck Palahniuk: Where I Like To Read

[loquacious-cephalopod]

17. Write a poem that employs a rhyme scheme. It can be a poem in verse or not. “Tell it slant” or not.

You’ll die when they’re done with you, kill you the way they’ve killed everyone before. Monopolies. Disease. War. The pain and panic and horror only lasts a minute or two.

12.06.2012

Source: Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

[loquacious-cephalopod]

16. Spend some time with a favourite poem (written by someone else). Write a poem in response to (or in dialogue with) that poem.

Do not think I underestimate hell. I, a smiling woman; the full set of teeth to annihilate each decade. I have nine times to die.

The big strip tease—peel off the napkin. Hands, knees, skin and bone. Pick the worms off; it’s easy enough. The flesh will vanish in a day.

The same face, the same, identical woman. I have done it again. I do it exceptionally well— a sort of walking miracle.

The theatrical comeback, a charge for the eyeing of my scars. Do I terrify? I turn and burn. Flesh, bone—there is nothing there.

10.06.2012

Source: Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

[loquacious-cephalopod]

15. Rewrite (“regenerate”) any poem you wrote in the first two weeks of the 30dpc.

How strange to wash my eyelids— like a small foetus (an imaginary one, of course), curled up like an eagle’s nest. I never felt warm again inside.

The bathtub was full of these flowers; my own insecurity a huge hole in the floor. It’s a lonely life—like being stabbed, like the end of May, like writing underwater.

We stood in front of the mirror, weeping with laughter. Wondered the distance between cars and stairways, stuff like that. (It’s all a dream, you know.)

The whole mountainside is a large wooden coffin around me. We human beings, cast to the winds, dead in the oven. I ran away, and he drove me all the way home, the lucky devil.

03.06.2012

Source: Interview with Marianne Ihlen by Kari Hesthamar