Today’s PAD prompt: regret

Worse Than Booze

I stayed up past four,
trying to catch
what my imaginary friends
would say next

and I’m trying
to squeeze out
a few more lines
with breakfast.

Forgive me.
Their voices
are so delicious
and cold.

For yesterday’s haiku, I eventually came up with:

Tufts of beige hair
drift by warm eggs,
bird scolding dog.

Today’s prompt was to write something work-related. I am in fact still at the office, having begun this after I clocked out at 8:27 p.m.:

Calling

I forget if it was a priest or a parishioner
who years ago declared, “God collars those
who He doesn’t want loose on the streets”
as we stood in the Christ Church lobby
discussing div school dropouts.

I am not among them, for all these years
I have known I am not a minister. My gifts
correspond to spreadsheets, manuals,
and casting commas upon wordy waters.
Nor can I ignore how my IQ drops fifty points
whenever I’m face to face with a phone —
instant disqualification for a pastor. It’s not

a source of grief or dismay, though now and then
I covet the parking spaces, the gowns and stoles,
the being needed, and the being deserving
of being so needed, just as I sometimes dream
of gold statuettes and thanking the Academy
even though I don’t write screenplays
and the last time I pretended to be someone else
was in an Ionesco play my last year of college.
I do pretend to be more patient and kind
and content than I actually am, to honor
how fortunate I’ve been: I can’t help my hangups
but ingratitude is not only a sin, it’s a bore
and if I am indeed a creature in His image —
well, I refuse to believe in a God who pouts
or whinges about the messes one could claim
are of His making, nor do I despise
those who cannot bear to believe
in any god, given the cruelties
exercised in His name. Yet, even so,
all that I fold and file in the name of order,
all that I devise for comfort, all that I do
to harvest praise or love — “work”
is what I call my obligations to the possible,
and what is “the possible” but another name for God?

– pld

(As it happens, I do have a sermon to deliver this Sunday, so that’s what I plan to work on when I get home. And the late shift here is admittedly partly due to me taking an extra-long lunch, the better to murder a major (and majorly stubborn) darling in the short story that’s been hijacking my head.)

The PAD prompt for day 11 was to write about an object or objects. I’d seen a large man on Rue de Chartres that morning carrying a small pair of pale blue polyester bunny ears, and have been trying to make a poem out of that, but this is what I finally came up with instead:

Objectif-iced

Nostalgic for bouncier times, Flora builds
a trio of snow-women, each with jellybean nipples.
One she crowns with a shiny headband
with pale blue polyester bunny-ears.
On the one to its left, she drapes thirteen strands
of green, gold, and purple plastic beads.
And on the third, she shapes a tentacle,
plump and curving from hip to belly,
and as she pats and squeezes its tip
she could swear the precipitate on her fingers
smells like salt.

Yesterday’s prompt was to write about rebirth:

Journey

Once the hem of a petticoat,
now the wrapper of a waffle cone.
Tomorrow a postage stamp.

Today’s prompt is to write a haiku — and/or an anti-haiku. I’m going to think about it in the shower. In the meantime, there’s Things Japanese in Tennessee, which has a poetry section (for ages ten and up) with pieces by Joanne and me, as well as luminaries such as marlene mountain and Sydney Bougy…

This week’s painting-prompt at Fifty Two Pieces is Gregory Grenon’s Moth Girl. I couldn’t help but think of it in tandem with Lesley Dill’s Standing Man with Radiating Words:

Restless

It’s after midnight, the weekday just
a few hours ahead. The lamps should be off,
the piano lid closed, the curtains drawn,
the clothes in their hampers or on their hangers,
the laptop powered off. It is not the hour
for fingers on keyboards. But none of the manuals
have chapters on getting to sleep when wings
insist on emerging from our shoulderblades. When
we don’t know how to arrange the blankets
in ways that won’t crease our panache beyond repair
or ding the edges of the letters depending upon
both to give them weight and give them flight. There
is nothing to be done except to continue fumbling
through the almost-silence for whatever semblance
of almost-repose one can retrieve from the shadows:
Martha runs through “Greensleeves” first as a boogie
and then as the blues. Across the room,
Isaac holds a “g” too close, like an umbrella
he will refuse to unfurl even when the rain
showers down as a thousand tiny nails,
glittering to the sight but dull to the ear.
It’s not an hour for sunlight: Martha moves on
to a tune I don’t know, but it’s thick with smoke
and the one drink too many that spells the abyss
between a drunken nap and sleepless sorrow.
It’s a song that’s good company for the self-forlorn:
the letters on Isaac’s back droop into drowsy folds,
and I drift into slumber as Martha eases the song to its end.

