Flame in pen & ink, metallic pencil, watercolour pencil, and tritone

Hard to believe that such a simple doodle took that many media... and after all of that the scanner played its usual games with the colours anyway. Ah well.

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is hot, which somehow prompted both a drawing AND my first poem in ages, such as it is.

Hey, I'm rusty. What can I say?

Phoenix in watercolour, pencil crayon, and metallic pen

Evolution
Out of the dusk a shadow,
     Then, a spark;
Out of the cloud a silence,
     Then, a lark;
Out of the heart a rapture,
     Then, a pain;
Out of the dead, cold ashes,
     Life again.
          - John Banister Tabb

Father Tabb and I certainly don't share a philosophy, but if you're not familiar with his poetry it's definitely worth a look.

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is spark, and frankly this was just me making a free-form mess while watching television last night. I have a tendency to be too literal when I'm doodling since a lot of it's for work and whatever plant or animal I'm working on has to look like that plant or animal. I figured I'd just wing this one, though, since no one really knows what a phoenix looks like anyway.

In the light of day this one looks more like it's wearing a black tutu than anything.



Yeah, you can't unsee that now, can you?

The paper I was using was far too thin to take watercolour, but I actually kind of like the way the wrinkles scanned. Sort of like rays of light and dark.

Lucky accidents are fun.

Afternoon Poems

Afternoon poems are different.
While nights speak of darkness
and warn of mornings
afternoons only know that they are hot
and lazy
and should have worn a hat.
Afternoon poems meander through the brain like old rivers
remembering old floods
but too trapped in yesterday to want
the rush of young foreign streams.
Afternoon songs are mumbled songs --
snatches of showtunes with teatime philosophy
and no more memorable
than a friendly round of Name That Tune.
Afternoon poems do nothing for the soul
and yet
when dusk brings on its shadows
and forebodings
watch the mind plead for just one small touch
of afternoon.

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I haven't been writing poetry for a while (got bored with myself, to be honest), but in honour of National Poetry Month I thought I'd pull up something from the notebook archives just for... well, I was going to say fun, but does this qualify as fun?

Maybe. I guess.

This one's part of a longer cycle called Life on the Small that, according to my notes, was written back in 2005. The rest of the poems in the group are uneven -- I'm being charitable there -- and from the style I can guess that I was writing at the patio table on a hot summer day. And, apparently, didn't bother to go back and tighten things up afterwards.

Ah well. There you go. The verbal equivalent of the five minute doodle you usually see here. If you're desperate for more of this (whatever this actually is), just hit the poems label below or on the sidebar.

Gravity

That do-over you asked for?
Leave the given space
and take a shadowed way.
Escape darkness
fly across time
or
hide in secret green forests.
Dream
and make the world glow.
Gravity cannot drive your spirit down
but
growing up too fast
will.

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Another magnetic poetry poem, with the same glow-in-the-dark set that I mentioned here. It's a bit of a challenge to make poem-y sounding poems when all you're given is science fiction-y words.

That's why I did it, I suppose.

Unlove

That is the story:
He shot eyes at her;
She saw his face,
hooked the tool.
He loved her skin,
lived in her hair,
and told dangerous secrets to the sky.
They kissed under a beaming moon,
but she was darkness
and ate his heart
in the shadows.

----------

This is from quite a while ago, and the joke (well, it's funny to me) is that it was done with a Magnetic Poetry set. And not just a Magnetic Poetry set, but a glow-in-the-dark set that was supposed to be for children. I just wanted to see if I could make a more adult poem from it.

I kind of like to play around with magnetic poetry if I'm wanting to write something and end up blocked for whatever reason. Lately I haven't been writing anything at all... I suppose it's time to get the magnets out again.

Maybe not the kids' version though.

The Path

Nine o'clock and darkness:
Short-cutting through pasture
To avoid the ice of early snow.
Knife-edge air slices skin
And shatters with a dead grass hiss
As I pass in shadow.
It would be easy to look down,
Leery of a fall reflected
In distant lamps
And headlights;
But I've decided to have stars in my world...
And, eyes uplifted,
Put faith only in the sky
To guide me home.

----------

In real life this would be a good way to sprain an ankle.

In a poem?

Well, I think I'll just say you should judge for yourself where I was headed with this.

