Poetry

Instructions (A Poem)

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At the start of each day,
Greet the sun.
Give it salutation
And the renewed promise you’ll blow it up
Just as soon as that fusion bomb is ready.

Take time every day,
Even if it’s just a brief moment,
To breathe.
Simply breathe,
and enjoy the sensation.
You never know when the nerve gas canisters
You installed in the vents
Will kick in and rob you of the opportunity
To breathe.

Ignore the passage of time.
What will be,
Will be,
In the fulsomeness of time.
You are on no one else’s schedule.
Your doomsday device
Will be ready when it’s ready.

At the end of each day,
Be thankful.
Give thanks to those
Who toil in your name
For your glory,
The ones who will die
As cannon fodder
When the hero bursts in, guns blazing,
Determined to end your reign of terror.

The July Project

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While I’m entering the home stretch with the rewrite of Book 4, I’ve decided I want to spend the month of July doing something a little different. So, every day for the month of July, I’m going to write a song or a poem. I’ll probably share a few of them here as we go along.

Poem – “Instagram”

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I tend to work out my anxiety and depression through poetry, because I’m a tremendously original individual who does things in a way that no one else ever has. Anyway, here’s a poem that’s a work in progress to kick off the new year. It’s about hypocrisy, I think.

I saw the photo you posted online
The one with your head titled just so
And the filter that made it look old-fashioned,
The reds bleeding over into everything
And giving the whole photo the patina
Of 1974.
You weren’t even born until 1994.

I saw the photo you posted online
The one of your cat being cute,
Lying in a sunbeam on a crisp autumn day,
The dust motes playing across the shaft of light
And the warmth of kitten belly evident in the pixels.
You don’t like your cat. You call him “Asshole.”

I saw the photo you posted online
The one of the meal you were about to enjoy
Delicious proclamations of your support of farm-to-table
And locally-sourced, non-GMO food stuffs.
You say you’re going vegan,
But I saw you eat that McDonald’s hamburger last night.

“I’m Afraid of Silence”

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Rough draft of a poem I’ve been working on, in case you were wanting a closer look at occasionally-fragile mental state.

I’m afraid of silence
Of the thoughts that bubble up, unbidden,
When I am quiet
So I surround myself with noise
Aural chaff, static to fill the void.

I’m afraid of simplicity
So I make things more complicated than they really need to be
I fill each moment with too much
Of everything
As a distraction from the truth.

I’m afraid of happiness
Of what it might mean to allow myself to just be me
To just be content in my own skin
So I surround myself with things
To distract my thoughts
The ones that come in the silence
That tell me it’s okay to have simplicity
It’s okay to let myself
Enjoy myself
Be myself
Once in a while.
I’m afraid.

Bad Poetry (A Poem)

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I spent (or misspent) a good chunk of my youth writing really bad poetry.

Now, I can admit that it was bad, ’cause most of it certainly wasn’t good.  But, in keeping with internet memes I see on a near-daily basis, you gotta get the bad words out so you can get to the good ones.  If that’s true, I’ve got a lot of really excellent words coming up.

In celebration of remembering that I still somehow have an active livejournal, I present to you a new poem about writing bad poems.  I hope you enjoy it.

“Bad Poetry”

Everyone should write bad poetry in their youth

Something to look back on in your dotage

And cringe at

Share it with your children and loved ones

Only once

Then put it back in the shoebox

You took from under the bed

And burn it as an offering

To who you once were.

 

Experiment with form

Play with iambs and meter

Couplets and triplets

Haikus and free verse monstrosities

Toy with structure

and design

capitalization (and unnecessary punctuation)

 

Follow all the rules

Break all the rules

It’s poetry

That’s what it’s designed for

 

Above all, be passionate

Be fiery

Write words wringed from your soul

Vomit them up on the page

As if you had no choice in the matter

As if keeping them inside

Would light a bonfire in your belly

Revel in the joy or the angst of it

Because the worse it is, the more you felt

The more you felt, the more you lived.