Vanessa Shields's Blog, page 30

Poem 211 – How the day gets away

How the day gets away

A quick conversation ebbs into an ocean of discoveries
An eye rest becomes a deep sleep under an afternoon sky blanket

A bite gathers courses and expands into dessert
A coincidental run-in unfolds into a magical meant-to-be

An email response thunders into a manifesto
A direct drive corners into a dynamic detour

Words delight and destroy
Reactions flutter or flow
Choice is a deck of cards 
scattered at your feet

The hullabaloo
The rigamarole
The just gotta
The almost done
The one more minute
The could we just

Organize the day into columns
we lean on weave around topple over

And there it goes    the day
skipping humming away

holding the hand of intention
sometimes it looks back
offers a wink

Is there a ‘stop-everthing-and-read-all-week’ week? Can we, like, start a petition or a lobby group or a twitter feed to make this happen? I would really be grateful for a week where all I did was read. Like a novel. Or a memoir. Or a poetry collection. Or all the books I’ve started but just can’t find the time to finish. For pleasure’s sake, you know? Are you with me?

Poem 210 – On Beginning

On Beginning

how you begin
is to begin

start the document in word
open to a fresh page in the journal
connect to the internet
highlight the paragraph in the book

give the thing a title
even if the title is ‘Title’
swing palms of ideas
in the air
welcome them with
song and faith
each contemplation is a prophet
that will change your world

accept that you are the idea
the palm
the prophet
the change

so begin

slip into the slick opening
of ecstasy patiently awaiting
your boundless creativity

Poem 209 – Jingle

Jingle

an explosive helicopter crash in a vicious snowstorm
brought my waking hours to a thick start – I sat up
quickly in bed, rubbed my eyes into morning

then it started
oh oh oh ozempic!
the commercial jingle for type-2 diabetes meds
banging in my head like a circle of kids
ring-around-the-rosey-ing my brain
oh oh oh ozempic!
oh oh over and over it rattled

oh oh oh when will it crash?
the words exploding like flakes
in a snowstorm?

Poem 208 – Morning Flower

Morning flower

my motivation remains
curled up in bed
the sleep fog didn’t
dissipate in the shower
I’m holding this pen weird
‘cause my fingers
aren’t fully awake

words are weak
like water-heavy tea
nearly tasteless
but the heat –
the heat gives comfort
& remedy to trust that
I will open soon enough

feel the day vibrate my toes
& dance like a morning flower
in love with dew

Gertrude’s Writing Room August Hours!

We’re taking the first week off for vacation and I’m running a film camp for the kids! But, do come in sometime for a visit!

To find out more of the exciting and creativity-boosting offerings at the writing room, visit www.gertrudeswritingroom.com. Thank you!

Poem 207 – Fugue Submission

Fugue Submission 

: the recollection of a submission discovered like plastic treasure
upon receiving its rejection

why did i write that poem?
why did i believe it was good?
why did i pay the fee and send it into the ether of highly flammable hope and vapid validation?

twas a fugue move
a brief flash in the pan – mind-numbed by theme or desperation or self-sabotage
or all three
utterly disturbed and 
bloody barefoot on the high wire yet driven to 
experimental expressions: write revise send
blah blah blah
there it goes…..

twas a fugue performance 
reprimanded by a tweet announcing the winners
– their names acupuncture needles lifting the memory of the words 
from deeply tensed muscles pushed together to form another layer of loss
I forget to feel until I feel it again and again

these repetitious fizzles
negate each tiny recovery
it’s better to forget
to keep beginning again
to let layers leaven like sweet bread

Poem 206 – Olympics I

Olympics I

olympics on the flat screen
stay on like the air conditioner
we pretend we are commentators
curl into giddy laughter at our
stream-of-consciousness comedy
discover we are bad at saying last names

I eat cucumbers slathered in hummus
while teen girls tear across a bouncy floor
flip like parlor rollers & single starlings

then a 46-year-old woman explodes
off the vault in a feat named after her
we are silenced – awed
standing ovations whisk her
into a new future
a different kind of flying

Poem 205 – Double Haiku for 205 Poems

Double Haiku for 205 Poems

Less to write than I’ve already written (10)
Some days pulling words out of my mind mouth I wish for gas (14)
The laughing kind – kind laughter helps me write (10)

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY GERTRUDE’S WRITING ROOM!

