muri's scavenger hunt

Ossified

fold/transform/mold–
sunny April
afternoon, now
cold, shivered, closed

part of the heart
on the edge of
your atmosphere
not weeping but

paused in because—
disillusioned–
tiny box of
lies and last straws—

hard tuneless chord–
this life in a
bottle—unsung,
wordless, cleft, scarred

I wanted to do Punam’s music prompt earlier this week, but I always have trouble making random song titles sound natural in a poem. I was also intrigued by Sangeetha’s DoReMiDo nonce form on Muri’s April Scavenger Hunt list, but uncertain how to make it work. My solution was to attempt to combine the two.

I did slant the rhymes, but managed to merge both into a somewhat coherent form, incorporating one song title into the middle of each stanza of the poem. This week’s Random Word List also helped out.

For dVerse OLN, hosted by Grace, and NaPoWriMo–two days to go!

This is the music under my embroidery, above.

Site

Hollow mute barren.
What is left
of the flesh
but bones, bereft?

Where
are the thoughts and prayers?
Fallen—buried in the sundered earth.

Unseen currents scatter
the fragments that once
cohered.  Ashes dust
atrophy rust.

Gone–
what once was written in stone.
Fallen—buried in the sundered earth.

What will future archaeologists, whether human or from alien civilization, will make of us? is today’s NaPoWriMo prompt. I’ve used Muri’s Running Repetition form (I hope I got it right…) for my reply.

construed

essence roots itself
in a trace of breath—silent,
ephemeral, runed–

essence roots itself
without location, time or
juxtaposition–

in a trace of breath, silent
universes take
hold, as if infused by clouds—

ephemeral, runed–
needing no gods, no hourglass
to spell out what is

I’ve written a troiku for Muri’s scavenger hunt which comes slant at the NaPoWriMo prompt to “describe something in terms of what it is not”.

disembodied (with apologies to Emily Dickinson)

Nobody was here but then they are everywhere, only not right now.  Everybody knows who they are not, but nobody knows who they are.  We—everybody and nobody, that is—are always asking who?  We also ask how when and why but never listen to the answer.  We hear it, but ignore it, thinking it belongs to somebody else.

If only I were somebody else; then I wouldn’t be nobody.  They have it better, those somebodies, they can come and go as they please.  Somebody is always present and sometimes so is somebody else.  I’m not somebody else, but am I anybody or nobody?

And then I’m wondering if there’s just me or if there’s also a you.  Are you everybody, anybody–or maybe–nobody too?

I haven’t felt an affinity for the last few NaPoWriMo prompts, but luckily there’s Muri’s Scavenger Hunt to take up the slack. This time I chose to write an American Paragraph, which is a collection of American Sentences, invented by David Bogomolny, an aficionado of the American Sentence.

If you can figure out what it means, let me know.

I recently rediscovered these collages when I started archiving my art. I do actually remember doing them 40 years ago–I had a book from the library that contained photos of famous artists with their work. Of course I neither wrote down the name of the book or the names of the artists, though they all seem to have been male. And I could not find anything on the internet that resembled such a book, so it must be long out of print.

Another mystery. Life is full of them.

Wasted

“unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused”
from A Game of Chess, T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

Her voice attempted to soothe, unguent–
but it grated against his ears like powdered
sand.  Her eyes pooled like liquid
poured chaotically from a troubled
mind.  The aggregate left him confused.

The Kick-About Prompt this week was an excerpt from TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, below.

 II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam.

My collage is loosely based on Eliot’s poetic images, with help from, among other things, several Restoration Hardware catalogs, which always contain the atmosphere of opulent decay Eliot created with his words.

The poem is a silver shovel, taken from the line quoted at the top, for Muri’s Scavenger Hunt. It’s true, all I eliminated was the word “or”, but it definitely made a difference in the feel of my final poem.

Off prompt for NaPoWriMo day 11.