Spontaneous Poetry, Friday Sept. 11th

From: Anastasia Tikka
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2009 12:18 AM
To: Keith Badowski
Subject: Poetry Challenge

Hello Keith,

Well... (you might hate me!)

I made a list of my favorite words, and whittled it down to the most beautiful and unusual fifteen: nouns, adjectives, verbs - five each.

They're random... have fun!

Nouns

eschaton
gossamer
penumbra
syzygy
yarborough

Adjectives

bathysmal
chatoyant
echoic
lusory
tosticated

Verbs

aestivate
evanesce
imbricate
quinquiplicate
welter

Revelation Revisited by Keith Badowski

Determined to aestivate on the island of Patmos,
no eschaton in mind, just vacation,
I was lusory as a rectory
with my head resting on warm rock
within the creeping penumbra
of daily rented umbrella.

Although I’m no Earl of Yarborough,
I would have bet against it:
an echoic voice so cataclysmic
it elicited a metamorphic subtraction—
if I were still corporeal,
I was now Neolithic!

I was crumpled by a bathysmal waterfall
and out of such pressure and darkness peered
seven pair of chatoyant eyes
whose glimmer was tyrant over my being
and whose stare weltered my lips
with a nectar of honeycomb.

Like a prophetic prodigy
I grasped I was crushed before the Syzygy—
none other than the Trinity!
My tosticated awareness reeled
as They precisely expurgated
every raunchy pleasure I ever instigated.

All my futures imbricated
and like domino falls They mandated
that all my Poker games would be stalemated.
They revealed how this old blasphemer
would so very soon fly on gossamer.
Yet my mortal life they would elongate,
in fact promised to quinquiplicate
all my earthly days!

I struggled to address Their omnipresence
but my questions dissipated like frankincense
and I had to acquiesce as They simply
and utterly evanesced.



Note: You might notice that I got Anastasia’s challenge on Thursday morning. I’ll admit I needed some extra time for this one. It took over an hour just to research all the words I didn’t already know. Then Thursday turned out to be too full for any devoted writing time. So today, Friday, I set about to manufacture some semblance of a poem from these very difficult words. The sets of words grated against all my instincts for poetry. I love interesting words, YES. However, if a poem has more than 2 words that I have to pull out a dictionary to understand, there is something deeply wrong. Mostly the poems I write (and the poems I enjoy) must be in a familiar language heard in a slightly different plane from normal conversation. Difficult words usually distract from the experience of the poem which ought to produce the illusion of a speaker. In this case, I think I tried to make sure the speaker had a profound experience so that his highfalutin words would seem applicable. Interestingly, Biblical language usually tends to be simple and accessible. Revelation is probably the least accessible book of the Bible, not because of the language, but because of the symbolism and coded terminology.

This was a very rough challenge, but I think the results are interesting and I did learn a few new words—at least for a short while.