Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is: Write a poem about a mythical person or creature doing something unusual.
SIREN
You sing so beautifully,
your music guiding me,
to sweet sleep.
Suddenly,
you voice cracks,
I get taken aback,
I see, your sharp teeth, snapping at me.
You search for a drop to medicate,
but it’s too late,
love begets hate.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is: Write a poem in the form of a poetry prompt.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is: Write a poem that glosses, or explains, or in some way responds to another poem.
I twist your words, folding them into the palm of my hand,
to hold as hope, to superimpose,
onto my own heart.
here is the deepest secret nobody knows.
My life splits into two, one I imagine with you,
seeping into everything I do like blood,
Second, is the truth.
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud).
There is nothing growing here,
but the comfort of my own lies,
and all I try to deny,
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life.
There is no peace,
just the buzzing of what I’d,
say to you if I could,
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is: Write your own prose poem that is a story about the body. write a poem based on a word featured in a tweet from Haggard Hawks, an account devoted to obscure and interesting English words.
Daily, I trudged through the deep snow,
Tired, from the simplest of tasks,
Doing, whatever you asked,
Surviving, the greatest of blows.
I forgot what life looked like in the light.
Still, even in the dark,
I waited for life to bloom.
I weathered your cold heart,
even as it froze my own.
I thought, soon, soon,
life would rise with what I’d sown.
Comforted, by thoughts of spring,
of time working it’s magic on me,
I wanted, I waited expectedly.
Afterwinter,
with it’s failed expectations,
it’s lingering affectations.
I listen for a chirp in the distance,
as proof there is indeed life beyond this.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt is: Write your own prose poem that is a story about the body.
You animate your body awkwardly, like you are using the wrong muscles for the wrong movements. I watch you untangle yourself from your desk, lumbering limbs you loosen out, angled arms you arrange around—unwrinkling yourself up. I want to readjust you like my trainer does my own body: “Pull back the shoulders, straighten the back, use the core,” she repeats like a mantra. You lean to the left when you walk. It’s quirky, or maybe an injury. I want to nudge you to the right, hold you in place. One day, we are finally formally introduced. “Nice to meet you,” you say with the biggest grin that’s ever been. I feel everything escape my body. All that is left is a desire to see you smile again, to be the one that makes you smile. I jerk my hand forward awkwardly, almost punching you in the gut. “Nice to meet you too.”
I
drop
hints and eloquence.
I
drop
bad habits, old friends,
all the make pretends.
I
drop
my heart anxiously,
my stomach constantly, in knots.
I drop what I forgot.
I
drop
masks and too hard tasks.
I
drop
to my knees, praying, begging please.
I drop what is heavy, what I don’t need.
I
drop
conditions and expectations,
pretenses and messes.
I
drop
tears that linger
at the cusp of my chin.
I drop fights I cannot win.
I
drop shows and stories before their
endings so I can go on pretending.
I
drop
words of comfort, love notes and hope.
I drop it for you. For the you that will maybe, someday, pick it all up and offer it back to me, an understanding, of all I have lost and all that I still am.
It all seemed possible then,
laying outside watching the stars, when,
the rest of the campus slept,
sharing our deepest secrets and scars–reworking them from impediments to impetuses–
teasing us out.
We were still so young, and we didn’t know as much as we thought,
but we had so many thoughts …
Thoughts about how the world should be,
and how we would be in it.
(You, a politician fighting the good fight, and I, writing your biography.)
We analyzed everything, from conversations with crushes to the constancy of change,
making sense of the little of life we knew.
We repeatedly played the song Gardens and Graves during our nightly charades,
so adeptly describing the urgency of our lives,
the eagerness to matter,
the restlessness of becoming.
How wild we thought it was,
to just be with the stars, and the music, in the middle of the night,
to experience such a life.
Life! Opening up right in front of us,
trying to live it because we could,
far removed from our contained childhoods.
One night, we detoured to a tattoo parlor,
just for the hell of it (to say we lived!).
You got a panther, of all things, on your ankle.
It excited us, to be more than who we seemed to be,
You, a tatted man, of all things!
The sheer thrill of it.
I think we got it wrong though, my dear friend,
we didn’t know then, what I see so clearly now:
You never had to be more than who you already were.
You were always amazing,
your life always rippling,
simply by existing.
I choose to suspend you here, in the shadows, looking up at the stars, your soul swirling.
Still possible. Still dreaming. Still alive.
Our tears soak the Earth,
But you carry them away,
As a beautiful babbling brook,
your steady stream lulling us to sleep and bringing peace.
And wherever you go, I know, life will spring; tapestries of dreams and all the splendid things.
I wish you knew me,
in my braless, hairy-legged body,
bursting, laughing, like a banshee,
in the streets, playing roller hockey,
knotted hair, face bare,
wearing hanging hand-me-downs and the sun on my shoulders,
before being molded, scolded and unfolded,
to be loved by anyone else.
Before I felt,
not good enough.
Tell me, would you still want this girl?
Would she still deserve the world?
We, battered, molested and assaulted,
abused and silenced.
We, with the secrets we keep,
passed down to our daughters as whispered warnings.
We, with our apologies we make in so many ways,
we create a new language.
We, with our bleeding bodies, aching cheeks, and sacrilegious skin,
forced into glass castles,
with fairytales,
short ceilings,
and narrow halls.
We, with our inconvenient emotions and loud voices,
told to abandon the angry, crazy woman,
Oh, but the beautiful boldness of her honesty.
Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, we become.
There is a fierceness in the way we transform the abuse,
as background noise to our lives.
The nature of being women.
We, the unshakeable trees bearing witness to generations of women who power through to find happiness in all the grossness and unjustness.
We, the daises growing in the cracks of sidewalks.
We, the waterfalls pouring our hearts out in all we do.
We, the rumbling on the rocks, with our weary shoulders and bulging bellies, always marching forward in the hopes one day we will understand our power in the way men already do.
The very things that make us look weak, are evidence of our strength.
As much as we are beaten, we rise up with life. We grow it, we become it.
Take up your power. You are Earth itself.
You see, there is a day we will take these wrongs, and birth something beautiful.
unwrithings 