Poetry I wrote for Creative Writing two years ago

 What it says on the title. Note: 2 years = not very good. I promise I have an actual wip that I am working on and will post in all its awful glory (eventually). Apologies to old me, you are probably a better writer than I am now, or at least more confident in your abilities. Also I put us back in the rat race, this time with more TF stuff too. 

Found words poetry 

 Emergency numbers

 
14 line 8
1st 3rd 6th 8th 2nd 4th 7th
8 7 6 5 4 3 2…
Siren will sound—
Expectations mixed up
Alarm 
will sound.
Run, Hide, look for exit signs, Stay Home !
Fight
Active Threat As a last resort
2nd Evacuation plan: Bomb threat, Gas Leak
Stop Fire first floor,
Always call 911
Tornado: Code red.
5 4 3 2 1… 1, 1, 1, stop! 
Emergency Action Plan & Response Guide
Work collaboratively on all sides
Sign up here teams of 6
Ask questions and come prepared 
Emergency kit
Fight Fire
Good Luck

X

 
Happy Birthday, you!
(Family approximately the same age)
2016 April, 
Tree of Heaven this year
You got it
You’re going to slay 
Your worth is within you 
Good luck today
Tree of Heaven:
We will have catered food, free, mild
Pizza & fruity pie 
(Hyper sweet stomach pains)
Live, laugh, love
Let me know 9. 


Ekphrastic poetry

and the tree was happy
Poem after untitled mixed-media sculpture in front of the Krannert Art Museum

Sacred forest
Sacred forest in the treed city in the plains where no trees grow
Sacred forest, dead
Never alive, unliving, perhaps a past life
Rootless, homeless stumps
The dream of a forest—made by who?
A traveler, or someone who’d never seen one
The deepest woods I’ve ever seen cut off the sky with green and choked
Me
Who would want that slow death seeped in fear?
Want to keep it, nurture it
Bring it into the city?

It was entrancing

Sacred forest with the synthetic spiders’ web
Trapping nothing but leaves, an empty nest
Fall leaves in the spring
Strange
Keeping the husks dead and present, unburied, bog bodies preserved under a holy binding
Bog bodies in, outside the (art) museum
Sculpture outside the art museum. 
Authorized?
Museum of art, museum of leaves, dead bog bodies, house of leaves
Silk lines trip lines ley lines fey lines 
Fairy spirits
Clustered around, albino arctic and wood brown
Loose clay coiled or smooth or stabbed and scraped, the stylus became the claws of scratching animals. 
Some naturalistic, wishes and whispers of the dead never-there woods itself
Other white, ghost skulls resting on coils 
Ghost logs curling up inscribed with half truths and the tree was happy
Forest cat peeping out of a clock no cheshire smile
Red mushrooms sprouting from gray soil 
Coiled brown clay like the roots of the trees turned in on themself spiraling
Ouroboros
The softest brushes of green, careful artistry or nature’s reclamation?

Alive
All alive
Ants wriggling in the cracks, lichen pushing, flowers and grass surviving at the edges
Even as the wood lies dead
Silent structure grows slowly to the staccato pulse of unheard construction
The trees the wood rots is swallowed regained renewed 
Grey and splintered, untouched, smoothed only by wind and rain
Dead alive piece that grows with its museum

What creator?
Birth is a mystery as is death.
No plaque no credit no name for anyone
No license?
And yet the piece has deliberation
Heavy like the sum of fallen rain, the fallen leaves it has caught 
Spell cast 
Maybe not on you but
Certainly 
On me.

Stronger than that of the statue and its height, elegance belying weight
Where is the rusted rough-soldered rabbit of my childhood?
Scrapwork dream, old become new again
He lives now in the woods 
Checks his stopwatch and is late to his meeting with the sprites and the mushrooms
Ignoring the abstract towering hulk
Even as it carries the sun’s rising, that sun is not mine

Who killed this tree (these trees?) so that its (their?) stumps uprooted could stand
Centuries the price of the vast thickness cut down in minutes
Lumped leaves hoarded by the web like fly carcasses rotting en plein air
If leaves still resting preserved in sleep are flys
Then who is the spider?

Untitled Villanelle 

 
Now where we were the flowers grow
Waving to the tune of distant chimes
Beyond the bank, still does the river flow

The rushing stream where no one now rows
Coats the cracked concrete beneath with lyme
Now where we were the flowers grow

And in the deep blue sky no cloud dares go
Within a mile of the new, double helix moon ringing the earth
Beyond the bank, still does the river flow

Becomes a delta round the landing pads
Twisting into unraveling threads of marsh
Now where we were the flowers grow

Even in the night their petals glow
Marking the earth in green pulsating lines
Beyond the bank still does then river flow

As tree roots swallow bones long steeped in woe
Reaching deep back to our ancient time
Now where we are the flowers grow
Beyond th bank the river still does flow 

 

 

 

I have no clue why I wrote this next poem.  

There are no demons
If you do not look
Close your mind, close your eyes
Your ears

Lay in bed
Dream away
From somewhere quiet 
To somewhere
Else

Bright lights like eyes 
Cast from a car
A wail, a scream a dying animal or ghost
The fire station near your house
 

 

 This is a poem about moving to the US from the UK, written when the UK was under Tory control, and the US was under Biden. 

Yellow 6

 
It’s been almost a year since we moved
Feels like a lifetime feels like a day
Haunted in all by the specter (spectre) of Yellow 6

Yellow 6
Chemistry, chromatography 
Ink bleeding up a paper strip
Orange, not yellow
Not yellow five at least, not goldenrod

In the cheese
Cheddar
I’m in America now, I need to specify,
The cheese orange like a flame
An artificial flame
Still tastes the same
Gloriously beautifully campily fake
Yellow 6

Doritos
Spicy, fake chips
Crunchy, strange
Normal corn becomes party food 
Suspicious
Processed to distrust
Delicious? You cannot go back, no matter whether you have eaten the pomegranate 
Gloriously artificial, gloriously fake
Yellow 6

In the tan
The spray tan
The bed tan
The Trump tan
The American tan
Orange, gloriously fake, gloriously showy
Yellow 6

“America is yellow 6!”
Cries America
But so
Is every 
Place else.
All yellow 6, orange, unreal.

America just doesn’t realize
Because their insurer won’t cover their myopia, 
And funny thing
The NHS had to cut funding for farsightedness prescriptions so
All Britain sees is that 
Prodigal child 
Plump with spoils of war and confident
Grinning back across the pond
Conspiratorially.