Today your weekly dose of culture-building poetry comes from the talented Ben Brizell, a writer, poet and blogger. Check out his other work at: Benbrizwritings
Enjoy!
Further
Looking back through
all these memories;
ticket stubs,
scrawled notes,
stacks of poems,
leaves a painful taste.
All I can do is wonder
If it all really went that well.
I’m a cynic at heart,
which leaves a little room for bias.
Ben Brizell
Happy VerseDay! Beginning next week, I will be featuring some of the amazing stuff that you have been sending in. Until that time, please enjoy this triplicate of Haiku.
The feeble heart stroke
Little beats against her ribs
Sparrow trapped within.
Rush of blood to brain
Thoughts misplaced; edged with remorse
For words said, too late.
The trouble with love
Is the world in which it’s borne.
Death springs from context.
I don’t know about this one. It’s a little rough. I think it needs something. Severely lacking in hope and warm fuzzies, to be sure, but something else. What do you think?
Time
Time is moonlight through the branches
of a tree that once sat lower in the window
It’s the gray hair in the washbasin you notice while brushing your teeth.
The teenage screams of “I hate you” and the slamming of doors,
Doors that once could not be shut for fear of being too far from you.
Time is the ache that once whispered,
And now holds you hostage.
Time is the moon and gray hair
A change of pace,
The wobble of temperament,
And the cruel device flashing revelations in pops and crackles of bone and joint.
Time is the tired vacancy of your parents’ eyes and the sudden realization
That you will be an orphan in less time than you’ve already lived.
It is the knowledge that they will be gone…
And so will you…
And that howling teenager, once so sweet a baby,
her too.
And we think it so unfair…so sad.
But our thoughts and laments do nothing to change it.
Nothing we do will ever stop it…
Because Time is an uncaring bastard,
who marches by and leaves you along the side of the street,
waving your tired little human flag.
And nothing matters really.
We humans are so infantile, never growing in our short span of century.
Cry babies for truth and justice,
Never grasping that we lack the ability to really understand there is no truth…
Justice nothing more than a construct of simple neurons needing to find order.
We are not ready for truth, we are not big enough for justice.
Nice try, pea brain.
You can barely remember where you parked your car.
Here’s a thing….
Atomic Hit and Run
I am in need
to feel your atoms against mine.
Even though it is short lived and often
unintentional.
Because your matter on mine,
matters.
Gives my particles cause to spring up from apathy.
As if I shared your stardust once, so long ago.
As though we had a place in time long before this,
When oceans were gas, and metals made mountains
Comets careening off of placid moon-dusted plains.
Somewhere back there,
You careened into me
And my soul still remembers.
It drives my poor lizard brain to ache
just once more
Maybe I’m just looking for the particles you stole,
when you astral side-swiped me.
Like exchanging insurance numbers.
A slight streak of sanguine against metal.
Small token of our shared space.
It is miserable
and noble.
All at once.
Time is a boundless roundabout
And all exits bring me back.
I tell myself it is a finite dance
I can only spin so long,
Until the friction of physics halts my motion
And particles lay in defeat.
I have to tell myself it is finite.
I need to know it ends.
I need to know it ends.
Okay. So this is a weird one.
The picture alone is disturbing. Sometimes in life we stumble across things that are perfectly normal aspects of the natural world, but they affect our human emotions on strange levels. Mother Nature’s everyday can make us feel uneasy and strange. Maybe it’s our too-advanced brain reading depth where there is none. Notions of mortality and empathetic wondering.
In any case, I acknowledge that it’s strange, and a bit unnerving. But then again, so is life.
Evisceration
Yellow stripe teardrop burrows deep into her leafy green belly
Once so full of harvest and good planning.
The seeds to feed the hungry nesters
Spilled across the glass table top,
Like a cornucopia
A feast for jagged takers.
Did she feel much after the first piercing sting?
Was it just all black?
Or did she feel the tugging pull of her insides, turned out?
What if Katydid?
Happy VerseDay.
Today was darker, as some days can be.
Enjoy…or if you can’t enjoy it, sit with its awkwardness for a bit and don’t be afraid of the feelings you may catch. Part of our Beauty lies in those dark and painful corners.
I Belong
I am yours and I am theirs.
I am the scale’s and the mirror’s
I belong to the vogue airbrushing
And the PTO.
I am the tethered hawk,
Forgotten her wings.
Hungry to hunt,
No freedom with which to fly.
I am the man’s and the patriarchy’s
I am the lament of God
And the decent substitute,
When nothing better comes along.
I belong to so many,
Each a share of grief,
Each a pound of flesh
So many hyenas tearing at a picked over carcass
I am wasted and wanting,
Found without
I am the lukewarm spread, the mannequin arms,
The expected response and sweaty spectral.
I am the failure of my skin
The price of privilege
The stain of guilt.
For apples I did not eat.
I am the sunken boat,
long forgotten; a weathered splinter in the reeds,
I am the once useful, fading at dusk.
I belong to you.
And to them.
I am no more myself, than anyone else’s.
But oh the torture of knowing.
