Day 12: Marriage Therapy at the Movies

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Buster Keaton

It’s late…but here goes. The prompt was to write a poem referencing 3-5 favorite movies.

I must be doing it wrong. Donna Reed I’m sure
did not drink wine all afternoon with her girlfriends and gripe
about Jimmy Stewart. Remember when we never missed
a Woody Allen movie, holding hands
and believing an acid quip might be enough
to make a marriage work? What’s wrong with us
that we haven’t become Bogart and Bacall,
or at least his grizzled captain of The African Queen
to Hepburn’s old maid? If I could choose a therapist
from the movies I think it would be someone curmudgeonly
and black-and-white, or I’d go all the way back
to the silents, cast Buster Keaton
nodding his head in that comic, grave fashion at our foibles,
and us — falling down laughing every time.

 

An Inappropriate Poem

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Sharon Olds

“If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.” -Gail Sher

My assignment today is to write an inappropriate poem. Keep it PG, Chris said, and, Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.

Here’s my attempt.

Told to write an inappropriate poem, I begin thinking about sex,
and then I think, no, 
and so I have to wonder what else might be
inappropriate enough to satisfy my instructor, who,
after all, is invisible, some guy on the Internet
throwing out suggestions all month long. And I think of comparisons
to how he throws out these suggestions,
maybe to 14-year-old boys
and masturbation, and then I blush,
and I try to keep on the track of what else might be inappropriate.
Anger, maybe, of which I have an especially large store,
or maybe those awful your-mother jokes
that my teenagers and their friends like to tell.

And then self-pity shows up and I remember how sorry
I was feeling for myself
just this morning, how, just as my self-pity crested, a wave of self-pity
because I have a broken ankle, because I have to use
these damn crutches, I opened the newspaper and found a story
about a young mother caught in a landslide,
her ankles broken, her arm broken,
trapped, and even so clutching her baby to her chest
and screaming herself hoarse, for hours,
until they were rescued.
I would like to say that my response was a simple awe
at her, and prayers for her, or even a quick check on my own children,
but instead —  I wallowed in even more self-pity, sorry for myself
for being such a pathetic excuse for a human being,

and right now I am wishing I had just buckled down to it,
and written a really rip-roaring, inappropriate poem about sex.

*

Pretty pathetic beside Sharon Olds and her “Ode to a Douchebag.” (Click on the link to hear her read a truly inappropriate, and hilarious poem.)

The Ekphrastic Poem

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not my batik, by the way, but an image from shutterstock.com

POETRYisEVERTHING‘s prompt for day 9 is to write an Ekphrastic poem, a poem based on a painting or another art form. As Chris explains, the ekphrastic poem can be a response to a painting, or it can give a painting a voice. To read more, you might check out a handout that I found at readwritethink.org.

I make no claims for this. Long day. Long nap in the afternoon.

Keeping the Lights on Late

The batik of the blue city with its orange lights,
its dark moon in a cracked white sky

has hung on the wall of every house I’ve lived in
for 30 years. My older daughters, when toddlers, tore it

from its frame one afternoon while I made their lunch.
Now it’s high up, unassailable,

in the two-story entry. On top of its highest tower,
a lightning rod draws the eye. There are no people ambling

the grid of the streets. But the windows are lit–
writers awake all night, scribbling.

Facing His Fear

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Image found at http://www.artofmanliness.com/2009/09/10/how-to-be-a-hobo/

I subscribe to AdviceToWriters, which emails me a quote every day. Here’s today’s:

If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle. –Richard Rhodes

 

I’m not sure what this has to do with “hobo” which is the prompt for today’s poem (see my other April 2014 posts for more information). But here’s what I did with it:

What good is fear to to them?
They wake in the dark to cold thicker
than their coats. A tin drum
of fire, safety in numbers, honor
among thieves. They are not thieves.
The road sings a song that is wild,
pure as the foot of a honeybee,
but the road confers no pension,
no medical plan, no paid vacation.
If you envy them, don’t  think that it’s all
vacation (no to-do list,
no itinerary, no meetings),
envy their sky of cherry blossoms,
bed of straw and feedsacks,
smoke of old trains skeining
into blue distance, clack of empty freight cars
a disillusioned Morse code:
this is the dream wrapped
in a promise that things can always get worse,
that around the next bend,
a meadow of bluebells waits.