A hundred times consider what you’ve said,
drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice,
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
with only the fakebook of Beauty for feeling.
What he needed from me I have no idea.
(He wouldn’t stand alone.)
Myself conjectured, were they Pearls?
Plunge me deep in love, Naked Man.
The trick is to make it personal:
we’ll kiss each kiss obscenely neck-like,
let silence drill its hole in the glaring white gap
of closed eyelids. Kiss the kiss.
Day 22
Poet Danielle Pafunda is running a cento contest. Cento (meaning patch work) is a poetic form where we write a poem using lines from poems by other poets. Dianelle has tweeted lines from Poem A Day archive of Poets.org. We have to a write a cento using those lines.
I cut and pasted from her blog the lines that interested me. Placed some together, coaxed them to tell a story, broke the lines, moved them all over again, and went on and on till I came with this. Remember, we are not allowed to use words, lines that are not sourced from the twitter feed.
The title of this poem is a line from E. E. Cummings poem ‘9’. Read the poem here.
Want to look at the lines that interested me?
the continent was clothed in trees
What he needed from me I have no idea.
My own bags were full of salt
to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice
let silence drill its hole
sad beds wide enough for planting
not April and the magnolias
implicit with stars in active orbit,
hot black dunes in the air
A hundred times consider what you’ve said
Myself Conjectured were they Pearls
Oh plunge me deep in love
Because I killed a snake the day she was born
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
hoist their nets, weighing the harvest
Obscenely jewel-toned, obscenely neck-like
paper sacks stuffed full of orange
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
Then the terrible thing happened
with only the fakebook of Beauty for feeling
while all the wild protected liminal woods
Old brain inside the new brain, inside the skull
He wouldn’t stand alone
disappear, emerge, twitch, reverse course
When my eye nearly failed
a place where plutonium safely resides,
you have lived and lived on every kind of shortage.
learn to petrify it
the nearer she got the bigger she looked, until
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one
we’ll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
The trick is to make it personal:
the chill of closed eyelids
sleepily indifferent
in the glaring white gap
it ran from their long hair,
the whole cathedral crash at your back
The naked man
My Garden 