Ars Poetica

Never trust in words --
oh never trust in pit-bull words
they only wait for lapses in control
To clamp you by the metaphor
and shake and shake and shake and shake
until the damned thing's only fit
for amputation

There's nothing quite so otiose
as throttling a stillborn thought
Ideas that were meant to spring
full-armoured from the godly brow
instead come scrabbling meanly
down the jugular like
mutilated gutter rats
and gnaw their way through fingertips
with scratching out and scratching out
on paper

That bloody pulp, the end result
just sits there staring back at you
and no more soars on angel wings
than garbage trucks or some such things
that rattle you from sleep at six a.m.

ah, may as well give up and start again.

----------

A particularly violent spell of writer's block?

This was written quite some time ago, so I'm not really sure where I was going with it. Seems like kind of a bizarre mix of horror movie and W.S. Gilbert now, though. With a title stolen from Horace thrown in for good measure...

Weird, yes.

But somehow, fairly amusing. To me at least.

And just for the record, I have no idea (today) why there's so little punctuation in the thing.

End of Day

End of day --
Hands jammed in pockets,
You and I shuffle through last year's soggy leaves
Searching for an opening.
Dead grass clumps beneath
And trees with skeleton hands claw their way up
Ghostly monochrome against the bruise-black sky.

This was once our time.
Back when the sleepy world turned to ice
Leaving lunatics and fools to bundle to the ears
And warm themselves by drawing silent pictures in the stars,
We owned this.
But spring's early warmth has hatched the party down the street,
The kids in the alley smoking something or other,
And the neighbour showing off his power with an obnoxious backyard floodlight.
Still, high above us
Orion shows his power in the heavens --
It's the same show, dear,
Just a different venue.

The noise disgusts you, I can tell --
You dig your feet in just a little deeper
As we stare out on those far-off lights
That our brains can't help turning into paintings.
I remember joining them --
The indistinct shapes pulling me along in the wandering,
The stories more real than anything on TV.
Now the skeleton trees demark my cage,
The bars which keep me from visiting the heights --
I'm chained to everyday...
You've broken my wings, my love,
But you don't know because you've never even flown.

"It's no use," you sigh,
"There's nothing here to see tonight."
Funny how the warmth has made the stars grow cold.
You trudge blindly back towards the house.
I stay, willing Polaris to point my way
For I am adrift on this ocean.
But stars are dead tonight,
And better sailors than I would be lost forever.

I see I needed winter chill to find us dancing in the sky --
New life has brought us to an ending,
And I shall mourn for you
Although you'll never notice I am gone.

----------

Um, yeah. A companion to this one, actually.

I'm completely incapable of leaving well enough alone when it comes to love poems. The cynic in me just won't allow it.

Meditations in an Emergency

Frank O'Hara was referenced on Mad Men last night. Google Book Search has this preview of Meditations in an Emergency available, so I thought I'd post it just in case anyone was curious as to the type of poetry that was involved in the show's plot line.

Peas Please

If I could only eat one vegetable for the rest of my life
I think it would be peas
But not your everyday out-of-the-freezer-bag peas
Oh no
I'm talking fighting your way through too-closely packed rows of twined-up vines
Listening to those swollen pods rattle
And the squeeeak as you nip them off with green-stained thumb and finger
To add them to their brothers in the basket
(Although many mysteriously find their way to the mouth instead)
And then the POP and RIIIP of those cocoons
As they relinquish their close-guarded treasures
Green globes cascading into Tupperware
And into laps when attention wavers
All leading up to that proud presentation at the dinner table:
Our heroes -- slightly chilled of course
Having never known the sacrilege of the cooking pot
Ready to explode stored sunshine with every bite...
Ah, I think that I shall never see
A veggie lovely as a pea

Unless you count those firm, crisp new carrots there
Mmm... carrots...

----------

The was written a few years ago in a moment of pure silliness. I think, though, that it still has a little bit of something to say about the transience of satisfaction.

Either that, or it's a hint at the absolute relief that finally having fresh veggies again can give a person who lives in a country with a fairly short growing season...

Seeing

Poplar leaf miners
left networks of tunnels here
Small city in green

----------

Surprise! I can, on occasion, write short poems too.

Bet you never would have guessed.

Sprung

The week was mad, we agreed,
Confusing the brain like a tie-dyed veil.
It wasn't so much plan as release, then,
That led us to the wilderness.

At first we just drove;
Stopping now and then to watch unnamed streams
Hurtle down sheer limestone walls,
Or laugh at trendy tourists herding to Banff.
Our way was less defined --
We wound through man-blasted caverns
And, with some surprise,
At last arrived at the Springs.

We made the pilgrimage at dusk,
Passing giddy families returning to the comforts
Of scorched marshmallows and bug spray.
The evening bite of alpine air
Sent billows off the sulphur pool
As we fumbled in pockets
For the necessary fees.

