Suburbanite -big poetry tent for 12/24

Suburbanite

Stalled performance & she notices
the hoarse noise that ropes around
the engine. Slight vibration’ n the stillness
between soundproof windows & oversized lawns.
Fretful fingertips drumming her hand reaching in
 the glove compartment. Smartphone. - overdue oil change
that kind of stuff that troubles the Suburbanite.

Swift rounding moves and she’s turning the wheels.
Into traffic, fluorescent lights & humming.
Glittering clouds immerse the highways, the city;
into the space hungry vehicles’ surroundings
you vanish ’n alikeness– a car among million other
amorphous outfits figureless  beyond tinted windows
the kind of stuff that doesn't trouble the Suburbanite.

Pedestrian silhouettes, urban coquettes’re forgotten
like those obsolete costumed parades with cape
& panache from college.
Your children grow unaware of 
the compactness of cities  the overwhelming presence of people every street corner
the unity of farmers as contrast to the vastness of crop-fields
Does this even trouble your kind Suburbanite?

For you built on a base-ment dis-loyal to the concept
beyond the social artifact. You did topple ancient topologies
in an attempt to squeeze out those you labeled as untouchables
and it did not seem to trouble you much Suburbanite.


the wordle prompt :

Eco-Friday: Memories of a house sketch (2)

I shall gaze at the buildings ahead

and still see trees beyond the hill’s edge

like once when Fall touched them, waning

the leafs that weren’t rusty yet & hiding them
 
yellow beneath the sunlight patches.

And I shall think : it feels like pain

should feel in an artificial limb, like this static buzz

hurting your ear - the noise from your e-reader device

substitutes memories held by a book's pages

 as yellow as tobacco’s smell

 Like once his  fingers touched them.

Eco-Friday: Memories of a house sketch

The story:

As many a cityperson - and you know that type : born, raised, lived her whole life in the city. So, as many a cityperson I am not quite content with my suburban living arrangement. For example, I’d love to be able to walk down to the coffeeshop in the morning without getting fully awoken by the trip. I’d like to wash the sand of sleepy dreams with a coffee and a muffin and not with a mile walk. Although I am aware the walk is a healthier way to wake up in the morning, but these bad habits die hard if ever. And there is that sprawling problem as well. Not here, in my suburb, but out suburbs sprawl like fungus - something that’s benign in itself but wears off the healthy organism of woods and pastures and orchards and crop fields until it falls to illness.

And even though I have the certitude of ending my life in a condo building, I already know that going back to the city will not be an easy task. I will miss the quietness , the views from my front porch and maybe the whole concept of white fenced house…?

 

a bigtentpoetry prompt

He  just wanted to posses her too much and so he concocted a dreamland from grassroot movements surviving only in history books, from the seeds of her hope and the vapors of her dreams to embellish his barebones reality. He lured her in his Spanish sandcastle...and to trap her  he built room after room on the resemblance of her dreams. So  in an end he ended falling into her dreams ..He started believing that what he told her this land to be this land was. That what she  wanted him to be he was…


First she was too much of a child to note that the evidence, the facts contradicted her hypothesis & his theory. Enslaved  by the spell of his chant, caged beyond the bars of her own beliefs … it is how they  lived  happily for several long years. Because she had a strong backbone that young lady, she would rather submit herself to unhappines than betray the loyality and faith she was once asked to give.


But children outgrow their naiveté and those who fall in are bound to fall out. He felt betrayed when she left. He could not phantom why their arrangement  was just a temporary one. Her beliefs should've been real , should've kept her bound to him.  And I could give him no answer, find her no excuse…Because he was blind to all that was not the world he invented for her.
And each time when she behave humanly towards him, he hoped in her return. He could not see that it was just the gesture   of half-eaten, half-digested debris of her affection . Her caring ways  as they swarm on the skirts of his made up land , withering under the crude light of reality.

No hope for them two docks into her heart .


The words in bold were offered by the september 13-19 bigtentpoetry prompt. More works on the prompt on here: come one/come all

Big Tent Poetry (a Draft)

Part II –History of Metals (From gold to steel)

Do not fault others. It was me. This is no country

for gullible men.