How different it could have been.
My darlings…This humble writer took a short break from her blog this week, but I will catch you on the beautiful flip side of life, next week on Wednesday. Also, look forward to a formal submission call for VerseDay, and all the fun rules and regulations that includes.
Until then, Enjoy a little VerseDay with your Thurs….day.
SHE
She came wailing
Screaming into the world on slippery tracks
Destined to set apart the befores from the afters.
She came pink-faced and angry
Perfect petals pouting tirades
Fingers tightly curled into tiny, life-lined palms
She came disgruntled
Protesting the cold and bright,
Raging against the metallic and sterile.
She came to show us, to shake us,
To remind us.
Life twists on, where we least expect.
And where we struggle to control and contain,
She always comes…just the same.
Good morning, Darlings. Here’s a little something to start your day.
Frailty
How precious, the fear,
Of casting your frailty,
Out into the jaws of a desolate world.
How brutally important
To stretch the lines of comfort
Throwing the weakly bonded cells
Into the universe of chaos and rock
The stone that tears,
Branches that bite,
Fire’s searing kiss.
How cherished, the heart-pounding uncertainty,
That drives us to the far away,
Against the pleading of timidity
Begging us to come home.
Safety is not safe,
Until we step into the treacherous.
Good evening! Today is about the terrible habit of looking behind, and being tethered to memory… and I also think I might have a hankering for fall.
Enjoy!
Lie in Weight
Now the days of yielding past
And fallow fields in quiet repose
Beckon down dark geese in flight
The crackle of air settling cold
The dusty birth of Autumn spreads
Waits for coy light to brave horizon.
I am still and lingering.
Patient like the fading light
The callous bite of snows to come
And the bitter taste of wood smoke in lungs
I remember the hush frosted grass beneath feet
Like your breath on the apple of my cheek
Clear as the fading day and vibrant as fog on the moor
How I long to miss the memory
When will it burrow beneath ground
Settle somewhere in the dirt where you hide
Silently waiting.
For my dawdling to cease.
Today was my official first run on an abbreviated 10-week marathon training plan. Okay, that’s a little fictitious. I’ve been running. I trained for and completed a 200-mile relay race last weekend, surpassing my hopes to not die by not only surviving but actually enjoying the whole thing. But this morning I dusted off the old chart and began to slowly start building the mileage I’d need to not die again in October for the Blue Sky Trail Marathon.
It got me to thinking about different types of runners. Some would have started training much sooner than this. Some are going to show up on race day with minimal miles and legs full of ego. Some have calculated calories to the numbers, selected precise nutrients per ingestion, and are weighing their shoe laces. Some are probably going to drink the night before and show up with four-year old sneakers and a day-old bagel with green chili cream cheese for fuel. The rest of us will fall along the spectrum between.
We’re all in the race, we’ve all got different reasons why, and different motivations to pursue that finish line.
In the same way, there are many types of writers in the world.
Those that dabble only when the muse traipses through their line of sight. Those that succumb completely to the words, to the exclusion of all else in their lives. The researching non-fiction gurus and the world-building sci-fi pros. The haiku aficionados and epic scribblers. The plotters and pantsers. The pious and the pornographic.
We cover all the bases.
The one thing we shouldn’t be as writers, no matter if we’re outlining or winging it, is stagnant. Yes, we need periods of repose where we can recoup our mental losses and rest the neurons. Just like runners need a resting season, writers should take breaks as needed. This doesn’t mean we sit still. We are always, in some way, in training. And sometimes, the best way to train is to diversify the hours we spend at our art.
My suggestion for today’s post is to make a plan with your writing.
HEY! Come back! Hear me out…sheesh…pantsers!
When I say plan, I’m not suggesting you go investing your hours in spreadsheets and calendars. I’m saying expand your repertoire. It’s one of the best ways to grow as a writer.
If all a runner does are long, slow-paced runs, they will only develop a certain set of muscles. If all a runner trains at, are speed drills around a track, the same thing occurs. Unless you’re an olympian in a specific event this is a waste of your potential and a recipe for injury.
Balance, writer. That’s what I’m talking about.
If you are a novelist, take a break and work on a short story (you can even make it about a side character or your main character thrown into an alternate universe). If you’re a flash fiction genius, take a couple minutes to start plot building a novella or research a topic for a non-fiction essay.
If you spend your writing hours researching and plugging away at your non-fiction novel about the long line of Fredricks ruling the Kingdom of Prussia in the eighteenth century, try giving your brain a break and write a noir short story set in 1920’s Chicago. Or, *gasp*, try your hand at a little poetry.
Stretching your brain is just as important as stretching your training plan to incorporate different activities.
Just like miles for runners, words for writers are not a waste. It doesn’t matter if they’re on paved or dirt roads, up hellacious hills, or on even city streets…the miles are the work and the work makes you stronger for the bigger tests ahead. Your words, your writing, grows stronger and better with every method you use to stretch it.
So get to it.
Go out and do ten fartleks of sonnets and a long-day of article submissions to Knitter’s Weekly.
Get uncomfortable.
Get better.
