The Mimosa Effect 2

i.
in December comes the monsoon
black rain runs over
the concrete ground
finding no purchase
no place to sink into

this is a dangerous time
to wander unprotected

hatless, coatless and barefoot
we run through
the midnight torrent
leaving no footprints
no sign of our passage
the rain washes all away
even the memory
of summers, the dry sting
of dust and yellowed grass
whispering along
the cracked clay
the same clay that built us
(or that we were fashioned from
no one quite remembers)

this is how December ends:
in a blinding whiteness
or a lullaby of tears

ii.
burn after reading
stamped in red
on a plain brown envelope
scrawled in borrowed ink
on a paper napkin
written in lipstick
on the vulnerable skin
of an exposed wrist

you must take this knowledge
into your heart and soul
into the bones of you
so you can never forget
then cast away
these ephemeral scraps
these temporary tattoos
these fragile imaginings

ignore the sirens
whispering in your ear
the scratching at the door
the howling in the wind
as you stand watching it burn
the edges curling,
falling to black ash

only remember this,
this one small thing:
everything ends; everything begins

- T.H.
Possibly not the most upbeat start to the new year, I know. Blame the lack of sunshine.

need arises
  for a rest
   from uncertainty
we hand suspended
  in cloudy water
   gulping at the surface
     knowing
      one can’t escape
      through solid glass
    (no matter how hard
    you throw yourself
  against the sides)
the roof of the sky
  is heavy
   holding us down
   holding us in
in this place
  we need
   wings of steel
    sharpened to
     a razor’s edge
     in order to break free
we need
  to believe
    that a flexible heart
     an unbreakable soul
   will keep us alive
  long enough to see
the towers fall

- T.H.  (for Saturday Scribes)

they say the pen’s the key
  although what lock
   it fits into
   is never clear

my pen is two bent wires
  teasing free the catch
my pen is nimble fingers
  brushing exposed wires together
   to make a spark
my pen is a credit card sliding
  between door jam and deadbolt
my pen is a thief in the night
  who leaves more than he steals

my pen is a bootleg album
 recorded on the road
  at some backwoods festival
   where it rained all weekend
   where we swam
    naked at night
    and woke at dawn
   to the sound
 of birds singing
and wind in the trees 

my words
 are the footprints
  left in the mud
  the patterns traced in
  burnt camp-fire circles
  ashes still smouldering
 that may someday
  (if the wind is right)
   set the whole forest ablaze.

- T.H.  (for Saturday Scribes)

Still writing, just took a little break from blogging.  Editing going apace; will go more apace once the latest spring bug has stopped trying to lay seige to my immune system.

we are all
so fragile
and yet
we go about
our lives as if
we were made of
much sturdier stuff
in the pantry
the delicate china cups
and the fluted
crystal wine glasses
waltz madly
as if they were
unbreakable
despite the forest
of shards that
tells us otherwise
we carve our hearts
on silver platters
feed the still
beating pieces
to waiting mouths
blinded by faith
that someone else
will do the same for us
and no one
will go hungry

——-

did you know
that enough hands clapping
sounds like a waterfall
that a thousand people singing
will always be in tune
that sometimes
it’s impossible to tell
if the tears
in the back of my throat
are for joy, or sadness,
or merely just
another symptom

-T.H.

ancient matters

elephant cousins
creating bastions
in the damp loam
weaving shrouds
to cover their dead
slide themselves through
the ebb and flow
of the long grass
they can be silent
when they choose to be
respect for the ancestors
no misconceptions here
only history

——

prophet

the bees are gathering
in the honey kitchen 
up on the roof
the buzzing hum of it
fills her ears like sand
she shudders in her sleep
dreams of drowning in sweetness

meanwhile, in Elysium,
snow-covered streets
claim the ocean floor
a submerged amber flash

they are coming
cutting through snowdrifts
scattering nests and tiny bones

pink skeins twine
around her outstretched fingers
cognizant only
of what the future holds
the present forgotten
subsumed
in the elephant’s graveyard

some say she waits for
the end of the world
but I know she waits only
for you

- T.H.

The final two for April, using a prompt from PoeFusion.   I took my seed words from this month’s National Geographic and a couple of fridge magnets. 

Thanks to ReadWritePoem for helping to keep the momentum going.  A month immersed in poetry was just what I needed.  May will see a return to prose for me, with a focus on novel editing, both of which will hopefully be suffused with a re-awakened poetic sensibility – or at the very least, a renewed appreciation for the beauty of language.  Reading other people’s poetry has also been a great way to spend some of those little crumbs of spare time each day.  If you get the chance, I highly recommend it.  Especially if words have become dull, heavy things of late - I guarantee it will breathe life back into them again.

