the quality of
her journeys
glory and orange scales
end with
her blood
ghosts of old industry
above woodsmoke fog
shudder in the haze
bounded on all sides
sun storm afternoon
checked red shotguns
white on fingers,
snowing shadow,
painted skin
of blood
she hears each
shrunken
cloud
a woman
motionless,
each is made of
the folding
in the stormclouds
time claims
each dawn
old and broken down
jungle
moon, the centre
above the street signs
oasis
above sky
thin,
white flesh
The way I formed this poem is interesting, and I think deserves a bit of explanation. This poetry is of a genre called found poetry. It involves looking through various random forms of media, anything from an article on the internet to a piece of graffiti on a street wall. Poets then have the liberty of
In this case, I found a website (here) that generated poems, specifically nonnets. As I mentioned the last time I wrote one, a nonnet is a form of poetry where the first line is nine syllables, the second line is eight syllables, the third line is seven syllables, etc. through the ninth line. I used this website to create nine nonnets (or nonets, as the site spells them). The website isn’t very distinct in lines of poetry, so a few of the lines (particularly the ones with few syllables) were repeated between these nine nonnets.
I pasted them all, in order of poem generation, into a Word document and then crossed out anything I didn’t want. In fact, many of the lines in the above poem corresponds to an individual line from one of the nine nonnets. However, I did change the lineation and spacing in some of the earlier stanzas. My goal was to take at least one part of a line from each nonnet, while not taking any direct phrases from the poems. That way, I could give the poem a voice unique from any of the nonnets it came from.
Anyway, as for NaNoWriMo… well, I’ll just go ahead and say it. My word count is 151. All of that was written in the last hour, too. I never really get a good start in NaNoWriMo, so I’m not very worried (especially since I’ve been too busy with school and work to care much). I’m hoping to have a very good weekend, though. Perhaps… 15,000 word good? We’ll see.
Nimbus in a Bottle 