Word Garden Word List #11 ("A Ted Hughes Bestiary")

 

Hello everyone, it's me with your weekly word list poetry prompt. This time our words are all taken from the volume "A Ted Hughes Bestiary", a collection of poems in which animals, birds, and even fish are used to illustrate our own human nature. 

Hughes was married to the poet Sylvia Plath (featured here earlier) until her death in 1963. He served as Poet Laureate of England from 1984 until his own death.

Returning to our source book, these are no fluffy bunny poems. They are bloody, unsentimental, and some of them are hard to take. Hughes spares us nothing and shows us ourselves in a manner that is shockingly accurate but definitely uncomfortable. 

What we do here is simple: use at least 3 of the 20 listed words in a new poem of any length or style. It need not have anything to do with animals--in fact I have deliberately included only one animal--the otter--on this list. Then link, visit, and enjoy. This list is "live' through Friday. 

I didn't think this was necessary, but it seems that it is. Don't link to this prompt if you're not DOING the prompt. And please make sure your link works. 

And now, your list:

abrupt

adopted

frayed

glitter

goblin

holiday

lexicon

madhouse

medical

needles

otter

ovens

pretense

razors

rubbish

sophistry

static

toys

vapor  (or "vapour" as Hughes writes it)

zodiac

Essential Oils For The Damned

 Idiot child of broken clocks, you once again brandish your prop razor

and my pretense skin curls away in shavings of apple peel red.

Glitter-eyed goblin, my adopted doppelganger monster,

here is your furious holiday for inmates.

I wave my frayed pennant and slide soggy sophistry down the coin slot

of the arcade game called Ouroboros Hoola-Hoop Boomerang For Dummies.

I like to think that my heart is not an unsafe toy.

I like to think that my blood is made of milk, my fingertips of cotton swabs.

Idiot child with the air raid stuck in your throat, fire-bug goblin,

do not call me sister, or mother, or twin.

There is an oven filled with cakes and loaves,

another with needles and broken glass.

Why scribble my name in static on the sunspot glass of the door?

Why not go die somewhere,

dissolve into tiny scrubbing bubbles of amnesia,

or while away the empty hours on the locked ward birthing lexicons for lunatics?

Why stand in the sudden mirror like immolated Jaycees

wearing Hello My Name Is Me stickers on your smoldering shoulders?

Why pen me inside an iron zodiac

with my temper and PTSD that rips me rising, screaming from my sleep?

The medical term for all this is Spiritual Infucktion

with features of Recurring Ordinariness,

and Impotent Fury.

Idiot child, horror goblin, my teachers and punishers,

the term I am searching for is

sorrow,

is failure,

is not again not again not again.

The word on the tip of my tongue where it is so badly burned is

HUMAN

and it binds me like a bandage made of water vapor and shrapnel.

________

for Word Garden Word list #11. 

Commuter

 

(dedicated to Howie Mooney)

it figures the bus would be late

fabulous, great

turn on some tunes

hope it comes soon

big meeting, big project today

I'm on my way

I'm prospering

mind wandering

oops, dropped transfer into the street

step off, dead meat

driver slow braker

meet my Maker.

_____

a minute poem for Dverse form poetry.

Impossible Riddles

 " After last night's storm, the tulip petals are strewn across the patio where they mortally fluttered" --Church, Jim Harrison

I woke around 3am again this morning. 

Someone had been talking to me

pushing pebble words through cotton teeth, 

posing impossible riddles,

or,

I was in love with someone already vanishing,

or

something important was expected of me that I could not do.

At 7am I set out seed and peanuts

for the birds and whomever may appear,

maybe even myself, in a new body

not made of seed and feathers.

Everything hurts and I am always tired.

I am as soft and ridiculous as snow, 

holding winter's hand by instinct, leery of warmth, gray as January.

Here come the jays and starlings,

crows and cardinals,

like clockwork.

I watch them from the window and remember a day years ago.

I am both there and not,

here and not.

Dear eager raucous birds, 

will you be here again tomorrow?

Will I?

_______

for Dverse Poetics: "Songs of Unreason"

Song of the Chimera

 

The blackbirds are dying and sing their death

from stump and steeple, barrel and rail.

The police are called every time it snows

and they maunder in the fields, dithery and pale.

I have seen the Chimera

and your barn is burning down.

She is lion, goat and snake

and your barn is burning down. 

Morning appears and suffers a scalding dew.

There is a killer hiding where the lilacs grew

beside the porch of the rectory he burns and claims 

the Chimera is you, and you, and you.

I have smelt the Chimera.

Her skin is fragrant with misery and death.

In the ashes, I have smelt the Chimera.

Her skin is fragrant with misery and death.

In the field stands the papier-mache president.

His is the pomp of smoke house and sty.

The postman delivers catastrophes ill-sent

as the blackbirds call, and falter, and die.

There was love, some say

kept in jars on an old woman's counter.

The gloomy blackbirds beg her for rest,

rest in jars, there on her counter.

There is no more clattering, no good book held high.

There are weeds in the window box, crackling dry.

The killer is hiding where the lilacs grew

telling fools their fortunes from a blackbird's eye.

I have seen the Chimera

coming fast through the dawn

with seven devils to drive her

the Chimera drives on.

_______

for Word Garden Word List # 10. 

Word Garden Word List #10 (Wallace Stevens)

 

Hello everyone, it's me with your weekly word list poetry prompt! This time our list is derived from the poems of Wallace Stevens, who has been called "the best and most representative poet of our time." Or the recent past, perhaps.

Stevens has been called difficult, and i found him so until recently, when the light went on for me and i discovered that I love his work now. (The same thing happened to me with Billie Holiday. I never got what the fuss was about; then, listening to her one Sunday night, I got it.)

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that, seeing Ernest Hemingway in the street, Stevens is supposed to have said, "You think you're Ernest Hemingway," and promptly punched Hemingway in the face, breaking his hand in doing so. Afterward, Hemingway helped Stevens to bed to recover. 

What we do here is simple: use at least 3 of the 20 words provided to write a new poem of your own--any length, any style. Then link up, visit others, and enjoy. Prompt remains "live" thru Friday.

blackbird

book

catastrophe

chimera

clattering

dithery

fragrance

gloomy

haunted

lilacs

mask

maundering

papier-mache

police

pomp

postcard

snow

song

suffers

witching

"The Meaning of Life" a poem by Gladys Schlump (CosmicUnicornPoet)

 

O candle of life, smoking grayly,

in life we give light, even if palely

til the snuffer snuffs us and we smoke away daily

then croak and leave our life that was fail-y.

Animated wax that our bodies are

cannot be kept, nor thrown very far

to live in bliss on a faraway star

something something John Agar.

Realms of bliss realms of light

some are born in Cleveland Heights

some are born in Cleveland Heights

some are born to see I'm right.

So, return to Him who barfed us forth

be He Rumpelstiltskin or Nanook of the North

scooped up in the dust pan of life and fate

something something pomegranate. 

_______________

Shared with Sunday Muse #195. Be worthy, rabble.

This beautiful arrangement created by Penelope "Pippie" Zugronski. 

Notes: My entire life has led up to this poem. It is a form called Intestin Bloque, which means Interesting Stanzas. This poem is included in my collection The Very Interesting Poems of Gladys Schlump and also appears in the November 1956 issue of Detached Retina: A Compendium of Torpid, Impenetrable Verse. Finally, this poem won the prestigious Itchy Rash Award for Poetry, given annually by the Debilitating Head Injury Guild of Stockholm, Sweden. Enjoy! (but not TOO much. It's unseemly.)

Actor John Agar with his collection of irrelevant booshwah.