THE GREAT POETICAL ATTEMPT

from Weebly

Well, after the blistering success of my last post, here’s another post.

There’s this monthly poetry challenge. [ I will not name it, that’s not the point of the following carefully designed and then wonderfully executed blog post here.] I attempt to meet that challenge, with decidedly ghastly results. I think I’m getting worse as a writer, not better. Every month, those at that site offer some artistic rendering for bloomed, blossoming and yet in the bud poets to try their talents on. It can be a photograph, a painting, blah blah. Something artsy. You, the poet, look at this offering and then try to get ‘inspired’.

Moi generally looks at the artsy offerings and explodes into hostile road rage-ish episodes. Is this all now a post-modern dystopian sparkly vampire world that I need to conform to??

from Popsugar. S.M. Geller as Buffy.

God damn it! Fuck you and your shiny little nice artistic crap! Sit and spin, you grinning daisy-chomping cuntmuffin! [Cue:Sound of car crash, sirens, screaming.]

Right after, I try to yank words from my hostile brain and slap them into some sort of poetical form. Get over here, adjectives!! Get your ass on my page, verbs! I’ll blister your bottom, nouns! Yep, it actually is an Afterschool Special on How Not to Talk to Parts of Speech [imagine, if you will, that it’s an on-the-nose hour on Billy and his mean parents and his mean parents learning their mean tones can hurt Billy and make him steal stuff to get back at them which leads to Billy’s death because he also tried heroin and flung himself out a window. Yeah, ah, the good ole days. Ah.]

I’ve tried three or four times to vomit out something halfway decent I wouldn’t mind a poetical editor/chooser to snort over and reject resoundingly. Maybe I should send the one where I have lines about “I just want to win the cash here, I’m totally writing this poem to win the cash. Pick me.” Is a poet not supposed to be honest?? Shouldn’t I be rewarded for my honesty? [No, I am not sending a fifty line poem, where the bulk of it just says I am writing this for cash/pick me out of the usual trash. I’m not that far gone yet. Yet. Yet!]

Here, I know!! I’ll share some of my poetical ‘attempts’.

Number One attempt: Literal and pungent and fulsome, oh my–

I can only think of the spray paint
used to paint your bones.
How perhaps I will be arranged and posed
when I am dead
and smeared with Flower Power decals
for some grad student’s take
on the Sexy Sixties.
Protest rock will play
in the background
and my bony fingers will flash
peace on earth, good will to men
as she earnestly talks about
how she’s not a feminist
because that’s not needed now
and she’s not a victim.

Here’s number 2– the untitled answer to T.S. Eliot’s the Wasteland, of course…

It turns its head and we all laughed.
I laughed because everyone was laughing.
And I want to fit in and win prizes
because I get tired
of being flesh-covered ordinariness.
Make me an artsy number
murmuring sorts
murmur over.
Make me something those murmuring sorts
have to stop to discuss in low
important tones.
Look, that shade of rose bone,
how fragilely absurd,
how exquisite, how universal
and yet how esoteric
and extremely lonely
and yet friendly and nice and
full of air and shadows
and music’s grandest silence!
They will then move on
to the next display over
and murmur about space
being the new time.
And I will laugh when they laugh
because my bones itch
in the dry air
and I’ve heard
that laughing cures all itches.
It doesn’t.

Number 3 is me having a slight break with reality as we know it:

I’m supposed to be a poet, I said.
Well, be one, she replied. Be one.
Rip the flesh away, use a figurative spoon,
everyone has figurative spoons, use one,
and walk around in your ridiculous bones.
What sort of advice is that?
It’s my advice, she said.
What does it mean?
It means eat a lot of grapes.
Are you sure?

If you can’t glean meaning from a moldy bit of advice,
then yes, it means to eat grapes.
You can’t eat grapes if you’re dressed only in your bones.
Sure you can, she said.
You can mash those grapes against your ribs,
smear them on your cranium,
tuck them into your eye cavities
and pretend you have eyes.
I find I am out of whimsy these days.
I know, she said.
Maybe you should try being a poet.
I hear that helps.

There’s more but you, gentle readers, get the big picture window here, yes? Oooh, what’s that, current events newsie stuff??

I just saw where a woman got convicted for laughing at Jeff Sessions, our new Keebler Elf Grand Dragon-ish, KKK-lite Department of Justice whatever. Um, you’re gonna have to arrest most of us now, kiddos that run ‘murica. We’re all fucking laughing, like, super-hard. And writing bad poems. Really bad poems. Viva la laughter.