Thinking About Poetry & Me
Do the words sing and dance? Do ear bells ring? Does your
chest swell or shrink? Do stomach muscles contract and wring unease from
twisted sinew? Do ideas collide in kaleidoscope, do they sneak up and tap you
on the shoulder when you were listening the other way? Do you find yourself surfing
melancholy seas, swimming in memories too deep to wade or splashing in shallow
froth of everyday experience? Does your head bow in reverence or shake in abhorrence?
Do your hands demand to clap, do your fingers command a snap? Do you soar and
crash and thrash and gnash and wonder how the hell you got there? Chances are good
that your eyes, your ears and all the pieces of you that matter have been
claimed if but for a moment by poetic manna.
Poetry is like jello, a granite boulder, a morphing cloud, a
cement stanchion, it’s rocket fuel and quicksand, plaintive entreaties and strident
commands, it slinks and swaggers, hollers from mountain tops and weakly
whispers your name and every other, wraps its arms around your shoulders like a
favorite brother, stares you down before it winks, trips you up before lifting
you up with extended hand, it shuns you, it pulls you close, it captures freedom,
corrodes common chains and releases…releases both joy and pain…
It is the reader, the listener, who will determine whether
my expressions are poetic or not. I write about what moves me, what stimulates or
stomps my senses. Of course, I’m hoping to touch your senses too. Ultimately, I
suspect these expressions say, what we call poetry says, “I’m here in the world
with you. This is how I experience it. Can you see it through my eyes? Can you
hear it through my ears? Can taste it with my tongue? Can you caress it with my
fingers? Can you inhale it with my flared nostrils? Can you feel it, Can you
feel it…Do you want to?”
Okay, enough! I wanna blast this blogpost off into the ethersphere
and let it do its thing. Glad you dropped by. Oh, before I go, in my world, poetry
can be visual, can be auditory, can be both. Sometimes it has to be both to get
the point of a particular piece across. For example, in the piece below, Gibberish
Gjourney- written during the Stroll of Poets 30/30 Challenge- you have to be
able to read the actual lines and hear the sounds to grasp the essence of the
piece…and even then the grasping might still be a challenge:
Tired of dwelling in Illing Noise, I thought I’d head for Truth or Consequences- an abandoned city.
I’d heard
that there were meticulously constructed
but empty
structures still standing in Convention Square there.
I had passed
through Normal, skirted Cancer City
when I saw a
phrase stumble over the border wall
and fall
before climbing into a sentence
without
brakes and unpunctuated tireds…
The map
hadn’t shown that wall…
My maps often omitted phantoum structures anyway…go figure…
Anywho, the phrase must have realized its predicament
because
without apparent clause it climbed out the window
and, like an
idiom, slipped across Stanza Blvd
and started
hitchhiking to…No Meaning Whatsoever…
Meanwhile,
ideas zigged and zagged like cracks spreading
in asphalt
too much driven over, their fragments dangling
over roadside
railings as if to jump into the nothingness
waiting below
to catch some significance
I found out
that Reason had left Rhyme
two counties
behind trying to catch a ride
with a broken
thumb that couldn’t even bully a pinkie anymore...
it was forced
to try another finger…
A few miles
down the road Simile, in its euphemism,
tried to
saunter past the border sans clue about the sin tax on metaphornication. She
almost got edited without bail,
but Cliche
rolled up in a Deus ex Machina
disguised as
a Deuce and a Quarter, paid the toll
and they
drove on down the road together
in
reminiscence of obsolescence and four-play.
They laughed
about the time Naked Rhythm and barely-dressed Rhyme
tried to
penetrate the membrane between Mumbo and Jumbo
and hy men-
beyond compare in contrasting uniforms- put a stop
to that none
sense and rode Rhythm and Rhyme outta town on a qua train.
A nagging
nagging nagging thought kept recurring…I
was as mad as
Max in a palindrome, only had a little rations left
and since I’d
already be cum a master baiter of hyperbaton,
I thought I’d
better double entendre back the way I’d cum…
Now,
well-versed in aimless travel, I reflect on that an epic odyssey of a journey
to which this piece is an oderous homage or omage if you prefer- I know some
people pay omahj to Tarjay…
I hadn’t
found Truth and the only consequence is that I find myself right back in Illing
Noise where I started, far too close to Normal.
Again, even with
eyes glued and ears peeled, this piece might be a challenge for many to
consume. But that’s just in keeping with who I am anyway, soooo…until the next
time, as my man Hiram would say, “Here’s to poetry!” Whatever that is to you.
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