Saturday, April 8, 2017

Week One of the Jamie and Carol PAD Challenge

As you know, my best buddy Jamie and I challenged each other to write a poem a day for the month of April. I’m following an A to Z theme of forms while Jamie is working from prompts supplied to her from a workshop she participated in.

We emailed our resulting poems to each other on a daily basis and today we’re posting them on our respective blogs.

Poem #1

My first poem is written in the Abhanga form. It’s a four line stanza with a syllable count of 6,6,6,4. Lines 2 and 3 rhyme:

Magic burning brightly
the heady perfume scent
of power in assent
filling the air.

A thought, a word, a spell
the magic works its will
and power rises still
to reach the end.

Poem #2

Since April has 30 days and there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, I’m going to take a page from the A to Z thing and do whatever turns my crank on Sundays. This is a poem I’ve been meaning to write for a long time that’s part of a book I haven’t worked on in years (because it needs to be totally rewritten). It’s supposed to be more like a nursery rhyme.

Beware the Myste that shifts your way flee as quickly as you may;
the Myste, it winds through time and space,
danger’s found in its embrace.

White the Myste that grasps your hand and takes you to another land.
Yellow Myste, the years will fly -
forwards, backwards, not knowing why.
Blue the Myste, transforming skin
into things that have not been.
Green the Myste you’ll lose your head;
Red the Myste, you’ll end up dead.

Beware the Myste that shifts your way flee as quickly as you may;
the Myste, it winds through time and space,
danger’s found in its embrace.

Poem #3

The Balassi Stanza is named after the Hungarian poet Balint Balassi. It consists of nine lines with the rhyme-scheme AABCCBDDB and a syllable count of 667667667.

My escape is a dream
on a silver moonbeam
a gift from the stars so bright.
I can fly if I will
even go further still
and soar far into the night.
I can change how I look,
take the road no one took -
wherever fancy takes flight.

I can be anyone,
I can lay in the sun,
or swim in an ocean blue.
I can step in a book
maybe just for a look
or see the story comes true.
I would live in a dream
all my life it would seem
if choice was in my purview.

Poem #4

Choka is a form of Japanese long poetry pre-dating, but related to, haiku. As with haiku, the lines of a choka should not rhyme but should follow a syllabic pattern (onji). The most widely accepted pattern for the Choka is to start with a katuata of 5-7-5 syllables and continue in a 7-5 syllable pattern. It can be any odd number of lines and finishes with a 7-7 syllable count.

Gun metal grey sky,
clouds weeping for lack of sun,
chill dampness seeping
into the pores of the earth,
no ending in sight.
Boiling rivers and streams, dark
with mud and debris
rushing to leave us behind;
wash away our sins.
Like divine retribution
prayers go unheeded.
In the uncaring darkness,
voices turn to smoke.
Like a prophet false to truth
the dark continues
eroding creativity;
a slow death of the spirit.

Poem #5

Despite being called the Diminished Hexaverse, this form has nothing to do with the number six. It begins with a five line stanza of five syllables in each line, then a four line stanza with four syllables each, then three, then two, then one. Rhymes are to be avoided in this form and you can give it a title or not, as you wish.

Creativity

The glide of a pen
A soft muttered curse
A brushing of paint
A starting over
Persistence is key

A finished poem
A finished song
A painting done
Satisfaction

Creation
is never
that easy

but still
we do

it.

Poem #6

This form is the Etheree, which is similar to the Diminished Hexaverse only longer. This one is ten lines long. The first line is one syllable, the second line is two syllables, and so forth until the tenth line of ten syllables. You can also do it in reverse, going from ten syllables to one.

I
write of
things unseen
and often things
hidden in the dark
abyss of a twisted
imagination - nothing
is planned, words flowing outward
and spread across the page in a pattern
that weaves the story that’s trapped within

But the spinner spins and the weaver weaves
and sometimes thread-thoughts become tangled
and I stare at the empty screen
waiting for inspiration
waiting for ideas
that might never come -
still I persist
until the
tale is
done.

Poem #7

The Flarf is an internet dependant form that combines unusual phrases from Google searches. It takes its raw material from a search involving wildly different terms, like "anarchy + tuna melt" or "exquisite + corpse." A poem is created by cutting and pasting words from the search results page (none of the website links are followed). You can also pull lines from your Facebook or Twitter feeds, but I chose the traditional Google search. :-D

The Ugliness in Beauty (revised)

Humans can be very conflicted
when it comes to the concepts of beauty and ugly.
Is Ugly the New Beautiful?
These are two variations of the same concept,
which, when literally translated, mean pretty-ugly
and beautiful-ugly, respectively.
Note the proportion of beautiful words to ugly ones.

What are we to define ugly?
We all enjoy beauty.
But an appreciation of ugliness is necessary to it.
The Beautiful and the Ugly are One Thing
Ugly is just another form of beauty,
Without ugly we would have much less,
Because even the ugliest thing has helped something.

How beautiful am I?
The beautiful and the ugly are not opposites,
but aspects of the same ...
Better to see the beautiful, ugly truth of the cosmos.
There are no certainties here, only struggle and contingency
In the natural world, beauty can be many things

Why am I ugly?
or not pretty enough?
It’s a pretty person’s world
I'm ugly, and I know it.
Stop telling me I'm 'beautiful'.
I'm ugly. It's fine.
The Beautiful Ugly. 143 likes

Heartbreaking, terrifying, thought provoking
Just who are these sinners
that are so ugly on the inside?
And the LORD God said unto the serpent,
Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle,
and above every beast of the field; ...
Existence can be beautiful or ugly.
It can be lonely. Chaotic. Terrifying.
What matters is how you see it.
“EVERYTHING burns,”
says the Joker in the Dark Knight
Am I ugly?

And there you have it. The first week’s worth of poems. I hope you had as much fun reading them as I did writing them. And hey, it’s National Poetry Month - why not give one or more of the forms I’ve included a try?

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