It’s quadrille night at dverse and De has asked us to write a 44-word poem that includes the word ‘balloon’. This idea was penned earlier today in an Exeter café bar!
Rising up into a black ceiling,
all those word balloons
floating out, an unintelligible
cacophony. Just snatches heard.
I’m a glorified stewardess really.
It was a nasty moment.
Moving mouths, gestures thrown
around the café bar.
All those emotions discarded
over Americanos and lattes.
At dverse tonight Paul Dear asks us to write a poem about rivers. The photo is an initial scribbling in my notebook of an idea for this poem – plus doodle!
He was a piece of night,
broken off,
left behind.
A crow smudging daylight
and in his eye a star was trapped.
He wept it free on high moors
and it began to run
through
sphagnum moss,
round granite,
gathering up a thousand
crow-dropped stars.
It led them to a hollow,
there they pooled and waited.
Another day,
a cloud burst of crows,
a dam breaks,
a galaxy streams downhill,
sears through the valley.
Host at dverse tonight is Bjorn and continues the series on art movements. Today we have to compile a poem in the form of impressionism – which in art focussed on modern life, colour more than detail, visual effect of light. So I sat in my favourite coffee shop …..
Light leaps in
from the street,
patchworks faces
in dark corners,
seeps over
lemon wood tables,
splashes coffee that’s
necromancer black.
Baristas flicker across
a stone coloured floor
and hands are caught
in a keyboard blur.
Platinum hair swings
as she leans forward.
Red ceiling lamps
smudge the eyes
but light
can’t find the shadows.
My work on the poem at the coffee shop
Lilian hosts poetics at dverse tonight and wants us to write about amusement parks.
From up here I look for an escape route,
but a way out is lost from view.
Everyone is queuing for the big
thrills, refugees from the humdrum
seeking a new voltage for their nerves.
To stretch them tighter until they tear
and escape screaming through
the open mouths
that have become their bodies.
This was a mistake. Through darkness
my ride twists and dives. In this vacuum
it is pointless knowing which way is up as
seamless fear stitches mind to body.
A hessian sack of nothingness
flung into a black hole,
tracing an arc through pin-prick stars.
Only a violent
slowing down,
light,
breathing again,
brings me back to earth.
Pale-faced, unsteady
I lose myself in the crowd.
Move against an electric current
to find that safe static place.
At dverse tonight Kim is hosting and we are producing a 44-word Quadrille which includes the word ‘spring’.
In our street, car windscreens
are craze-cracked. White lace
netting glitters in a steel spring morning.
I fear for yesterday’s buds.
You could hear them then
breaking free on the fine ends
of tree branches.
They’ll be cracking to a different
tune this morning.
At dverse tonight Toni hosts haibun Monday – a prose poem and haiku-style ending on the subject of shinrin-yoku .. otherwise known as forest bathing.
Cortisol hormones zing when plucked. An atmosphere stretches
the nerves, cranks up stress until it’s screeching. Fused into your
brain so that your eyes are pinpricked electrics. A prescription
of forest trails, pine needle tranquilisers, wood oils drip feeding
calm disarm words bent on harm.
In spring the owl hoots,
its echo searching for listeners.
Leaf voices die in autumn.
welshstream 