More Poetry Exercises - 25/12/08

I.

Body Exercise: Falling Asleep

The slide can do anything
that my pill cannot. Seemingly
stationary and motionless,
the sharp angle does not reveal itself
until I approach, knowingly, the maw
as late as possible.

I relieve unpleasant shades of past
impacts, the slide approaches the apex of
its race in fractures – what am I to do?
I can’t, if my pill cannot.


II.

Diamond poem (compressed)

Nothing
IS NOT, sterile
waving, screaming, waking
not there yet, worms, exactness, dust
whispering, birthing, loving
accord-ing, moving
Desire



III.

Simile exercises

as blue as a highway treetop
as rough as a roundel
as lonely as an a
as tall as a sky
as talkative as you, in sunny springtime
as eager as a irrident thought
crying like a storm
praying like dreaming with eyes wide open
reliable as desolation
as expensive as lust itself
as mad as a rose
milling around like April to Winter
common as life
regular as a song of boredom
as pretty as the ‘you’
as reluctant as a grown-up newborn
as smooth as semen
as quick as a cirrus
running like a cascade of thought
creeping like a newly formed sentiment
as loud as a dream of the future
as nervous as a coiling mesh of optic fibers
as green as a mind on its wrong day
as angular as a song
as mellow as sex
as sure as a second before understanding
shaking like a brittle bone
as rich as breath itself
as perky as the young to the jaded
growing like a futureless thought

selection1:

as mellow as the ‘you’
as pretty as sex

milling around like life
common as April to Winter

as mad as the young to the jaded
as perky as a rose

Paste:

As mellow as ‘the you,’ similarly
milling around, like life when it is
detestable to you the most,
Uninspired boredom is stifled and
pervasive, common as April
to Winter, cunning disguised within the
perkiness of a rose,
pretty as sex.
You are mad, as the young to the jaded, and
it disapproves of your petty rebellions,
of your
-not so new- similes.


IV.

Laundry poem

Inane, cavernous, a nightmare from
another world, not for humans;
the very opposite of what it was
made for.

For we made it for prettiness and fresh
inspiration, but – no water-
the earth and glow of unnatural
mechanisms belongs to it,
a place of troubled, contorted thoughts.

One does not clear his mind
by a laundry machine.