An industrial change-room;
Swim-clad bodies protested in gooseflesh
As tender feet rushed over rough, cold concrete.
We nearly ran to the water,
Pretending not to know or care about the old-egg smell,
And plunged with relief into the natural warmth.

Steam rose in the half-light,
Obscuring a chiselled mountain face
And the ledge where marmots watch the world.
The street lamps seemed ghostly in the mist:
Unreal beacons from another, cruder plane.
I sat,
My mind following the water
Down crevasses to the planet's soul,
Accepting its fire,
Then bursting forth;
Returning inner heat to frozen hearts.

A light snow fell
As we walked to camp by flashlight;
Chill cousin of the warmth we'd left behind.
We did no talk,
But somewhere in our muffled steps
Or echoed in the silent pines
A quiet thanks was offered
And,
I still believe,
Most happily received.

----------

Not much to say here. It's an old poem, and I'd write it differently now.

Everyone should have a chance to experience a hot spring in cold weather, though. It does something to the mind, somehow.

POV

Wax, wane, rise, set;
We have our phases like any other space rock
plodding around an insignificant star.
And what if we are Blue
creating marvelous green?
We are so small
statistically we don't exist.
Then how can this infested stone be everything?
Worlds on worlds within a water drop
is all...
I see more value in a dogwood leaf
than Mighty Mankind the Precopernican.
How, after all this time,
do we still find ourselves the centre of it all?
Better to know what we have seen:
That we are each of us worlds to some
and invisible to the next;
That we are made of the same stuff
as the amoeba and the elephant;
that we could fit
if we would but window our castles,
look out on the universe and see
a world within a world within a
drop in the ocean.

----------

Like this one, POV was part of the longer poem I called Morph. It was, I suppose, a look at changes, appearances, and how they affect our views of ourselves.

This poem might sound a little less angry if you saw it with the rest of the cycle. Or maybe not. I don't know. Sometimes I just get really ticked about how self-centred and arrogant our species is.

Tycho's Nose

The stars still shine on us
as they did on Uraniburg;
at least until they meet our arrogant modern halo...
Do they remember that moody man
who saw clearer than so many before
and yet could not see past belief to find the truth in seeing?
And did that man
as he stomped around his fortress
ever think on the god
who gave him eyes to map the heavens
and a fevered brain that left him just
an ever-present glue box
to prevent his silver nose from sliding off?

----------

This is part of a longer poem (or a cycle, if you want to think of it that way) called Morph that I wrote a number of years ago. I'll often group poems with related -- or occasionally contrasting -- themes together just because I like the idea of juxtaposition.

Having said that, I'm not in the mood to type the rest of it today. Maybe I'll add it piece by piece... or maybe I'll be difficult and just not bother. We'll see.

Oh, and what's with the nose thing? Well, for that and his inability to completely let go of the Ptolemaic system in his thinking despite what his observations were showing, it's easier to give you a link to Tycho Brahe than to type a shorter version. In a nutshell, he was a genius but also very human. And who can resist writing a poem about a metal nose, really?

Um...

Most people, I suppose. I just happen to not be one of them.

Blue

Too hot this time to think about thinking
so I float along in the hammock
hands shading eyes
watching poplar leaves shimmer in the sun
like shards of Tiffany glass
wrapped up in the silken blue of a
perfect Alberta summer sky

My uncle
who has lived too long away
tells me we live in Big Sky Country
and take it for granted, the blue
that goes on until forever on these days
when the air hardly moves
and even the farthest horizon is highlighted
across blonde canola blooms

I didn't know myself
until I found me enclosed for a time
in the grey of an artificial jungle
(and saw my eyes turn concrete to match)
how much of what I am
depends on days

of still, hot summers
scattered with green
and yellow
and perfect, open skies
touching endless fields
with neverending blue

----------

A bit early to post a summer poem, I suppose, but yesterday's temperature put me in the mood.

This one is supposed to be rambling and lazy, so the near lack of punctuation is on purpose. Just picture swinging in the hammock, enjoying a warm day and a clear blue sky.

The open, blue sky is something about Alberta that I'd miss terribly if I ever moved. I've visited other places, obviously, and it's amazing how much the lack of a good sky can close a person in. I'd swear, it's almost a claustrophobic world for those of you who don't get the chance to really enjoy your sky.

Prickles and Poisons

That is your choice in the world:
Energy is finite,
And you can use it for barricades
or bitterness.
Either way, something will always
find a route around defences,
And you must discover a way to coexist
or be harvested alone.