History (1) : after the days of the may flower the people who found the lands here to be more fertile brought steel pieces by thousands, by sea, to build new cities and Industries.



History (2) : back then, back there...

                   it was decreed that gold and silver are better than steel

                    thus steel, only used for menial pieces, was never awarded full value.


Yet here the lands, amorphous patches of raven earths randomly interrupted
                                                                               by water or mountain or human

were always flowing, never a pattern. Just to contain it’ll be enough trouble ,no fuss about metals
                                                                                      -ships brought in steel by the thousands.

Molten steel molded the land into patterns. It belonged here - a country for steel.







History(3):  a fact

                  so it was discovered that steel is better than gold and silver.

                 More flexible, it endured more.

                 Sharper edges, it cut deeper & further


History (4):  new patterns erected in steel. This land reshaped grew taller and faster. They said growth is good but it required order.
And to order is to set limits -boundaries
narrow down comprehensibility
to avoid confusion we  now decree
there is one kind of steel
stronger, whiter , sharper and lighter
to stand above the others.
(as the quality of steel is contained
by its skin...)

Note: this draft is a fragment from a longer poem project of mine.
But I think the code is not that hard to decipher ... the fragment is quite self-sufficient.

Note: other answers  to Monday’s prompt — the guest maestro’s idea to write using a hidden code

Big Tent Poetry: step 1

The poem I wrote as my first answer to the Big Tent Poetry prompt: "letter to an absent friend" has proven to be an inspired one.

A friend , one I had in mind when writing the poem, as he was unusually quiet during that  period e-mailed me the next day. He was not the only friend that I felt starting to drift away when writing it, but he was the one to reply. And thus he assumed the poem.

And if you read it when I first post it on my blog you may recall the end:

"the letter you never got to mail."
but I got to mail it, well email it, when Bryan called for submission for the most recent chapbook he edited:


And  not only that it got accepted.  It also made O.  admit that sometimes the most unrealistic horoscope type predictions may become true: " Aquarius, someone from a far away land, will publish a poem with a dedication to you."

I also got to enjoy my electronic contributor copy while waiting for the hard copy to come in the mail. For now- Leigh Binder's "No more hags" -(but gay nannies) got my attention.







Note:  The weeks'  prompt was actually about words,but my  poems seem to have a mind of their own. More poetry circus under the big tent.

Under the big tent :step 3

...what if I were a pelican


 egg lain beneath an orange moon

sinking maroon in the drowsy a drunken sea?

Would I invoke her deity to turn

all human beings into hairy beasts?

Return us to the times when we were kids

and all the same, the moon's offspring

stretched  back on wet rocks, nested on stilts

uplifted dreams.


More orange moon poems here: Big Tent Poetry

Big Tent Poetry: step 2

Mr. Sapient fondles a new ideology:


the new band-aid for our economy

-or so I heard- is no band-aid at all.

The pattern of failure bears the marks

of government tincture. (You said it!).

New deal taxation and forced desegregation,

stall small business growth and thus

do not ease but slow down healing.



According to you, the Capitol better capitulates and

 the economists, financists and other business “-ists”

 will play no juggling tricks with derivatives

as southern patrons will  abolish racism

on their own (free and good will).

Mr. Tomasky, I agree with you

                                           this is kookoo!





Mr. Know-it-All, hello,

All you strive to proof will crumple

once we doff the fancy libertarian caparison

off the reasons you’re riding in the race

-you are no knight in shining armor.

Glitch one: deregulation- seen that, done that.

And guess who pursed our dreams?

Glitch two: my civil rights protected by

Plumber Joe or Locksmith 3 Key?



Ayn’t said so?
              let’s drop it, this debate’s futile…





Note: this week's prompt was this wordle, i.e. a set of words we had to use in the poem. The words I used are in bold formatting.  And the topic, well -it is one debated political issue here, in U.S. One that I find hard to take seriously, though I should, so I decided to approach it with a drop of irony.
More poems inspired by the same group of words: here.