“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.

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

A perfect moment:
When a song syncs precisely
with my car’s blinker.

“Write a six-line poem … informed by repetition, simple language, and express enthusiasm.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-fifteen-11/)

I will never understand people who don’t like music.
It’s the cheat code to my soul, to my heart, to my passion.
I thrill to it, mourn to it, dream to it!
I move to it, sing along with it, celebrate it!
Music is human being made manifest.
We are the music and the music is us.

“A poem that describes a place, particularly in terms of the animals, plants or other natural phenomena there. Sink into the sound of your location.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-fourteen-12/)

What difference:
A trembling of the ground?
Or a rumble of deep sound?

What difference:
A spike of fear?
Or a shriek to pierce the ear?

Pitch becomes hum becomes rhythm
Becomes a feeling in the bones.

Such sounds travel miles
Through the earth,
Through rock and river,
Tree and terrain,

The great beasts speaking
Across vast spaces,
Vast spectrums.

Deep time in
Thunderous silence.

“Six-line stanzas use lines of twelve syllables, and while they don’t use rhyme, they repeat end words. Specifically, the second and fourth line of each stanza repeat an end-word or syllable; the fifth and sixth lines also repeat their end-word or syllable.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-thirteen-11/) I ended up rhyming rather than repeating.

There’s a yearning toward the divine in all the world,
A spiritual stretching, flowers grasping for sun,
A soul gasping for grace. But there’s a counterweight,
Fear and doubt pulling us down, ourselves overrun,
     Striving for better, for best, for something (not this!)
     Bright and good, a clarion hope we can’t dismiss.

We defy the darkness! Resist the fear, the doubt!
Our nature’s better angels soaring toward the light,
Pulling us, urging us, to follow where they lead!
Darkness disperses and righteousness becomes right.
     We find meaning in creatures’ inter-relation,
     Kindness defines our locus in all creation.

Such hope is rare in this world, far too delicate
To trust to capricious vicissitudes of chance.
So we care and nurture hope, fulsome with yearning,
To navigate light and dark as a kind of dance,
     The rhythmic ebb and flow which defines existence.
     Our defiance is how we sustain resistance.

“A poem that makes reference to one or more myths, legends, or other well-known stories, that features wordplay (including rhyme), mixes formal and informal language, and contains multiple sections that play with a theme. Try also to incorporate at least one abstract concept – for example, desire or sorrow or pride or whimsy.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twelve-13/)

I
Is it trite to say I identify most with Orpheus?
Such an overworked character! So often overidentified with.
We all relate to his impulsiveness,
the difficulty of trust, our fear at the pith
of our stomach.

For me, though, it’s his lyre, the lair of art,
the liar of storytelling set to music. The ego
of the creative act, a journey into the mystery of our minds,
wresting a treasured largo
amidst the hustling hassle.

II
Nick Cave has the right of it:
Orpheus the Rock God!
Orpheus as the origin story of Beautiful Noise!
Music, art, as rebellion against
the certainty of death!

III
His tragedy: the loss of Eurydice.
Our tragedy: the loss of music.
Is it worth the price of knowing?

“Write a poem that incorporates song lyrics.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-eleven-13/)

I may never see the light
again. It’s a darkness
filling, brimming, overtaking
me. I saw a drawing once:
a figure bent and crushed,
huddled under clouds of violent
black lines, chaotic and heavy.
I thought: I know this.
I know what it is to
feel this. The end of
feeling. The snuffing
of light. The towering,
suffocating dark.
I know this.
I know what it is
to feel yourself
unfeeling.

I used this day’s prompt rather loosely. (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-ten-13/)

I hate the word “crepuscular”.
I refuse to accept that it means
What it means.

It attaches to images of rays
of sunlight, piercing through clouds,
the light of life, of creation,
so often used as a metaphor
for the light of god.

Such an ugly word for such
a beautiful thing! Such a
muscular sound for so
delicate a thing. Such a
stuffy word for so
spiritual a thing.

It’s the wrong word
For what it is.

“A poem … that uses rhyme, but without adhering to specific line lengths. For extra credit, reference a very specific sound.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-nine-11/)

There’s a certain quality
of air
that carries sound
far and fair,
the rattle of trains
intimate and near,
riding tracks five miles away,
Abrupt and clear.
It’s a rhythm almost in time:
Juddering, shuddering,
a mechanical syncopation.
The air changes, sundering
sound, a heavy thick mass,
trains now distant,
now unheard.