"Years Ago, When I Was Younger..."

[psalm_onethirtyone]

Poetry.

Assignment: Write a poem using hard and soft sounds.

Trans


Most hot days I wish that I could crack that skin open
from inside
and climb out of it, drop
the dry wallpaper
and walk away from it--leave
it on the pavement.

If I stepped free from this false self,
if I slid whispering into my right gender,
if my smooth chin grew sparse hairs
and my voice fell two octaves down,
I could tell you I am not transforming
from one thing into another.

It was always me in here
enclosed in the wrong body, and
in these skirts and lipsticks
I have always been a
changeling.

xxx

Assignment: Write a poem using a made-up word. Do not define the word in the poem.

Paper Thin Hotel**


It’s four in the morning
the end of December,
the beginning of a better song by a better poet
but my heart feels gravel-rough, so
perhaps that’s enough for kinship

and I’m lying awake listening to the
gasps of fucking
from the couple next door,
thinking: at least they sound happy,

thinking: I could get drunk and forget this,
a cambrelin and a scotch at the bar
but then I’d have to readjust my eyes

to the light. Fuck that noise.
New York is cold, but I like where I’m lying--

and then the train comes, howling, through the valley.

**this poem is a tribute to Leonard Cohen, as evidenced by the references to Famous Blue Raincoat, Paper Thin Hotel, and his rather unique singing voice.

xxx

Assignment: Write down a complete observable description of a real photograph. Write down two unknown facts. Write down one observable inference. Using this information, write a poem.

Psychophysics


What neither of us knew was that shortly our haptics would
forget us both, that
three weeks later the velour of feathers would be
familiar to us only in the way of our
dead grandmothers’ voices--diffused
across dull photographic distances.
Tactile stimulation ceased, then
audition, fading out in waves
we could no longer detect.
But even four senses down, divided
from olfaction, gustation, and the wise receptors of
the thalamus,
we could remember that day: the
green-bright hill, the Indian corn of chicken colours,
my bracelet flashing, your smile quirking,
and the visual process of rods and cones
that saved us from
solitude.

xxx

Assignment: Write a poem that uses simile.

Apitoxin


why are the ones who hurt the ones who
stay with you, i ask my mother
why do they keep humming around you like the last
wayward bees on extracted frames,
making you afraid to brush them off?

why aren’t you gone? i’ve
waited a long time to lose you.
why aren’t you gone?

but when i ask my mother she
only says that you’ve pressed your thumbprints
on my heart
like a suspect at the police station
and there’ll always be a record

you’re in the files
you’re in the frames

xxx

Assignment: Write a poem that uses metaphor.

Genesis


Why do poems travel in
     the creases of the brain,
underground rivers carving
     channels for themselves, carving
stalactites, caverns, chimneys,
     for hundreds of miles of split-
second neural activity
     until they well up from our
mouths and flow into
     our hands, our history,
like water from the
     earth?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_grayswandir_/]

You are, as usual, amazing.

I especially love this:

It’s four in the morning
the end of December,
the beginning of a better song by a better poet
but my heart feels gravel-rough, so
perhaps that’s enough for kinship

-- which has the sort of cadence that seems to suggest a meter that isn't quite there. And I love the sounds and the way rough/enough seems to form a kind of hidden internal rhyme. And:

three weeks later the velour of feathers would be
familiar to us only in the way of our
dead grandmothers’ voices--diffused
across dull photographic distances

Amazing.

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

Yay thank you so much! ^_____^

I kind of totally stole the first two lines of that one, but. I like the sounds of it, too, so I'm glad you do!

Oh man, Dr. Goldstein and I spent so long on the last two lines of that excerpt. XD

[the-chloroplast.livejournal.com]

I love these. Your poems are always very poignant; they have a certain je ne sais quoi that just makes them gorgeous. I don't know. Reading them is like holding a bubble, or something very fragile made of glass, it's special and you don't want to move too quickly or you'll break it.

I especially like the "you're in the files / you're in the frames." It's a simple statement but it says so much.

Agh agh agh. One of these years I'm going to walk into a bookstore and there will be a book of your poetry on a shelf there and I won't be even a tiny bit surprised. These are all beautiful.

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

oh, yeah, baby, stroke my ego moooore.