Friday, February 18, 2011

Drive it away

(- 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. Melbourne weather, your glamour

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:

Kirsty Murray said...

I'm loving these. Definitely Brain Asploding material.

Anna Ryan-Punch said...

I'm loving it too. They feel a bit like our poetry nights - sometimes 2 people come, sometimes 30 people. Unexpected and fun.

greenspace said...

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

Anna Ryan-Punch said...

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.