…think I can?

write with the TV on have a day without pain lose my
most painful memories (should be) doing what I can
I’m going to get to be okay with
losing people is all it’s cracked up to be
if people will stop hating each other anything can
keep going on like this only skin deep
we’ll take much more of this (it will)
keep doing this right now keep going
can’t sit here much longer
accept the inevitable change everything but
it might kill to live the death of irony stay funny
forever what people are thinking things I secretly
want what I really need writing about beauty is
what I can’t do going anywhere interesting
sleep before midnight tonight do this any more
we need we can people will ever
be what they are

- T.H. 

For the RWP prompt “I don’t think I can…”.  The idea was to start writing a list where every entry began with “I don’t think I can..”.  (Naturally mine immediately strayed into a myriad variations: “I don’t think I’ll ever/people will/we can/it will/this is…” ).  Then you take away the “I don’t think I can” part of each line, and start messing with the words that are left over.  This is one of the quasi-poetic results.  Fun with word clouds can be had at www.wordle.net

I’ll paint a picture
of a girl named Eve
hair like strawberries
eyes like the sea
She walks through doors
without opening
  (she knows
   where the tigers are)
goes from here to there
without travelling
  (she says life’s too short
   for traffic lights)
I’ll sing a story
of a girl named Eve
hair like autumn leaves
eyes like a summer breeze
She swims in the ocean
without needing to breathe
  (she likes to go deep
   where the light can’t go)
she coasts uphill
without pedalling
  (she tells me it’s easy
   she’s such a tease)
I’ll write a song someday
of a girl named Eve
hair like a memory
eyes like a dream
the little girl
who walks through walls
  (there she goes
   again)

-T.H.

Café writing #3, for NaPoWriMo. One of the phrases (coasting uphill) made it into 2 out of the 5 poems written in this particular café writing session. The other poem is here. Inspired by one of the main characters in my current novel-in-progress.

The first in a series of patchwork poems.  This one is a variation on found poetry.  The lines used in the poems were taken from writings by Hesse, Kafka and H.G. Wells.

I.

Enhaloed now in birds,
how mockingly bright the day seemed
bells borne back and forth
by the drifting of the tide
a film about Palestine in the afternoon.
He spent two days in pursuit of her,
days of impatient happiness
  (one always suspected some ingenuity
  in ambush, behind his lucid frankness);
Vast, indeed, was the change that we beheld.
Were we crazy? We ran through the park
at night, swinging branches;
what might appear when that hazy curtain
was altogether withdrawn?
What evenings, walks, despair
are still before me?
Nothing, nothing.  This is the way
I raise up ghosts before me,
the profounder grew the stillness.

II.

Dim and wonderful is the vision
I have conjured in my mind:
Seven girls, one of them short,
a sweet look, a white rabbit
on her shoulder,
the cat is playing with the goats;
These things are mere abstractions,
remnant of a faith.
That is just where the whole
world has gone wrong:
we are always getting away
from the present moment;
in peacetime, you don’t get anywhere,
in wartime you bleed to death.
Then open yourself
let the human person come forth
breathe in the air and the silence:
My life is only
a hesitation before birth.

  —-

All of the lines in the preceding poems were borrowed from the following works (with some very slight tweaking):

• Narziss and Goldmund by Herman Hesse (all about pursuit of self)
• Franz Kafka’s Diaries (the last few lines are from Kafka; who knew he could be so Zen?)
• The Time Machine & War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (a secret poet; the very first line is his.  In my memory, the pioneers of science fiction were much more formal and matter-of-fact in their writing style than many writers are today.  But on re-reading, I realized that Wells’ writing was full of unexpected passion and poetry, wonderful lines that shone out in the midst of the grimmest of scenes.)

Thanks to Sweet Talking Guy for the old fashioned cut-and-paste idea. (Once I’d thumbed through books picking out lines and writing them down, I then cut all the lines out with scissors and taped them together to form poetry).

Part 2 of the Twinned Poetry project. These can be read as two separate poems or as one connected poem. You can read Part 1 here (“little voices”).

- T.H.
Cafe writing /Twin Poems #2, for NaPoWriMo
(Title borrowed from a song by Death Cab for Cutie)

These can be read as two separate poems or as one connected poem. I’m not sure what this technique is called, but I think of it as twinning – twin poems, related but apart.

- T.H.
Cafe writing /Twin Poems #1, for NaPoWriMo
(music at the time: Romeo + Juliet soundtrack; Stars – Set Yourself on Fire)