Overheard

He was hot... H.A.W.T.

     You're almost as tall as him.

That is not allowed,
I'm married.
I don't think we should be going to a bar.
     I tell you what,
     Go in for a practice round.
...
     No, you don't have to stop.
     That's the last thing you want to do.
Meet you on the other side.

I recorded a few lines while waiting in the airport security line, then rearranged them into a story. This is what I got.

Interrogation

You know him?
   Who?
You ever see him now?
  What's going on?
Said he said he'd done something?
  He said that?
What happened?
  Was it Monday yet?
Why?
  Can I talk?
Promise?


Lines found in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

Never Gets It Right

Serving as we have,

it was never our intention
to run our community.
Students will continue to exist
only if the writers experience hope.
Join us.
Come to the experience in writing.
Learn and develop with the criticism.
Know that we are no journalism department.
For every issue, feedback is provided.
Access and bring forth ideas.
Is it impossible, the reality of focusing on students?
The work is for anyone who
dirtied their hands, found a book,
or shared our community:
this community of students.

Words for this poem were found here:
Meredith College's student-run newspaper, The Herald
Issue 28.5; Date 11.2.11
"The Herald Never Gets It Right: A Letter from the Editors"
Ashleigh Phillips and Emily Gamiel, Editors

Death of a Twin

Today's prompt/form idea came from dVerse: Craft prose to poetry There are three steps.
1. Find a prose passage that seems poetic. You know you read some stuff that just sounds cool.
2. Break it up into more poetic lines and stanzas. Reformat it, basically.
3. Alter it to better fit your definition of poetry. A few options: even out rhyme, meter; more flowery words; clearer images.

I used a passage from Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, which I copied below the poem. I loved reading that book. It's about a pair of twins born in Ethiopia, Shiva and Marion. Their parents were an Indian nun (who died in labor) and an English surgeon (who fled shortly after their birth). They were raised by two Indian doctors at a mission hospital. Very interesting story about love, medicine and family both chosen and natural.


Death of a Twin

His body was warm. 

He never took a breath 

after. 

His expression never changed. 

I felt his pulse,

regular for a full minute.

Then it paused,

as if the heart had just realized 

the lungs had quit. 

With a final throb, he was gone. 

Of all the pulse types, 

this was both the rarest 

and the most common.

Every pulse possesses

the potential to be absent. 

I closed my eyes and cradled him, 

his skull buttressed against mine.

I felt physically vulnerable

lying here next to him

in a way I hadn't known

when we were a continent apart.

With his death 

my biology was altered.

The heat was rapidly leaving his body. 

I lay there, my head against Shiva's, a finger resting on his carotid pulse. His body was warm. He never took a breath after the tube came out. His facial expression never changed. His pulse stayed regular for almost a minute, then it paused, as if it had just realized its lifelong partner-the lungs-had quit. His heart sped up, became faint, and then, with a final throb under my fingers, it was gone. I thought of Ghosh. Of all the pulse types, this was both the rarest and the most common, a Janus quality that every pulse possesses: the potential to be absent.
I closed my eyes and clung to Shiva. I cradled him, his skull buttressed against mine and now wet with my tears. I felt physically vulnerable in a way I'd never felt when we were a continent apart, as if with his death my own biology was now altered. The heat was rapidly leaving his body.
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Love Lost: Philip Levine Cento

She remembered or yearned.

“I found you whole.

I find you in these tears,

and it would do no good.

I will never make it"

Now she shakes her head,

shakes him away,

and she's herself.

Something began here

and nothing comes back.

This poem is a cento: a poem created by rearranging another writer's verses or lines. I greatly enjoyed reading many of Philip Levine's poems in order to find this poem. The lines came from the following poems:

In the New Sun (1, 5)

Father (2,3)

Heaven (4)

A Woman Waking (6,7)

Late Moon (8)

My Fathers, The Baltic (9,10)

Prompted by The Found Poetry Review

Poems found via the plaigarist.com poetry archive

Witnesses

Keep it a secret!

It was not their fault.
They could not see his face.

