Word Garden Word List #4 (Laura Nyro)

 

Hi everyone, it's me, with your weekly word list writing prompt! This time, the words are taken from the lyrics of songs written by the late Laura Nyro. Haven't heard of her? You've probably heard her songs recorded by others, from Blood Sweat & Tears to Three Dog Night to The 5th Dimension and many others. 

When I was 16, I was visiting a friend at her apartment, and she had some record albums leaning against the wall. The one in front was Laura Nyro "New York Tendaberry." I wondered who this wild-haired woman was, standing in the wind, looking like some sort of urban poet goddess. I soon bought a copy for myself and....mind. blown. Soon after, I bought the rest of her albums. Check out these lyrics from "Stoney End" with which Barbra Streisand had a hit:

Never mind the forecast

Cos the sky has lost control

And the fury and the broken thunder's come

To match my ragin' soul

Or this, from New York Tendaberry:

Sidewalk and pigeon

You look like a city

But you feel like religion to me

Laura was born in the Bronx in 1947. She says that music was, from an early age, a way for her to cope with a difficult childhood. "I've created my own little world, a world of music, since I was 5 years old." She never sought fame, and in fact, shied away from it. Even though her songs are best known as sung by others, her own singing is passionate and covers three octaves. She composed her own songs, and played piano on them, in a unique and amazing style unlike anyone else. I can't even express how much her songs and the way she performed them inspired my own creativity, and still do. 

Laura passed of ovarian cancer at the young age of 49 in 1997. She was an animal rights activist and mother of one. She is missed.

And now, without further ado, are your 20 words! Please use at least 3 of them to write a poem of any length or style, OR a "flash 55" which is a poem or flash fiction consisting of exactly 55 words. Then link (Yes, we now have a linky!), visit, and enjoy. Prompt stays "live" through Friday.

blues

cats

captain

coffin

confession

cradle

fearless

firecrackers

forecast

fury

holy

lazy

patience

pigeon

religion

stoned

train

tomcat

whistle

winter

Alley Cat Queen

 

There she is, the one the cats call queen,

the one you find fearless,

standing by the resale store

holding the rising sun in her half-curled fingers.

You quit getting stoned when you heard the trainman

blow his whistle in a nightmare at noon,

but now look--you're wasted on this woman.

Her, with her corona of crows, and pigeon entourage.

Love is lazy, chica. It sleeps cos it feels like falling,

and only gets up to set the winter on fire.

You need those ice-bones that doxed a coffin

but you're pouring yourself out like a tapped sugar tree.

I know, baby, I know. Love the buzz, hate the forecast,

but here's religion, honey, here's firecrackers on the altar:

the bright on her body, the heavens in her hand?

It all came from you. She's just a moon, reflecting,

And she blinks out every time you close your eyes.

_________

for Word Garden Word List #4 (Laura Nyro).

image: Chinese actress Fan Bingbing

A Conversation

 

I've read what you wrote.

And? Brilliant, yes?

Brilliant in its own way. If cheap sentiment were white sand, you'd be a resort beach.

Harsh.

So I've taken away your shoes to teach you a lesson.

Bitch.

Hey now. 

Why are you here, anyway?

Community service. I missed choir practice again. 

Your lap is comfy!

Get off me, pervert.

Don't have kittens. What's the matter, you don't like bathos?

Why don't you try writing something decent?

When pigs fly.

Oink! (flap flap flap)

Uh...kay, bye Felicia. Weird chick.

(from afar) Write something decent, Steve. 

________

for the Sunday Muse #190. 

Steampunk Starling

 

Steampunk starling is noisy at dawn

at the base of the window, not the tops of the trees.

The steampunk sun and the regular one

animate her heart that is wound with keys.

Steampunk bird, lonely trifle

wheels and sits in interpretive fits

her gears all meshing with teeth all threshing

the odious this from the marvelous that.

Steampunk starling, nobody's darling

but God's if mechanical God may be

she sits in the gloaming prevented from roaming

an ornament for Master's library.

_________

for Dverse Poetics: "Passions Stamped On Lifeless Things"

Word Garden Word List #3 (Grover Lewis)

 

Hello friends, it's me, Shay, with your weekly word list prompt! What we do here is to look at the 20 words on the list and use at least 3 of them to write either a poem of any length or style, OR a flash 55 (a poem or flash fiction consisting of exactly 55 words.) Just leave your link in the comments! Prompt remains "live" through Friday. 

