The Last Shall Be First

So the final prompt for the last day of National Poetry Writing Month is to write a ‘farewell’ poem, and true to form I took it a little further. Today’s poem uses the last lines of twelve famous films, starting with the first line and alternating every other line with one original to me, save for the final couplet which is two famous last lines. All quotes came from this site but see how many you can guess without peeking at the answers.

 

The Last Shall Be First

 

People come, people go, nothing ever happens

to change what people think.

I’m sorry for everybody in the world, I guess,

enough to drive a man to drink.

 

That’s something you need never worry about

because it seldom has a personal cost.

Victory is ours,

though the battle is already lost.

 

some guys get all the breaks,

some have to work for everything they have

He was a moment of the conscience of man,

a human medicinal salve

 

here’s my hope that we all find our Shangri-La

among our current possessions

may God bless us, every one

and all of our little obsessions

 

I don’t want to be disturbed

or pulled out of my little life

I think I might go on a piece, maybe to the top of that hill

anything to avoid all the strife.

 

there is no then. There is no after.

The ending is only the beginning.

Concrete Dream

So, today’s prompt for National Poetry Writing Month was a complicated mess, but the result is hopefully interesting. I’ll post my poem first, then the list of ‘requirements’ from the prompt below it; see if you can locate all the elements in the finished piece.

 

Concrete Dream

 

The laughing was a lonely knife slicing through concrete

cutting through the crumbling grit of years

Taste the sawing, hear the dust, see the way

It makes the nose do a country dance.

 

Feeling like Elvis Presley at the Ed Sullivan Theater

In need of a total hip replacement

The funk doctor is in, get your booty sanctified

It’s all about the money, said the dream killer.

 

Viva Las Vegas, potential crumbling in your hands

before the almighty dollar becomes your master

You’ll bungee jump from a moving airplane

With the cinder block giggling the whole way down.

 

The prompt is called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. And here are the twenty little projects themselves — the challenge is to use them all in one poem:

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

Go Away For A Long Time

Today’s prompt was to write a poem using lines from a news article. It didn’t have to be about the same subject, but this one just seemed ripe for some poetic justice, ripped from the day’s headlines on NBA team owner Donald Sterling:

 

Go Away for a Long Time

 

Every rich old man, pathetically insecure

go away for a good long time

take an Instagram of those allegations

 

posing for pictures with black men

shower her with cars and money

paying millions to settle

give him an award

 

A low opinion of women and others

whose authenticity is being determined

the worst-kept secret

One of the most arrogant bums ever

Hillside Reflections

Missed yesterday’s prompt for National Poetry writing month due to finishing up my time at the annual MerleFest music festival in North Carolina, and driving home late–the assignment was to write a poem inspired by a photograph. I can’t think of a better one than this great shot by official MerleFest photographer Bob Alexander of Jim Lauderdale and the reflection of the massive Hillside Album Hour crowd in his mirrored sunglasses on Saturday afternoon, so here goes:

 

 

Hillside Reflections

 

Reflections capture us in front of you

adoring fans filling the frame

all the questions have come true

We know the album’s name

 

It’s Deja Vu all over again, here for another year

of music, moments, and memories like this

Friends from afar, who now are quite near

Sharing this wonderful feeling of bliss

 

Voices raised in harmony singing

sound like a half a million strong

up the slope and farther ringing

our eternal mountain song.

 

 

 

Starry Sky

today’s prompt for National Poetry Writing Month is to write a Curtal Sonnet, which is shorter than the normal, fourteen line sonnet. Instead it has a first stanza of six lines, followed by a second stanza of four, and then closes with a half-line. I’ve been camping under the stars the last couple of nights, so that inspired today’s poem:

 

Starry Sky

 

The starry sky is clearer in the mountains

With less of us to muddy up the view

It’s then you realize how many exist

See the patterns that are set up there for you

Our ancestors looked up at this same sky

How many more were there for them back then?

 

Taking things like this as something special

Shows just how far from our roots we’ve come

Spend a night or two out in the country

Remind yourself of where we all have come

 

Remind yourself of where we call our home.

There is Music in the Hills

Today’s prompt for national poetry writing month is to write an Anaphora. That is a literary term for the practice of repeating certain words or phrases at the beginning of multiple clauses or, in the case of a poem, multiple lines–think the lines in Ecclesiastes used by the Byrds, for example. Being in the middle of the MerleFest music festival right now, my Anaphora is music-related:

 

Music in the Hills at MerleFest

 

There is music in the hills, by the creek and in the field

There is music in the hills, Doc and Merle have both been healed

There is music in the hills, their spirit will live on

As long as people come back to hear

There will be  music in the hills.

