#poetry exercise

[flyawayrage]

Moonshine 🌙

‼️ OUT EVERYWHERE NOW ‼️ links below ✨

started as a writing / poetry exercise (using the last word or two of each line as the first word of the next line - color coded below ) and it turned into a song about living with chronic illness - always feeling like you’re falling short, but getting back up and pushing forward anyway.

listen here | find me here

🎼🎶🎵🎶🎼

[lyrics - verse 2]

What happened to her

Fire it’s goin’ cold

Shivers now in the moonshine

Don’t keep her warm

Hands are hard to come by

When you’re livin’ in the dark

& it makes you bite

Cause they don’t listen when you bark

[shebeingbrandnewandalittlestiff]

poem with repeating image

An orange morning over the ocean in Santa Cruz

A setting moon, orange over the ocean

Pulling the waves as it dips below the horizon

Their white, foaming feet trample the shore

An orange sky frames the green trees around a blue ocean

Deep blue waves moving in and out from the shore

The shore is crushed under white, foaming ocean

On an orange morning in Santa Cruz.

[nightbloomsresorthotel]

Are you tired? Here; sit next to me. We can rest our weary bodies on top of each other, set our skins out to soak. Find reprieve in each other's shadows and sympathy in our collar bones. Synchronize your breath to my heart beat, the first lullaby you ever heard. Come sit next to me.

@heenawrites "Tired".

[palamedeeznuts]

Cryonaut (18 Oct)

1.     a person whose dead body has been preserved by the technique of cryonics

  O my love, oh how your riches

Preserve you, frozen in hope.

Your Egyptian nose need not confide

In long hooks slithering up, but

  Yet you will remain, not in a triangle tomb, tall and

Heavy, but in light, light cold. Your frozen fingers

Reach forward to a future of revival; a world

With a garden walked by the wise, the ancient.

  Never did you doubt it, this decision of yours.

But I do, pondering your chilled locks, translucent lips.

Can mourners visit, I wonder? Gaze upon your

Body on ice, displayed like a fresh salmon,

Still salty from its journey; source to sea.

  On a day, you will return to those alive,

But O, how cruel, I will not be among them.

           Will it be worth it?

           The wait?

[haphazardheuristics]

On Curtains

When I moved into this house, before it became a home, we hung the curtains you bought bright and white with stripes of gold and black marching down, they embraced the floor-length windows much in the way you cover me, thin enough to let the sunlight stream through yet thick enough to shelter us from the blaze;

I remember the first time we made out when the curtains were left open, and the aunty from the opposite building shut hers in disgust, I remember the days we stayed in bed as the curtains fluttered in the December winds; slowly, steadily, the curtains gathered ash and dust as we indulged our chai-sutta rituals, our eggs-and-bacon breakfasts, our songs and our dances in the night, until the brightness and the whiteness surrendered to the grime and the dirt; With the opening of my eyelids each day came the pulling of curtains, and looking out into an uneven city that seemed simultaneously confident and confused between skyscrapers and villas, some days, you would be there to join me for a cup of frothy South Indian coffee as the curry, mint and basil plants flourished, as our naked feet warmed up on the boiling tiles. Now, the plants have dried up and the curtains are unrecognisable and the aunty on the opposite balcony doesn’t need to draw her curtains anymore you and I have left our days of basking behind and the ashtray fills up no more, yet I’m loath to pull down and wash the curtains for then I’ll have nothing left to shelter me like you once did.

[babygalentine]

"gray rocking chair"

(written for memoir workshop, january 26, 2023)

exercise: write a trio of memoirs based off of a childhood object

there 

is a rocking chair 

from my childhood 

that would later teach me 

a valuable lesson: 

how to gray rock 

gray rocking: 

a technique used 

to divert a toxic person’s behavior 

by acting as unresponsive 

as possible 

when you’re interacting with them 

gray rock 

my mothers 

my fathers 

my families 

my friends 

perhaps  

I should learn 

how to gray rock  

myself 

for the ways I’ve done 

before 

[airportmagazines]

bulgaria poem

Way down here, you need a reason to move and so we drive –– slowly –– through the mountain pass, into valleys where hordes of turmeric yellow trees blaze in the afternoon light.

We engage in the no-cell-service variety of unencumbered conversation, argue over the music; I win –– James Taylor, since it’s his birthday, and such numerology means something to me, he’s learned. Way down here, you need a reason to move

He hates the plastic cards, so we check into a hotel with real keys –– old-fashioned skeleton keys, brass, with handles and everything. I pocket fruit from the bar imagine moving way down here –– do we need a reason?

I lie on the beach one day, alone, reading mystery novels while words swirl around me; when you don’t speak a language, or speak it poorly, you notice other things –– hand gestures, eyes. I can’t even read the alphabet, and there’s a strange peace in that, the helplessness. Like there’s a life where I don’t have to move.

What does it mean to refuse, to step off the ambition treadmill drop out of the race, extend my rootlessness another year? Why did you come here? an elderly bunică asks, why not somewhere else? And I have no answer but: I wanted to live somewhere entirely different. A place where you need a reason to move.

[shebeingbrandnewandalittlestiff]

google translate poems

[Using google “translate by voice,” I took random snippets from my notes app and translated them from language to language until they resembled something like a poem.]

I. Very tired. Very tired. Very tired. Very tired. You were there until now and when I saw you, you knew.

II. It's so powerful, stressful and incredibly fast. Surprisingly, you need a robot to grow. I did not promise that it would be unique: asteroids in the old town.

III. I'm so jealous that every time I watch TV on the Internet, I go crazy, mostly about how I felt when I interviewed Apple about their physical and emotional relationship. I would like to know.