sorcerer's house

.

Did I, somehow, displace the house?

Did I, somehow, displace the house?
Did I subvocalize some arcane apprentice spell
erasing all but this field of dust, this forest of debris
with hypnagogic sorcery

One reads so indiscriminately in dreams.
I turned a page and stepped inside
a shed, two-holer, kennel, midden.
Did I, somehow, displace the house?

On the way to re-create the primal chaos
what cryptic grammar did I use?
While I fantasized an ordered life
did I subvocalize some arcane apprentice spell?

I wanted to draw the perfect angles of diamond window panes
and smooth the cherry curves of the new sleigh bed,
but mishandled the wand or stylus,
erasing all but this field of dust, this forest of debris.

Did I replace my blue porch home
with trash heaped on molding dishes,
or did it gallop on the wind pure as a hero
with hypnagogic sorcery?

MONDAY PROMPT / October 25

By Deb

This week’s prompt

This week I’m going to borrow a writing exercise from my creative non-fiction teacher. I think it will lend itself to my purposes (drill for old material in a new way) quite well. After all, what doesn’t serve poetry?

Set yourself down at a quiet writing table with blank paper and a couple of pens or pencils. Set a timer for 30 minutes and draw your home. I don’t mean design your home, or become a drafts person and render it accurately, but I do mean try to identify all the rooms in your house in a graphic manner. On paper: walls, stairs, sinks, doors, furniture. No one is going to see this drawing but you, so don’t worry about how well you craft it. Just draw your home for 30 minutes.

Now (as in immediately after you have finished your drawing) free-write for 20-30 minutes about something this drawing brought to your attention. It may or may not have anything to do with your house. Just go with whatever comes to mind and write down at least a page of that stream of consciousness flow.

Next step (which doesn’t have to immediately follow): write yourself a poem using something from your free-write.

For the cascade poem, a poet takes each line from the first stanza of a poem and makes those the final lines of each stanza afterward. Beyond that, there are no additional rules for rhyming, meter, etc.

internalizing chihuly

internalizing chihuly

cars planted like pineapples
bask in sun dry washes,
thunderbirds surrounded
like pot plants by enough razor wire
coiled cursive zeroes to link two nebulae.

moistened by deep spongecake soakers
cantaloupe wear slings of old silk hose
their summer baked loaves,
levened with blown glass zucchini,
stream over pumpkin coaches

janis

re-bound

Bound

I’ve booked passage, traveled
on a thousand narratives
always leaving by the gangplank
when the story ends.  Pretending,
sometimes I make a return trip
to sip a favorite wine, take a turn
around some well-known room.
there’s bound to be fine conversation
at the silver-serviced captain’s table.
and I do eavesdrop on the crew
when passengers are too proper.
But I have always disembarked
at the voyage end.  And why?
when life stumbles on
from gray to grayer?
it may be that the time has come
to travel, stray from the mundane.
Stay.  Stow away.
slip from my stateroom
secrete myself among un-named crowds
the peripheral characters uncounted,
even by their makers, moving props.
un-knit my ravels and revel a while.
and if the play suits me well,
then, melt into the letters
like punctuation.