Walls

Today’s prompt was to write a poem featuring bricks, walls, masonry, etc…something that sounds like a natural for this blog given the wall photo I’ve used up top in the header. (That’s from a building on the grounds of the Lexington County Museum in Lexington, South Carolina, by the way). As in many poems about walls, mine isn’t really about a physical structure:

 

Walls

 

Something between

cannot be seen

built piece by piece without forethought.

 

Stacking it high

letting it fly

no worries how it will end.

 

Fill in the gaps with mortar

make it an impenetrable border

nothing gets through you don’t want to.

 

A good one takes time

make it too high to climb

you’ll never have to venture beyond it

 

Use the right tools

attend the right schools

nothing affects the outcome

 

More than your attitude

are you nice, are you rude

it’s how we treat others that matters.

 

Take a sledgehammer to it

break a hole, make a conduit

once it’s open, don’t ever rebuild.

She Won

Today’s prompt was a tough one for me, mostly in finding a piece to use. The instruction was to rewrite a poem that’s in a foreign language, not as a translation but as what it looks like it’s saying if it were in English. I chose a poem by Ukrainian poet Victor Neborak, “Boha”, and with the slightly altered title taken from the translation “She 1” here is my version, which came out very odd but very interesting, I thought. (I’ll include the original below for comparison):

 

She Won

Notary, ha! Have a pie.

Exotic Sun misanthrope, a hero by-and-by.

Exotic Sun, bed and bath hero plays hip.

O aeroplane, Gareth poured honey.

 

Exotic sun, a hero gnashing POTUS Monty Python

O aeroplane, Gareth’s dyspepsia rips a rapid

Gazpacho hole, Kyuss I anticipate topiary.

A-ha, can-can, toucan pikachu rope key.

 

Crap, Sheboygan

Asian nonsense

Mat Cothran, a yak.

 

Earth Day ABC’s

Today’s prompt for National Poetry Writing Month was to write a children’s poem. Since it’s Earth Day today, I used that for the theme of this ABC poem where the first letter of each line forms the alphabet if read straight down the page. Picture this with cute illustrations to go along with each stanza and it could make a halfway decent picture book for kids, I think:

 

Earth Day ABC’s

 

Air is the invisible substance we

Breathe into our lungs.

Clean and pure, it has to become.

 

Driving an electric car will save

Energy and the environment

Future generations will say thank you.

 

Green is the color of life

How many green things do you see?

I see the grass, the trees, and a frog.

 

Journey to the continent of Australia

Kangaroos live on that island country

Land there and you’ll see koalas, too

 

Mountain ranges tower over valleys below

Natural formations that took a long time to grow

 

Oceans surround all the land masses,

Polar icecaps are covered in snow

Quickly melting then falling again

 

Recycle, it’s good for the planet

Save your plastics, newspaper, and cardboard

Trees will thank you by living longer

 

Universal is the language of love, he who

Views everyone as a friend

Waves at anyone even if they don’t wave back.

 

Xboxes can’t replace the adventures outside, whether you’re

Young or old makes no difference. Like the stripes on a

Zebra you’re just two parts of the same natural earth.

Soda City Salute

Today’s writing prompt was an involved one that asked for a poem in the New York School of poetry, explained in a link here. I took one liberty with the instructions and made the piece about my own city, Columbia South Carolina, instead of New York, but otherwise followed as much of the ‘recipe’ as I could.

Soda City Salute

Soda City or Columbi-Yeah, take your pick, I don’t care

We’re just hot, famous or not, and sweat rolls down your hair

in July and August, who the hell tries to put on a music festival in the summer?

Foreign films at the Nick, Taco Tuesday at the Whig, either one fills your inside

Here’s to JJ the Boom Box Guy for a decade of jams, a couple of decades out of stride.

Want photographic proof of all that I’m claiming? Ask Sean Rayford, he wrote the book.

And raise your hand if you hung out with Danny Devito in Five Points, “Hey, is that… look!”

“He was hiking on the Appalachian Trail” is a perfectly logical thing to share,

were it not for so much water so close to home. Three rivers to hike and you went there?

I used to camp out for tickets in a field where the Koger Center now stands;

The Coliseum will soon join the score of buildings erased from my collegiate lands.

I’ve heard Columbia referred to as “The Armpit of the South”

But I’d put its biological reference point somewhere much farther from the mouth.

Sing me home, Daniel Machado, with tales of Dixie, and beer.

Take the racism, and the fear, and the meanness out of here

And let people be without having our dysfunctional government interfere.