– pld

Today’s challenge: title a poem with “All I Want Is ____” and go from there. So:

All I want is not to want things
that are pointless or painful to want
especially given how much I possess
that I thought I’d wanted, and do, but look
at how little I’ve done with it, and at
the feasts at hand I’ve not yet fully savored
so why my fool heart still covets more crumbs
of unearned idolatry, unsolicited joys,
and unconditional connections — I want
such senseless cravings to cease.
such senseless cravings to cease.And yet
all that I do not want to become
stays my hands from straying toward
the things that are not mine, no matter
the depth of my damnation — these days
through which I dogpaddle past
the siren serenades and the hollow gifts,
‘til my self-churned waves cast me upon
the shore of a story with a happy ending,
one in which I don’t find myself wanting.

– pld

(P.S. I don’t have the chops or know-how to match the html color code to the background within a reasonable space of time, so if you see the spacer-text in front of “And yet,” please just pretend it’s blank.)

The Day 12 (Easter Sunday) prompt for the PAD challenge was to title a poem with “So We Decided To ____” and then elaborate on it.

So We Decided to Walk Down St. Claude

Easter Sunday in New Orleans, we had our choice
of at least five parades: Chris Owens, Arnaud’s,
St. Charles, the gays, and the Goodchildren Carnival Club.
We weren’t in the right mood for Vieux Carre hijinks
so we headed toward the Goodchildren gathering
at the corner of St. Claude and Poland. Along the way,
a half-dozen strangers wished us “Happy Easter,” and
one man cheerfully yelled, “Where’s my candy?” We also
passed a brick building where someone had sprayed
anti-war slogans. Eight blocks east,
a dentist’s window proclaimed, “We Cater to Cowards.”
The police hadn’t arrived at the start of the route
by two-fifteen, so one of the firemen
angled his truck across a lane
as a wall between the restless bunnies
and would-be thru-traffic. A woman in
a hat bedecked with large purple flowers
and an alligator plushie peeking out of her bag
kept trying to reach the cops, while one of the bands
passed the time repeating “Down By the Riverside.”
Finally — one, two, three boys in blue.
The marchers mush into their lines. The sirens toot,
and ten minutes later they’re all past the turn.
If it weren’t for the trinkets cupped in my palms —
a green plastic egg, a xeroxed fleur de lis
inside a metal frame, two strands of beads —
there’d be nothing to show me what I’d just seen.
Ten years ago, I’d have hoarded such relics,
and twenty years ago I’d have gone to Mass
as a voyeuristic indulgence, the way I always order
a wine or whisky I haven’t yet tasted
when we splurge on a dinner out. The older I get,
the less I try to cling to the past, for
the more I realize how much it costs
to clutch at even insubstantial dross. But blessed
are they, I’m told, who see not, yet believe. I see
yet do not believe. I am blessed nonetheless.

– pld

This morning, at my personal blog, I claimed I was about to head to work.

Assorted chores and one shower later, I’m still about to head to work. But first, here’s my response to today’s prompt at Poetic Asides, which was to select a color for a title and then write about it:

Flute White

I am not an artist, so
to suggest a flute, I reach
for a gray or silver crayon

but here at Cafe EnVie
we breakfast below a fine painting
of a jazz musician. The keys

of his flute shine out, bright
in the Monday morning gloom,
white splashes of light

like Cheshire teeth gleaming
from dark green thickets. Like
a trill of sparks within
a moody solo. Like the fall

of water from our showerhead
that, not being an artist, I
would try to depict
as something transparent —

streaks of white in a painting,
or streaks of black in line art — only,
the way it falls reminds me how
notes swarm out of a virtuoso’s flute

like clouds of fireflies. Brightened
by the sunlight pouring through
the bathroom window, the water

strikes the tiles in a cascade
of gold and of tinsel, silvery
as the oil-paint white

keys of the flute above us,
as glittering as the note
that sounds as our glasses meet.

– pld