“Write a poem that recounts an experience of your own in hearing live music.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-five-11/)

I have a friend who says
the best concert he ever saw
was late-career Miles Davis.

I have another friend who says
late-career Miles Davis was
the worst concert he ever saw.

How can both be true?
He was onstage for over two hours
and only played two notes.

“What a rip off!” says one friend.
“But those two notes were perfect!”
says the other.

I wish I could’ve seen him.
I wish I could know what
two perfect notes sound like.

“Write a poem that involves people making music together, and that references – with a lyric or line – a song or poem that is important to you.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-four-11/)

I sang,
but Carl Sandburg I ain’t.
You remember,
not just the moon,
the two of us
howling together,
tearing through the night,
windows down,
radio up,
not caring who we woke
as we sang,
our howling soaring songs
filling the world.

“Write your own poem that focuses on birdsong.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-three-11/)

There’s a phenomenon called
the Critical Flicker Frequency
defining how we see and hear,
how we experience the world.

Different animals have different
Critical Flicker Frequencies,
so different animals
experience the world differently.

It’s believed that birds hear
faster than we do, that they
can pack more music into one note
than we pack into a melody.

I listen to a whippoorwill
and wonder why it sings
the same thing (always the same)
with such insistent repetition.

But it doesn’t. Within each note,
entire symphonies my slow ears
will never be able to hear,
each repetition sung uniquely,

Full of detail and meaning,
abundant with variations
I will never know
and cannot access.

Some animal see colors
I literally cannot imagine,
some smell scents on scales
inaccessible to me.

Some can feel the world
with near-molecular resolution,
and some taste things
for which I have no receptors.

Each sensoria experiencing
a world unrecognizable to others.
There is so much
that I will never know.

Do I find this ignorance
wondrous or fearful?
Both, sometimes, depending,
and even my fear is a wonder.

“Write a poem about something you’ve done … that gave you a … kind of satisfaction.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-two-11/)

I always thought I’d grow up
to live a life of the mind.
My childhood body burdensome,
never as easily athletic
as my classmates, never able
the same ways I envied in them.
I dove into books: scifi, fantasy,
not so much for their escape
but as a gym for my mind:
to wrestle with complexity,
to grapple with how
the world could be different.
In third grade, I wrote an essay
on what I wanted to be when I grew up:
When I Grow Up, I Want to Be
a Cosmologist! (So proud to know
that word, even then I knew I was
too young for people to expect that!)
Laying awake in bed, thinking about
time, existence, beginnings and ends,
the incomprehensible counter-intuitive
complexity of quantum reality,
thinking about death and recurrence,
of God’s creation of time from eternity,
and even then I knew a life of the mind
was the best place I could live.

Then came music, and theater, and dance,
mosh pits, and martial arts, and manual labor,
and I found my body is remarkably able,
lithe and strong and agile,
and I could be as effortless as
I always thought my classmates were.
And I learned my mind works better
when I’m moving, and I didn’t expect that.
I still think about time, but measure it now
with breath and heartbeats and foot falls,
and I know how existence feels when my body
swirls through space to the rhythm
of someone else’s music, and how time
and recurrence manifest in the thrilling
contractions of muscle fibers.
Everything that exists is motion
and I celebrate my cosmology
in the movements only my body can make.

“Try your hand at writing your own poem in which something that normally unfolds in a set and well understood way … goes haywire, but is described as if it is all very normal.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-one-10/)

Today we begin the end of our life,
the end always a beginning,
and we decide how to proceed.

Options:

• with joy
• with anger
• with hope
• with fear
• with love
• with hate
• with acceptance
• with resignation
• Other (please specify)

We choose: All the above,
with the addition of:

• Compassion
• Composure

Admixture to chef’s choice.

And so we can proceed,
toward our end.

Thank you for choosing temporary existence!
We hope to serve you again soon!

Please note an 18% gratuity will be added for parties of 8 or more.

Once again, I didn’t really follow the prompt for this one. (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-12/)

In stillness,
in motion,
with feeling,
dead inside,
we contradict
ourselves, heedless
riotous, incautious,
as we
dance, sing,
scream, weep,
laugh, love,
all still,
chaotic motion,
dead to
the world,
we create
our reality
with such
intense feeling.

