twisting
coral beads
tighter
leaving
indents
like
teeth marks
turning blue
.
haiku
Category Archives: Sickness
he’s
from a totally
different fairytale than ours
charmingly creepy
.
haiku
fleeting
something like terror
mirrored in eyes meeting grief
brief in divorce room
.
haiku
red, red
ragged laughter ripped
from lubricated throats, men
form late-night dog-packs
.
haiku
disquiet
dark words spoken in
strangers’ voices spill corrupt
from constricted lips
.
haiku
sweet guilt
mouth full of butter
cream crumbs melting into guilt.
where to spit it out…?
.
haiku
man!,
falling in love is
poisonous to women with
potential, that’s all!
.
haiku
against all advice
.
salt-swooped, enticed
from the dark deep lake of his eyes
washed up on your shore
left there
balanced on a blade of his hair
bent-winged
you take a second chance at his skin
which has the look of tin
left out in a recent storm
yet glinting
dangerous as a virus starting
fished from his mouth
.
an unfamiliar curl of dull light like
a line of syllable struck on an infinite yet vacant sky
sickles you in its soiled embrace
he circles in again
patient like a surgeon
from a distant planet
.
you gulp you rumble yet fail
to notice sap that blooms and spills
ecstatic from his ruinous touch
that acts like a compliment, but isn’t so
conspicuous
.
you wilt you mumble
as he picks his teeth
larger than easter island monuments
as you swoon
sucked clean as a puckered scar
flapping there, un-speeched
beached on remnant happiness
no-one else gets
.
this vice is your
kryptonite
.
.
not a haiku
.
NaPoWriMo day 24
Hard-boiled detective novels are known for their use of vivid similes, often with an ironic or sarcastic tone. Novelist Raymond Chandler is particularly adept at these. Here are a few from his novels:
- A few locks of dry, white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.
- Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
- From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
- She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
- He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
Today, I’d like to challenge you to channel your inner gumshoe, and write a poem in which you describe something with a hard-boiled simile. Feel free to use just one, or try to go for broke and stuff your poem with similes till it’s . . . as dense as bread baked by a plumber, as round as the eyes of a girl who wants you to think she’s never heard such language, and as easy to miss as a brass band in a cathedral.
unfair
.
my thoughts are over used
rutted and butted and puttered over
endlessly
mulling and churning and chewing over
ceaselessly
all details and entrails assailed over
and over and over thinking thinking
drinking and drowning down in
mess of haze-maze crazed
worry-boned alone-ness
.
it’s fair to say
my thoughts are worn-to-thin
fair-to-middling — overmused
knocking the stuffings of my noggin-chocking nights
no respite in sight; unlit — confused
.
whirl pooled in a floating world
misted twisted pensées swirl and curl
miserly, relentless, restless, gutted
i rise from sleep to sleep perchance but
just to think again again again again
my wearied brain is drained thus
in vain though
i own it
i know it
i think
i think
i think
therefore i am?
here? there? no? where?
it’s fair to say
.
overmused : worn out form thinking too much
.
today’s challenge is to write a poem based on a word featured in a tweet from Haggard Hawks, an account devoted to obscure and interesting English words. Will you choose a word like “aprosexia,” which means “an inability to concentrate”? Or maybe something like “greenout,” which is “the relief a person who has worked or lived in a snowy area for a long time feels on seeing something fresh and green for the first time”?
I chose, of course, without overthinking the possibilities, overmused
WORD OF THE YEAR 2021: overmused 33%
(adj.) worn out from thinking too much
It’s fair to say we probably all had a lot on our minds in 2021, which makes this superb seventeenth-century coinage the perfect choice for Word of the Year. To overmuse is to overthink, or to contemplate too much—so if you’re feeling overmused, then you’re utterly exhausted from endlessly thinking, worrying, and mulling things over.
https://www.haggardhawks.com/woty
.
not a haiku
btw
no-man’s land
masks on stop looking
at one another eyes down
barrel lock and stock
gaining momentum into
madness of prison-islands
.
tanka
.
5-7-5-7-7 syllables
barbaraturneywielandpoetess 