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The bus waits (a poem)

2016/08/25

At open mic last night, one of the participants prefaced her two songs by saying that she felt like crap and was running the risk of having to barf mid-song. This poem has nothing to with that, except she was sitting in the seat in front of me, frequently running her hands through her hair.
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Cortege (a poem)

2015/05/27

Today’s prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano is to write in a different way than usual, whether that be in a different form or style, using different imagery or words, etc. The poem I wrote just before this one probably achieves that goal more successfully—but I like this one better. It was inspired by a couple of Jon Hassell pieces (Last Night the Moon Came and Amsterdam Blue (Cortege)) I was listening to on Pandora…

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Smiles (a poem)

2015/02/12 — 2 Comments

I wrote this poem this afternoon while waiting to go to an appointment. I arrived much earlier than expected, so I sat in my car, writing. This second of the three poems I wrote during that 20-minute period was simply me recording my observations of what was around me. When I read it a few minutes ago, I was taken aback—it sounded really creepy. After thinking about it, I made one small change. I hope that made a difference…

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that small smudge of hope (a poem)

2014/11/06

The November 6th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to pick a particular line from a particular page of the nearest book, then use that line as the title of the poem—and within the poem, if possible. I started by using my copy of The Daily Poet, which yielded the intriguing line ‘and they began selling steamed seawater’. Unfortunately, what I was getting from that was unsatisfying.

Then I got e-mail notifying me that HoneLife’s new poetry group had posted its first exercise. I followed the link to find that the prompt was very similar. The main difference was that the prompt called for turning to a random page, and pointing to a line without looking. Then it called for using that line as the first in a 3- to 5-line poem. I ended up going with a line from Franz Wright’s Kindertotenwald as reproduced in the deluxe edition of David Sylvian’s new release, there’s a light that enters houses with no other house in sight. Since I normally do not use lengthy lines, I broke up the line into three, then added four stanzas of three lines each to complete the poem.

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