Friday, August 22, 2008

Friday Poems??

Got the following email from my blogliophile friend, Todd . . .

Hey, Keith --

What happened to the Friday spontaneous poetry? I bet you've got a backlog by now, so bring it on!

If you need some more keywords to get going again, add these to the pile:

Superfudge

Waterloo

Spartan

Watchmen

Tachyons

Hope all's well,

Todd


Hey Todd:

The requests dried up on 4th of July weekend and I didn’t have the mood anymore to nudge anyone else for prompts. Basically I quit writing on the 4th and hadn’t picked up keyboard or pen to do anything poetic until yesterday. The 3rd Thursday poetry workshop met again yesterday and I hate to go without something to get feedback on. So I dusted off a scrap of writing I’d started and whipped it into a more finished form for the group. It got some good responses but it’s not quite done yet.

Anyway, I was ambivalent about the arrival of your prompt. I almost turned it down. But the poetry bug seems to be biting again. Not to say this is anything all that great, but I’m getting more in the mood to play with words again. So thanks for the prompt. I hope you find the results interesting enough.

Peace,
Keith


Dream Theory

Superfudge is a book about a boy
who wants to be a bird.
That dream will never come true.

Waterloo ended Napoleon’s rule.
Some dreams end in abdication.

Although rumored to be lethal,
the Spartans left on permanent vacation.
Some dreams are never written, dying on the tongue.

Girls and boys are raised up for the Presidency,
but who watches those watchmen who let us down?
Too many dreams of justice never reach the psyche.

Tachyons, tachyons, theoretical but never slowing down—
dreams are like that, cold hard proof never found.

1 comment:

TS said...

You make it look easy, and there's the trick, right? The beauty of this unfolding poem is that each setup hold something factual up to the light which is then given over to a larger, harder truth. Word economy works to great advantage here, making each statement quite powerful.

Again, I've really enjoyed the poems you've written under the spontaneous heading; I'm still amazed at how you can whip them into shape, and I'm honored to occasionally be a small part of that process.