I was inspired by this day’s prompt but didn’t really follow it: “Write your own poem that tells a story in the style of a blues song or ballad.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-nineteen-10/)

I need a keening kenning song,
to sing my love,
to pay proper respect to
memories of you.
People aren’t meant
to suffer in silent
stoic strength.

I watch videos of mourning
in other parts of the world:
Proud public displays
of heartbreak and struggle,
communities coming together,
a chorus of intolerable
pain, loss shared.

I need a keening kenning song,
a way to voice my grief.
I need someone to tell me:
It’s good to feel,
you don’t need to buck up,
to get through (but don’t take
too much time).

We carry far too much shame
around our most human feelings.
We hide what we share
most deeply, most truly,
embarrassed by our raw
naked need, as if to say:
We shouldn’t feel.

I need a keening kenning song,
to be human, to dive deep
into lingering love, lost
and lonely together, and so
deeply, painfully, hopefully,
fully alive.

“Craft your own poem that recounts an experience of driving/riding and singing.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-eighteen-11/)

Our little red Hyundai isn’t big enough to hold so many memories, nights of bored driving, shared ennui, screaming along to NIN’s cover of “Get Down Make Love”, you so excited to have me listen to the Sugarcubes, I let you see me weep as Tori Amos shared her pain.

We were so young, so sure we knew what was up, angry and passionate like our music, confused about our feelings, excited and hopeful and scared for our future, you always hated how I dove into mosh pits heedless of how dangerous it was, I always wished you’d let go and let yourself dare.

When you sang along to “Losing My Religion” I knew you were trusting me with your soul, when I raged along with “Jeremy” I trusted you to sit with my anger and know you were safe from it.

But you weren’t safe, and I was dangerous, and I knew you needed to leave if you wanted to thrive, as you drove off in our little red Hyundai, too full of memories, and I hoped someday you would remember the good ones.

“Write a poem themed around friendship, with imagery or other ideas taken from a painting by Carrington, and a painting by Varo.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-seventeen-11/)

I saw you across a room (such an embarrassing
trite way to see someone!) and I was
shocked at how fully you existed in space
without any apparent care for how people
see you. You were more yourself than anyone
I’d ever witnessed. I’d always been a wallflower,
someone often not noticed when I arrived,
unnoticed when I left, and I never knew
how to be around someone as blazing and
visible as you! I didn’t know what to think
when I saw you, standing in the center of
the room, amid your adoring crowd, basking
in their attention, because somehow I saw
myself, too, through you, and I couldn’t
understand why. You saw me, and came over,
said “Hello” and for once I didn’t wilt
farther into my wall. I said “Hi” back,
so out of character, and then it was the next day,
and the sun was coming up, the golden hour of
morning, and we had talked about everything
in the whole entire world. I delighted to learn
how utterly weird you were! The kind of weird
that makes you so deeply yourself, and I got
to be my weird self with you without
embarrassment. We were never weird
the same way, but to the same degree, and
ours was such a wonderfully compatible
weirdness! Today, I came to visit you, as so many
times in our past, and you let me speak this time
without interruption, without passionate argument,
and now it’s sunset, the golden hour to end the day,
so I rise from the grass, remove the dead flowers
and dirt from your memorial (such a normal thing
to mark the life of such a definitively
weird person!) and I don’t know how to be
myself anymore without your shining glorious
weirdness buffering against me, I no longer
know how to be weird alone.

“A poem that … imposes a particular song on a place.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-sixteen-12/)

This is our song,
you said, as we danced
in the headlights
of your car, parked
in our favorite park
after dark, just us.
Teach me how
to dance, you asked,
eyes alight with
mischief, sly smirking
smile, so alive and
beautiful. Just us, alone
in our favorite park.
So we opened the
doors, turned up
the radio, and danced
in the headlights
of your car. This
is our song, you said.

Now far distant, alone
in my apartment, our song
comes on the radio.
No longer ours, mine,
and memory’s, and it
all becomes such
an ordinary world.