The winter snow
found him wishing
he could explain.
He never was given admittance. 



Found on page 121 of Camber of Culdi by Katherine Kurtz

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Wanted to tell you that we're better.
The new version will allow many games.
Make sure you want only her.




Advice
Enhance your play.
Get the most out of today.
Enjoy games.
Experience play.




Winner!
Protect yourself from the upcoming risk.
Bring down the whole world with you.
If you can read and are willing,
these jobs may be for you.
Everybody is a winner!




A few fun things derived from spam emails. 
Thanks to the Found Poetry Review's weekly prompt.

Found in Grammar

An action is in itself a signal,
a new step.
Reach for the relationship.
Circumstances would then
no more be discussed.
It may be a single change.


Words found here:
The Elements of Style
Strunk & White
III. Elementary of Principles Composition
9. Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic.


Found Poetry Review prompt
Grammar On

Typewriter's Eruption

I pulled the curtains.

When I leaned
over the typewriter,
sparks burnt round holes
in my shirt,
and fire
singed a sleeve.

I dragged the rug away
from the sparks.

In the kitchen
I filled a bucket with water
and returned to the erupting
typewriter.

The typewriter did not seem to be
flying apart,
only erupting.

On my face and hands
I felt the heat
from the caldera.

The yellow fire made
a fast, roaring noise.

The typewriter itself made
rumbling, grinding noise;

the table pitched.

Nothing seemed to require
my bucket of water.

The table surface was ruined,
of course,
but not aflame.

After twenty minutes or so,
the eruption subsided.



Words found here: The Writing Life - Annie Dillard
Prompted by The Found Poetry Review

High-Seas Plastic

Fishermen had lost them

every year

for half a century.

Killing everything in its path.

Three months in the Pacific,

a net thirty feet across.

Island: estimated

six thousand more tons.

Still greater danger. 

Words from one page of the book:

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them 

By Donovan Hohn

The selected words describe lost plastic fishing nets which harm and kill sea creatures for decades (so far) after they're lost by the fishermen. Also, there are unfathomable amounts of plastic floating out in the ocean causing all sorts of trouble and even creating islands of trash!

Collection of Horoscopes

Equilibrium is
not that valuable.
Stylish lopsidedness and the 
beauty of irregularity display
incongruous details that
reveal fresh, hot truths.
So-called flaws are to be celebrated.
Lucky accidents are serendipity.


"Imagine greatness in others," says the man
not renowned for his optimism.
Activate your own dormant greatness and
fantasize aggressively.


The income gap is
absurdly grotesquely humongous.
Raise your voice against this inequity.
Discrepancy exists
in your own personal sphere.
Immediate effect in the immediate area.
Rich aspects of your psyche steal from the poor parts.


The smartest words you have ever said in your life and
two of the top five thoughts of the past decade have
popped into your brain recently.
Inner sources of wisdom are strongly
aligned
with the Divine Intelligence,
formerly known as God.
Be wilder and freer.


Status quo, no!
Uncertainty and
transformation are
shifting the mood.
Experimenting with the rules is healthy.
Imagine different ways of doing things.
This superpower should be shared.


The rupture in the order of things has cause people to
completely forget why they started doing it.
People
are in a daze,
hypnotized by a certain 'rupture' which
took place some time ago.
Wake them up, gently, 
to move on.


You're an animal!
Vitality is heading toward peak levels.
Every move you make is a dance.
Explore the righteous blending of grace and power.
Be a fluid bolt of ingenious fun.
Play hard and
with sublime ferocity.


"Make the invisible dark force beautiful.
Create a song out of your moans.
Brag about your wounds.
Dance reverently on the graves of your enemies.
Sneak a gift to your bad self.
Dissolve the ties that bind you to hollow intelligence.
Seek the angel near the funky gully that winds through no man's land.
Dig for treasure in the mud puddle where the single lily grows,"
my dream said.
Align yourself with its spirit.


Happiness should be reclassified as a 'psychiatric disorder,' he says.
Pathology of joy, he says.
'Happiness is statisically abnormal,' he says.
Cluster of symptoms and
cognitive abnormalities abound, he says.
Be besieged by a massive influx of good feelings and
surges of unreasonable joy.
Rebel mode, activated.
Flaunt you abnormal bliss.


