Poem #30 for April National Poetry Month.

I made it! 30 poems in 30 days! It has been actually more than 30 poems. What a ride! I’ve never tried to intentionally write that much poetry at once. It has been good discipline.

Susan Lori-Parks wrote a play a day for a year. Now, being who she is her year of plays gets produced. It was a grand experiment like this.

I know I need to edit and re-work a lot of these, but there are beginnings of some gems. What would a year produce, I wonder? Could I stand it? Keep it going? Or have enough vocabulary? I tend to repeat my favorite words. I am aware of all of this. What do you think? Yea or nay? Let me know.

Tonight you get two poems for the price of one. The first written this afternoon and the other after seeing myself tonight on film at a big movie theatre in the local indie film The Pony Man.

Pondering Polaroid

A quiet cascade through my memory

A silence so loud it hurts

How easy let go

It doesn’t flow

Here in my mind

The pictures painted bright

There is so much I have forgotten

I reach for the photos

I have misplaced

Shuffling through the same stack

Getting lost in story

The sound of the train whistle

 Out back of my home

Between the garden and the airport

On the edge of that farming sleepy town

The train sliced through

Clickity-clack high pitched announcement

That marked the day into sections

So sweet like an orange peeled

Juicy and ready to cut those hazy

Summer days playing on railroad tracks

Smelling the sticky tar

Bubbling up from treated wood slats

Hopping from one to one to one

Walking for hours trying to outrun the distance

Lying on my back in a dark field

The cold grass against my shoulders

A bit nippy in September’s late kiss goodbye

 to August’s free form passion

Looking for stars or something familiar

Singing to the Heavens

Waiting for them to whisper back

Tasting blood trickling down

The side of my head banged against

The steering wheel

Lost staggering alone on an Iowa dirt road

Stunned seeing the ditched pitch

Of a car curled up like a yellow bean bug

Waiting to devour the whole plant

When a dust cloud pulls up

Out steps a flannel clad knight

Asking if I’m ok

He takes me back to town

In a rattle-trap sea sludge green truck

on a sienna brown road

Pulling us towards town

out of the wild lonely flat lands

These small unspecific adventures

trapping solace and sculptures of a place

A marker between pages of adventure

stretching out my probability

To capture that perfect sunset

photographed on my cortex

in a distinct distant melody

I sing to remember

Humming snatches

Grabbing notes

Floating euphoric in snapshots of home

First Screening

Surreal seeing myself on the silver screen

I was there and then gone

Uttering a few lines

A pained look with joy

Is that what I look like?

I look at her

And I do like what I see

Heavy, but pretty

Country and city

Finding something in this itty bitty part

My life mimics the art

It’s a start

Performing a tiny role

Written for me

That I thought,”Why not?”

I get to be on the spot

In the light

Big emotions in a miniscule moment

A pause of dialogue in the montage

That’s me full and free