Guest Post: 3 Poems

Deb at Kicking Corners is our guest today. She's one of my new favorite bloggers with her thought-provoking posts and incredible range. She sent me these lovely poems that have instantly taken up residence in my sub-conscious. Thank you, Deb, for sharing these vibrant little bits of life with us.

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You're helping me get past the part

where I feel like throwing up.

Me being quiet protects you

from having to know.

And from having to do.

I want to live somewhere

that's it's okay to make mistakes.

In this world you have to be perfect.

Pictures don't talk.

This grey place is calm --

but not for long.

Learn to Too

When I get mad at you,

here are some things you can do:

You can call me a bitch and walk away.

You can talk over me, not listen to a word I say.

Or you can smirk at me, laugh. Make me feel dumb.

You can rip my emotions apart until I feel numb.

You can lock me away from what I care for.

You can keep tally of comments, like sport with a score.

These are drops in an ocean of things you could do.

But if you really love me,

like I love you --

then when I get mad at you,

show me you love me anyway.

Despite the things I say.

Because the deep down secret is this:

I'm really just mad at me.

I know this ocean because I've learned to tread water in it.

Nearly over my self-depreciating head,

I'm spinning in it.

But if you can still love me,

no matter what I do,

maybe I can learn to too.

Myth's Creations

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Bubbling out.

We are a spring brook.

We are full of fish and tadpols.

We tumble together.

Waves washing over and over each other.

Roaring, we are the ocean,

laughing.

Lazy snakes, not wiley.

We lay on rocks.

Soaking. Sun.

You are warm to me.

You are my tree of knowledge:

teaching me good and evil.

You are my tree of life:

we are forever.

We are creation myths.

I believe in you.

Sweating With My Blog Homies

What do cliffs, needles, blackberries, mothers, whirs, and voices have in common? Why bloggers, of course! Sometime in the past few weeks (they all run together in blog-land for me) I posted about a poetry exercise that tickled my fancy and extended an invitation for some audience participation. That's the beauty of blogging, isn't it? The community of it?

Several sporting bloggers gave it a whirl and I'm dancing and whirling with them. They all came up with such vastly different pieces using the same tools. It has just delighted me to no end to see that sort of magic at work. The exercise was The Ten Minute Spill and I outlined the instructions here.

Confession time: This exercise was hard for me. It was much harder than I originally imagined. The time limit panicked me a little bit, as did the line count, did I use enough of the words? My offerings pale in comparison with those of my fellow bloggers. For some reason, this also delights me no end. I love a challenge, I love to sweat over things. I even enjoy the feeling that I've done something rather poorly and therefore have plenty of room to stretch and improve. I will never climb Mount Everest - I find sports that can kill you somewhat distasteful. I do, however, create mini-Everests for myself to hurl myself against and grow dizzy and deplete my oxygen in the process. Thank you so much to those of you who did with me. It has been so much fun. For those of you still considering, please do. We all write for different reasons and about different things and with different voices. I think what ties us together is discovery. What's not to discover?

Here are the lovely contributors, my fellow climbers who took their ten minutes and spilled. I've also added my favorite line from each of their poems next to their links:

Larissa at Papa Is a Preacher "I'll take on all it entails, the celery, the strawberries, / The fails, the victories, all that I can be."


sebtown at In Search of a Title  "I can edge to the cliff. / I can fly. / Every day I can be scared and I can be alive."


Michelle at Buttered Toast Rocks "They teeter on a tightrope cliff edge / Dreaming dreams bigger than I had dreamed for them"


Masked Mom at Masked Mom "The desire to protect them all--from the world, from myself--overpowers nearly everything, / Until, finally, fear's voice is the loudest one in my head"


Julie at Feeding The Cat "I can't hear her voice, / or smell her spit on my hair / to hold down a cow lick."


Esbboston at My Worlds My Words My Worries "But I thought about how much I had grown in the last year, plus how much weaker my mother was getting since her ax accident..."


Please do go check out their links and read the whole poems. They are just delightful and imaginative and so very exciting. If you have done this exercise and not shared it, or I've overlooked it please link up! [If I've overlooked yours, please hit me with the Twitter stick or something and LETMEKNOW so that I can add you to the post. I just got a foot of hair cut off and I'm still heady from the fumes of the styling products.] This has been so much fun. Who knows? I may drag out a few more fun exercises that I come across. 


Oh, yeah. I promised you dreadful. Here it is. Catch me in my black lipstick and a dog collar reading this at a college poetry slam near you:


She didn't know how to jump.
The clouds lay beneath her
And tremble, wobble, no.
She didn't care a lick
about the gazes, intense as needles
from the faces below.
She didn't want her mother
to find her.
She could almost see the News vans, helicopters now.
Nothing left of her but blackberry jam.

Author's note: When I was just now typing this, I typed "feces" instead of "faces" and almost left it because it made the whole dreary affair a teeny bit more interesting. Thanks for playing with me, blog friends!

My Kind of Exercise

I have an on-again-off-again love affair with yoga. I love the simple contemplative art of it. I like to feel each muscle as it stretches and works with the others. I like to feel like I have a big ball of breathing light in the center of me besides a messy jumble of organs and half-digested food. I like the way my mind reconnects in its simplest form with my body - simply as a driver, not as a commentator. I love the focus of in and out and filling myself with new air and releasing the old. I especially like that it's a solitary form of exercise and that there is no need for bouncy pop music and overly enthusiastic cheerleading: "O-K! One! Two! Up! Two! Clap! Two! Feel the burn!" I like to do yoga by my wood stove in the winter for the whole Bikram experience in the privacy of my own home. It is one of the few occasions on which it is not only acceptable, but encouraged, to sweat like a farm hand. I imagine the tiny demons pouring out through my pores and dissolving in my salty sweat. This is the sort of exercise I love but alas, life gets rearranged with alarming regularity and my exercise ritual disappears for a while.

I have been doing a different sort of exercise lately. Not the kind that burn very many calories or keep my muscles strong and limber, but the kind that keep my brain oiled and focused. I picked up a book at the library, The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach, that has become a useful tool. I dabble in poetry, don't really consider myself a poet in any sort of exclusive way, but the exercises are great for really any kind of writing. Most of them focus on freeing up your thoughts for breaking the bonds of regular association of words and for enabling the play and rhythm of language. That may sound like so much hokum to some, but my writing style lends itself to hokum. Besides, any sort of kick in the rear end in the direction of regular writing practice is a good thing for me. I want to share an exercise I stumbled upon last night that tickled my fancy.

It's called the "Ten Minute Spill" and is suggested by Rita Dove - she was a US Poet Laureate and has assorted hardware to her credit, so I think she might know a thing or two about writing.
Here's the gist of it:
Write ten lines in ten minutes- she suggests poetry, but I think it would work for lyrical prose, too.
These ten lines must include the following:
- A proverb, adage, or familiar phrase that you have changed in some way.
- Five of the following words:

cliff           blackberry

needle           cloud

voice                 mother

whir           lick

How fun is that?! I'm going to give it a go, but because one of the wonderful things about blogging can be the interactivity of it, I found myself thinking about what various other bloggers would do with it. I want to see. If you feel inclined, join me in this exercise and post a link or even just your ten lines in the comments or on my Facebook page. It will be fun. We will get to stretch our writing muscles, distill and focus, maybe sweat - but nobody will actually see us!