----------

This was more thinking out loud than anything else. The idea comes from plants, actually. They have two main methods of defence (physical things like thorns or chemical things like bad tastes or poisons), and energy expended on one isn't available to be used on the other. Prickly things often aren't (very) poisonous, and vice versa.

Extrapolate that to life in general, and... well, you get the idea. We all have our choices.

Norah

Why do you sing the same sad songs
when the sun is melting rivers in decaying snow?
The birds believe in spring,
you know,
but you still hide yourself in dead leaves
and sigh for last year's
forgotten flowers.

What sort of waste is that
to aim for tragic
when the whole garden wants you to dance?
All around the buds vibrate life
and even the icicles sparkle
in their ending.

For your sake
(if only yours)
let the new warmth touch you
through the open door.
You were not made to cultivate shadows
and the season calls to the
light in your veins.

----------

I never commented on this yesterday when I posted it (it's today now, in case you wondered). I suppose that's because there's not a whole lot to say. It's a little too hyperpoetic, but it's an easy mindset to get into when spring's finally come after a long winter.

Borrowed Music

starting
with a
single
drum beat
pulsing
comfort
feeling
endless
feeling
one

Then thrown to the pit of
unrelated lines and foreign instruments
each following different tempos
each existing in different notations
each living in different keys
and all
demanding to solo
in cacophonies of
atonal
histrionic
uncompromising
arrogant
scouring
selfish
noise
a secret longing
for a lost
half-remembered
one

and you and so many will stay there
straining too hard to have your voices heard
with thousands of others
straining too hard to do the same

unless
an unfamiliar note causes you to

listen

and in that unfamiliar act you find
the note weaves its way throughout the discord
and once heard
it chooses themes
twines them together
strand by strand
creating harmonies you never realised
though they were there
to be found

and if you find that music
follow
let your self know the rhythm

the song is not for you
and never was
but we are given a few short bars
to join
belong
hear
and know
what it is to be
one

----------

This was written a while ago and I know what I was trying to do with it, but I'm not sure I quite got it. The structure (yes, there is structure) was meant to move from a simple heartbeat to sudden metric confusion (boy, did I get that part right) through to more of a calmness after listen.

The theme? In a nutshell (although there's a bit more to it than this), I think that if we would learn to listen -- really listen -- rather than forcing our own voices on everyone else, we might be able to make better music. Erm, so to speak. And as for the underlying harmonies... well, they are borrowed. The world, in the largest sense, functions with or without us. The song is always there, whether we're screaming above it or taking the time to try to actually fit ourselves to it.

I vote for the fit, obviously, but not everyone agrees with me there.

Eruption

We had no thought of dying before daylight.
True, we'd felt the building move
and heard neighbours remark the rumbling,
but we were used to bombast by this time
and could only tell them
that the mountain knows its place.

So life trudged on,
hiding itself in semblance of routine;
but still we felt the magma surge beneath out feet
and ached to speak but could not
lest the curse upon us be discovered
and the pressure released.

We yearned for a sibyl.

That night
as we stilled our tremblings in the eggshell house
and watched the thickened air ooze from wall to wall
a single whispered word upset the scale
and the world exploded.
We swam in fire until the blood boiled in our brains
and smothered us in our own silence...
in the end
lacking even gods in the heavens
to echo our feeble cries.

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This was brought on by a combination of couple of family violence stories in the news and a documentary on Pompeii. I thought it might be an interesting comparison, but then I got a little stuck and put it away before I'd refined it.

I still haven't refined it.

Am I happy with it? No.

So why am I posting it?



No idea.

Wabbits

If I was to own a rabbit
(a situation that
were it to actually happen
would astonish both the animal in question
and
I'm sure
its owner)
I would never call it Fluffy or Sweetums
or any of those other cringeifying names
that
in their utter preciousness
would have any self-aware animal huddling in fear
of addled spinsters
in search of pseudochildren.

It's never helplessness
that makes the bunnies look scared
you know
it's the thought of hearing one more
simpering female
talk to them in pookywookywookies
and ask whether they wouldn't like
an itty bitty cawwot
for their wittle tumtums.

And really
can you blame them?

It's a lot for any being to bear without shudders
especially one tough enough to live
by coprophagy.

(bet you didn't know that one, Ms Snugglemuffin)

No, rabbits deserve better
and if I was to own one
it would be Thrasher
or Boris
or Rex
(complete with studded collar)

and if anyone dared speak to it
in misplaced
cutesy
babble
I would give it my complete permission
and blessing
to chew off every single one
of her daintily
manicured
fingers.

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Er... yeah. I don't do so well with cute.