HAPPY THREE YEAR ANNIVERSARY to Gertrude’s Writing Room! To commemorate this most excellent celebration, we open the submission call for our next anthology. We welcome special guest editor, Irene Moore Davis, a long-time member of the writing room family! Irene and I are thrilled to read and select your amazing poems! Yes, this open submission call is for poetry! The theme is COMMUNITY.

For all the juicy submission guideline details, please CLICK HERE!

Please tell all your friends! Write your hearts out!

Poem 204 – What She’s Doing To Me

What She’s Doing To Me

“I know the days are offering me only murder for my future.” pg. 5, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

She comes at me in a flurry of assaulting adjectives
She whips adverbs like wet switches on the shadows of my skin
the tender spots that don’t get attention and don’t want it anyway

This language of hers: a frothing devastation superfluous with
the slow death of the dagger-dressed hallways of cursed love

I’ve been there – crawling twisted & torn
shucked like a slimy oyster
my pearl crammed in the tear duct
of an eye that never weeps

She drags me in the tunnel
panting & pleading punctuating its walls
with the cruel voice of silence that speaks
in dread & deadly desire

Look what she is doing to me!
Sabotaging the foggy joy
in this dirty-cotton-sky day
piercing holes in the deeply buried
pandoras of my past

She tells me – openly
needingly about love that lives to kill her
how she bows into its halitosis mouth
because she has no choice & I have
no choice but to honour her turbulent torture

We are swaddled in each other’s extraordinary
expressions of literary excavations
It’s excruciating

and I’m only on page twenty-three
I’m burning
What will be left of me?
Of us?

Thank you, Jane Christmas, for recommending I read Smart’s books/writing. This poem is dedicated to you…and Elizabeth.

Poem 203 – To Trains & First Impressions Event Tonight

To trains

to trains
to moving mysteries that roam
whilst roaming
to blurry scenery & the romance
of not knowing the next
tongue you’ll taste
to old fantasies that fatten
like scar tissue
to blank pages & pink ink
blending into poetry
to the country of sky
you hold up each day
to evening thunderstorms
that surprise & scare

to breaking & breathing
to sobbing & sleeping
to wild nights with Emily
& kinship with dead writers
who never really die

to the damn bigness of tiny moments
to everything & everyone
to trains
to tracks
to leaving & returning
until the place & the person
becomes your blood

TONIGHT! Youth Poet Laureate Event on Facebook Live!

REGISTER HERE!

Join in for the first talk in the First Impressions series with local Windsor youth poets Alexei Ungurenaşu and Serafina Piasentin! 7pm on Facebook live at the Museum Windsor page.

Poem 202 – Playing Store

Playing Store

In the fourplex living room
hauling hardcover books, mom’s shoes, stuffed animals, tape cassettes, bags, candles, picture frames, notepads, jewelry, Cabbage Patch kids, sticker books, lunch pails –
using Monopoly money, found pennies & nickels & dimes,
blank bank forms paper thin like dreams,
and a Fisher Price plastic cash register
that beeped sadly, intermittently, its battery
corroding with age.

The best gig was cashier
pushing buttons, doing fake math, taking money, giving change, packing grocery bags
with purchased items to be immediately
placed back on sofa cushion & coffee table displays.

Oh, the hours of satisfied play
the therapy of shopping
then the surprising weight
of putting it all away
ending empty handed
that paper thin dream of
superfluous spending
of feeling rich
lifting up up up
like breath exhalations
blown from sugary lips
after candy cigarette breaks
on the shared balcony.