This week our list is taken from I'll Be There In The Morning If I Live, the only volume of poetry by Grover Lewis. Dave Hickey, in his introduction to Splendor In The Short Grass: A Grover Lewis Reader,  calls Lewis "the most stone wonderful writer nobody's ever heard of." Lewis was a native Texan (hence the "short grass" of west Texas) who wrote marvelously for Rolling Stone and other publications about movie sets and the directors, actors, and extras found there, as well as his own harrowing history. Lewis's father shot his mother dead when he was just a boy. The police were told that, in her dying moments, the mortally wounded woman picked up the gun that her husband had dropped and shot him right between the eyes, rendering Lewis an orphan. (It seems that a friend probably shot the husband, but we'll never really know.) Young Grover was sent to live with strict, sour, religious grandparents, and then on to another relative who encouraged his love of books. 

When I was a teenager, I found I'll Be There In The Morning If I Live, and devoured it, cover to cover. I still have my copy, and Lewis's poems have been a prime inspiration for me in my own writing. 

And now, your word list. 

dittybops

dumbshows

fever

fragrant

fumed

grandfathers

locust

mulligan

painters

pandemonium

prowled

pulpit

sailors

scudding

shadows

stricken

strophe

tatting

text

wreckage

Remember The Alamo

 

"And now! What did we wish to say, that we were not able to say?" --St. John Perse

"Love is a stranger in an open car" --the Eurythmics

When love is a stranger, things can get twisted.

A girl can get sick, being the McDonald's drive-thru of eating shit.

She may cop an attitude, or hear the cop say

to his partner, "That chick might as well just shoot herself."

That stuff sticks.

When daddy and his strophe wife, the replacement who shoots up Thomas Mann say,

"We'd like you to move out," after just a month of nervous dumbshow confusion,

the mulligans are running out and the road calls.

Where else you gonna go, baby?

When love is a stranger, there are still poets, painters, 

failed academics, leering dittybops, locust nutjobs

and grandfathers walking with canes into

the roaring pandemonium of downtown San Antonio.

There are still stricken drunks on pulpit stools

to tell you, baby,

let's get out of here,

I know a slaughterhouse on the south side

where a girl like you could see god in fumed gold Krylon.

When love is a stranger and the bones bend 

like spines of books with pages knifed out 

to hold some lack-rent new straw man's works,

it's time to get knocked up with an idea,

blood out a new plan and join the shanghaied sailors

at the 12-step dock in the free lunch church downtown.

When some oxford-cloth fuck tells you not to come back,

You come back anyway, you find a new high,

you start scudding down San Pedro with no idea

and no wheels, but a sacred heart, a votive candle,

and maybe a shine-ghost mirage of something better.

Slide into the Olmos Theater,

start tatting together the film edges until you spill

out with the rest of the film buffs,

find a tarantula on the pavement on the way home and say,

"I will not die here." 

That's when you pick up some pride, some Spanish 

and some mom and pop Texican deliciousness

before doing the dishes to pay.

Hey chica,

it doesn't have to be this way.

New friend Jake tells me that til it rings my ears.

He buys me the leather jacket I was jonesing for,

and suddenly it's my world too,

holy fuck, I have the right to be here,

and I am walking down Alamo towards the cenotaph

thinking maybe being a live coward or dead hero

are not the only choices that I have.

_________

For Word Garden Word List #3, Grover Lewis. 

In Bohemia

 

In Bohemia, where the Moldau

flows and hollyhocks rise beside the cottages,

I went, as a child, into the dark woods to escape 

the terrors of the monster behind the door of mine.

At night in Bohemia, where the wolves

go and the moon rises over the trees beyond the cottages,

I rose with it in the night to escape nightmares

as the wolves sang to me like imaginary mothers.

In Bohemia there are hands, and cookies shaped like hands

full of sugar and poison. In the mornings the monster

fed me hate because I was a mirror, but the wolves

told me I was a lake and a home for the wandering moon.

In Bohemia, there are little girls carrying wicker baskets

beside the shores of the Moldau, where the rooks rise.

The rooks are born from ice in the blood of monsters

and they say, "we are the rooks, we love you," as they peck.

In Bohemia, by the shores of the Moldau, many children

disappear, into forests, or ovens, where monsters sent them.

The wolves heard of this and began to follow ceaselessly,

so closely that I became them, and they became me.

In Bohemia, where the Moldau 

flows and hollyhocks rise beside the cottages,

a Gypsy girl and her wolves shrank a monster

who starved on its own poison cookies.

So I ask you now, Sir or Madame come down the lane,

to my fairy cottage by a lake beneath a golden moon,

looking for love and loaves and a soft situation,

do you really want to fuck with me and my wolves?

Better you should go, and take your monsters with you.

_________

for The Sunday Muse #189, where I am hosting.