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.