Poetry Assignment, Stage 1: write the worst poem EVER.
It's Dark and Everything Hurts
SPOILERS! (Click to view)I only need love
it's supposed to fit me like a glove.
but you left me behind
I'm empty like an orange rind.
I always just put my emotions on a shelf
trying not to be myself
but all it ever brought me was pain.
it's hard to stay sane
when all that remains
is this lonely refrain.
I thought that we fit;
that what we had was really it,
but you left behind the only thing that ever meant anything to you
which was me.
I hope that you're happy with him
knowing that my future is so grim
forever dimmed
by a betrayal that maskeraded (sic) as love.
your fickle whims
have buried me in a hole from which there is no escape
except to take
the easy and cowardly way out.
my soul shouts
for you
but you don't care?
do you, Claire?
Stage 2: write a long list of words that you find to have a delicious sort of texture. Read 3 aloud during workshop and use them to develop a class master list.
Stage 3: adapt your shitty poem, using words from the master list, into a good poem (or as close as you can get).
Cecilia
SPOILERS! (Click to view)Cecilia, he says,
is just another word for the sleeping entropy
that sits at the end of the bar
seeming coy, keen on macram and discombobulation.
A teleological fascination throwing back drinks
and shanking passers-by with some mellifluous voodoo,
feigning interest in their distant mariachi tunes,
drawing them relentlessly into a bottleneck canyon
before throwing on the saddle.
A wizard of the pillow talk howitzer
- dead reckoning behind diaphanous conversation -
she sends shrapnel whining and whistling, tearing at his fuselage
so that he has no choice but to eject, naked and confused.
She finds him lying
broken in a fen, wrapped in the albumen of his parachute,
captures him, drags him
to a secluded bungalow festooned with the tusks
of past solicitations,
slips slivers of bamboo beneath his fingernails, smears wasabi beneath his eyelids,
and hobbles him with sweaty bedsheets.
Bludgeoned and macerated, he writes out his obituary,
entitled o-bitch-uary,
with candied viscera on the linoleum, a stagy rebuke
in warm tapioca,
crawls to the balcony and reads it aloud to her
as the curtain falls,
unaware that shes already fled
to avoid the lackluster final act.
I thought Cecilia was more lyrical than Claire, hence the switcheroo. I'll leave to your imagination which words were on the master list and which were not. for the most part, I feel it's pretty obvious.
it's a fun way to write poetry.
homebrew unveiling in gainesville this weekend. I should have some fun stories to tell, come monday.
you're so deep! I did not know....
I love "Cecilia"!!
xoxoxo