Epic Deed Ahead:
Capacity for amazing feats is bigger than usual.
Accomplish what's beyond your expectations.


You had to relinquish and were
forced to sacrifice what you love.
Be awakened to an unexpected new source of excitement
liberating you to rise again.


*Freestyle wacky fantasies:
indulging in your own version of
healthy for you.
Depart from you usual raps and
unveil some unpredictable self-expressions.



Found words in horoscopes from Independent Weekly 5.4.11.
All lines start with Indy words. Some lines end with my own. A few sections are all Indy.
*May 25: Found the one that didn't get copied in originally. Thanks jaanpehchaan from Heartbeat for noticing and letting me know.

The Pivotal Moment

The pivotal moment:
Am I going to be here?
What will happen?
Made a profound impression.

Who we are as people was
built on important ideas:
sharing, being responsible,
and collective power.

People who were next to nothing
operating so much bigger.
That can really exist, even thrive.

Personal freedom.
I could create new meaning.

I have a full sense of myself.
I understand the imagined.
I'm committed to possibilities.
I want to move my body.

It's in motion.


Words selected from an old Independent Weekly newspaper. Found poetry is fun.

Explore Thinking

Explore thinking.
First, education.

The lecture:
"Perspectives of access to all levels of equality."

Classrooms increasing stress
and issues with current era.

Students required to master
knowledge of time.

Prepare students
for the world in which
we must acknowledge that
women are different.


Select words from a speech by the retiring president of my alma mater, Meredith College.

Evensong

Evensong

Into the future I hope to see
A saving, defending knight
Helping secure prosperity.
I reflect on the moon's might
Asking guidance on this night
And knowing it has been too long
Since I last sung an evensong.



Stephen Hawes
The Passetyme

O mortal folk, you may behold and see
How I lie here, sometime a mighty knight;
The end of joy and all prosperity
Is death at least, through his course and might:
For though the day be never so long,
At last the bells ringeth to evensong.


Today's inspiration taken from an arbitrarily selected poem out of this awesome poetry collection you should see about checking out:
The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World
Ed. Richard Aldington
c 1941, 1958 The Viking Press, Inc
New York, NY

Grandma and the King's Son

"Yes ma'am," the boy told grandma.
"Heard about you out here in the living room from mama.
About nine-thirty last night you were laughing, mama says."

"The king's son was there, in my dream," grandma explained.
"'Like meat loves salt' he claimed he loved me. I was young.
And when they got a right long ways off, his guards I mean,
squintin' squirrels were the only ones left to see us."

Grandma just laughed and hollered last night through the whole dream.
"The two boys slept on, too tired to notice," Mama added.


Found poem using arbitrarily selected first phrases on pages out of Grandfather Tales, edited by Richard Chase.

Guy in the red jacket

You'll never read this,
but rejection... is just so awful.

You had me at 'sorry, did i burn you?'
You serve me iced coffee sometimes.

Caught you looking!
I was eying you back.

I half-heard you say hey to me, so I didn't say anything back right away.
If only I could start a conversation with you.

Since I missed my chance,
just want you to know you're super cute.

Fate has an interesting way of working, and you tend to ignore the cues. It's ok, I do too.


Today's post is a collection of quotes from Missed Connections posts on Craig's List. Each line was taken from a different posting.
Found poems can be both fun and challenging. Also, I think they can be a good way to convey a shared experience, many points of view becoming one story.

Day 2 of NaPoWriMo 2011 - Human v Universe

"Write a poem that incorporates the titles of three books you have in your house."


Human vs Universe
Technology and capitalism are our current American Gods.
Try remembering the magic of the universe.
Look to the night sky and practice Seeing in the Dark.
If you forget how fragile, small, and short-lived we are,
you'll forget how much the large, rich, city is really a City of Glass,
waiting to be shattered by nature and time.



American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Seeing in the Dark - Timothy Ferris
City of Glass - Cassandra Clare