(- based on suggestions from @snazzydee, @VayaPashos, @greenspace01, @jellyjellyfish, @slimejam, @facelikethunder, @sulphura, @matchtrick, and @realnixwilliams. Think that's everyone. Group effort, this one.)
Dig a big fuck-off drain under the whole thing.
None of us has to fight the future in this. We’ll just snap
on the latex, roll up our sleeves and
even our parents will call us Mulder.
Smashing down again.
Is washing out thin, we can’t strip this weight
from our humid heads. My elbows are sweating.
There’s a fix: make a gate out of sulphur;
A weir out of matches; a child out of stars.
Beat rain spiders flat with a cookbook.
Curl the night in bubble wrap for safekeeping
Pop a day open to find a boy,
find him every single morning
Worship his rush of joy at dawn.
Unshiftable muddiness, ineffable as the box it came in
The wet child born of flood has curls, has curls.
Dig mud out of your backbone. We’re out of vinegar to
wash the blocks bone-mean. At least the car’s clean.
None of us wants to be Archimedes’ doormat
But the Tetris effect of neighbours and wheelbarrows
Brings a new world that stays in your postcode.
Start with the gods, praise the family and their home town
Wherever it is in the sluice these days.
Report shiny thews, slice them with muscle for lunch.
Smaller victories are never mentioned in detail,
But everyone had a shovel and everyone hurt and
by curfew they beat those Buffys down.
Saved a tiny pocket of air for tomorrow’s breath.
Pindar wouldn’t want us to pin a
rhyme to a calendar or choriamb
Align gods with mortals;
seat rappers with poets. Turn them all French.
Flip back the tide with words
slap out the waves with speech.
It works like a mask, a belt, a huge sea.
_________________________________________
Today's poem doesn't have structural restrictions, because by the time I was working from 9 different thematic inclusions, my brain asploded.
The requests for inclusion were:
- Bubble wrap
- Humidity and other unglamorous weather phenonema
- X Files
- Things that have things inside them (vessels/containers)
- Thews (mighty thews)
- Pindar (I think that was a structural request, but I've kinda paraphrased his structure instead)
and finally, for all that to be rolled into the saga of a driveway being washed away in a flood.
I plundered tweet-streams for parts of this one, so if some of the words seem like yours, they probably are.
Also, first person to find the Bring It On reference gets a shiny penny.
4 comments:
I'm loving these. Definitely Brain Asploding material.
I'm loving it too. They feel a bit like our poetry nights - sometimes 2 people come, sometimes 30 people. Unexpected and fun.
this is amazing. I'm a very lazy poetry reader - don't do it often, sometimes don't persist with a poem if it's challenging.
your poems are challenging in that they make me read them more than once to keep discovering more from them. without any extraneous words, there's so much in them.
if we weren't friended on twitter, I might just skim them, and think 'cool', but I feel privileged to read poems that I've contributed to the concepts/themes of, and it is so rewarding to really read them.
Deborah
Oh Deborah, thanks.
I think this is the reason I'm writing them. Collaboration is making this so good, so fun, and so liberating.
Thanks for your contributions, and support.
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