My poetry class is cancelled tomorrow so I don't have a poem for Thursday. However, we did blitzkrieg poems in class (each given 10 minutes to write) on Tuesday that I am going to post. These prompts came from poems that the prof read in class and took ideas from. I have not edited from the way I wrote them in class as they are quick writes.

The first prompt was to take a color and elaborate on it.
The second prompt was more of a rule: your poem has to start with the line "My love is..." and then from there you could take the poem where ever you wanted it to go.

BLACK

Onyx, that is the
negative of day,
lunges at you
as you turn off
the lights.

Ebony, that gets
close to your throat
and scuttles
across your ribs.

Noir that hugs the
inside of the charred
fireplace, too bare
to burn flame.

You're sweet and cold,
as the bleak black,
dark as death,
dips you in
the fathomless sea
to check if you
can really be
born again.

MY LOVE IS

My Love is broken.
I'm not talking about
a boy or a man.
I'm talking about
a friend.

She's sitting on
our couch, tequila
drunk.
She's crying about
a boy, she calls a man,
who she thinks she
loves.

My Love is broken.
She thinks she's
fixed herself, but
her heart's in her
feet and her
brain's in her
mouth
and she's running on
this thing she
calls love, with
this boy she calls
a man.

And I've tried
to talk, we've tried
to talk to her,
our broken Love.

And she's pushed us
away.

So now,
my broken Love
tries to stand,
thinking she is
whole again,
while we sit,
and we cry,
and we try to
fix.

Love from Pullman,

The Blonde and The Bullshit

The prompt for the assignment due tomorrow is write a poem about your reaction to your favorite piece of art. I chose to do mine based off this piece by Banksy:



BANKSY

Awkward glance at the dirty cup,
next to the broken man,
in the purple sleeping bag.
Loose coins drop,
eyes still on screen.

"Hey, dipshit,"
he said.
"How about looking up
from your internet life
to see the change
you haven't made
in the real one?"

Eyes up,
cheeks pink,
breath dead.

"I don't want to hear
the coins yelp as they
beat the bottom of my
styrofoam bank account."

Maybe it was harsh.
She thought so, as she
cussed out the sleeper,
more awake than she.

But I don't know.
If change was comfortable
and soft,
our generation would
roll it up, breathe it in
and exhale a shift 
in what we see.

"Keep your coins," he said.
"I want change."

Love from Pullman,

The Blonde and The Bullshit

This prompt directed that we take a line or lines from a favorite song or poem and link them into a different poem. I chose lines from Basic Space by The xx and jacked the title. But I used themes from the song Desert Island by Mansions on the Moon.

BASIC SPACE

Basic space, open air,

freckled knuckles

and soft skin.

Decayed bones add

salt to sand

as you grind your teeth

back and forth,

back and forth.

I pull your face up

as you try to drown

your lungs in scar tissue

and cheap bleach

and you roll your head

against the bathtub wall,

back and forth,

back and forth.

The sun cuts out and

your deep sea cold

coils inside, while my

broken bones shake,

back and forth,

back and forth.

Love from Pullman,

The Blonde and The Bullshit

The prompt for February 13 was to write about a turning point in your life.

FEBRUARY 13

"Tell me your turning point,"

he said.

Dammit, I know

what it is, but I 

wish I had to think

about it more.

I wish I had to mull

over my turning point.

I wish I had to debate

whether it was when I

looked in the mirror,

junior year, realizing 

that the ugly duckling

was a little less ugly.

Or maybe, it was

the first day of college;

fresh start and shit.

But it wasn't.

Weird that Whitney was 20.

Maybe it isn't weird;

I'm 20, well, almost.

20, spine cracked,

fragile, coma intensive.

I'm not that kind of 20.

I sit on my bed,

writing about her,

heating pad on high,

peanut pretzels

in a bowl.

I almost want

to ask her

what it was like

on the driver's side.

T-boned, neck split.

Sometimes it hits

me at weird times.

But maybe it's not weird.

Not weird that she left

on the thirteenth

and that this was the assignment

and that I sit here

on hard, black plastic

and tell about her

fucked up death

to people I hardly know.

20, and I haven't done anything.

But maybe she hadn't either.

That's not true,

I know it's not.

She had done things.

But not really, you know?

Not turning point things.

She's my turning point thing.

Whitney sits in a box,

burnt down into a gold urn.

20 years old.

What if she were me?

Maybe it isn't weird.

Love from Pullman,

The Blonde and The Bullshit

Wow. I did not mean to miss four posts. Sophomore year is heating up. I will post each separately with their prompt.
This is from February 11. Because it was close to Valentine's Day, we were prompted to write a love poem. However, (plot twist) it could not be about a person.

LOVE YOU TO THE MOON & BACK

Droplets of dusk
suffocate the last
elderly remains of day,
as they drip, drink, drug
the sun into a Novacaned stupor.

Once all is night,
she appears.
First shyly, peaking out
behind a dense curtain
of straining stars.
Then boldly, praising the
baby fires for beginning
to light her way.

She kisses the tender
clouds and they melt away
at her caress.
She sits up there,
on her thrown of atmosphere
and cries so softly,
I nearly miss it,
for all her loves
that have been taken back.

Love from Pullman,

The Blonde and The Bullshit

The prompt for Thursday's poem was to pick a branch of science of social science and use the jargon. I chose to use Astronomy in mine:

GALACTIC

I want to be born in a 

protoplanetary disk.

Crumbled concrete samples

my battered skull.

Brain knocked forward,

left eye blocked.

Ripped out tail light,

tap, tap, tapping with my breath.

Not dead yet.

I want to be the radiation pressure

of the solar wind that breaks

baby protoplanets.

Raw knuckles scrape up

blown out windscreen,

as I blink, blink, blink.

Generating from my core,

I want to be my own magnetic field.

He stares at me, benign, pitying,

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

My God's kind of an ass, I think,

as a siren crawls into my ear.

Love from Pullman,

The Blonde and The Bullshit

Tuesday's prompt was to take a familiar idiom and write a poem where you take the phrase literally (ex: 'take a hike', 'best of both worlds', 'have your cake and eat it too', etc.).  I chose to do 'killing two birds with one stone.'

TWO BIRDS, ONE STONE

God put his brain in backwards,
dropped it in the cavity of bone,
didn't even check if it was in right.
Papa said not to look at him,
but I met him last November,
asked him what he liked to do.
Like I didn't know.
One eye squinting,
gun, made of hands, cocked.
"Hitting one crow? Pithy.
Like Death deciding whose throat to slit."
His voice soft, drifting, dusty,
like I was just a maple in the wood.

God put his brain in backwards,
brain stem digging into frontal lobe.
"Two crow boom, two crow boom,"
he lamented, like the cow going to slaughter.
Mad as a March, God said.
Bought it off a guy I graduated with,
safety disengaged.
One crow, two crow,
two birds, one stone.

Writing one tonight, I'll put it up later!

Love from Pullman,

The Blonde and The Bullshit