Light, the Pope, his Toe and the Afterlife: Two Poems written along with my students in Poetry Class

The Pope, his Toe and the Afterlife

everything you say is bleeped out by birdsyou threaten some guy on the ISIS listserveand all he hears is chickensbut it’s ok, all of ISIS sounds like chickadee-dee-dee
what does the Pope say when he stubs his toe?(lets get back to that later)when two continents collide, it sounds like blackbirdsand the bomb that destroyed my village is a hummingbird
even these words are incomprehensible the entire poem, hollow-boned, hoveringI live by the light of the new philosophy and all that can be heard is squawks
and maybe it’s not what the Pope says but what his parrot says when Papa stubs his toewas is it? that’s easy, the same thing as the Pope:Soon, goddammit, this’ll all be cloud



Light
A form of darkness that isn’t visible. 
Here’s how. Imagine it’s not your eyelids, but the rest of you which opens. Where? Close. You’re always close. If there are colours beyond the visible spectrum, ultraviolet, infrared, there are other forms of dark. Colour is fast sound just as sound is slow colour. Silence creeps like sunlight on your skin, and you aged eight, lying in the garden, and your mother calls from the side door, come inside soon it’ll all be gone.

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The above are two more poems that I wrote as my students wrote in creative writing class. The first one is based on David McGimpsey's "chubby sonnets" and inspired by his investigations into narrative, the self, and popular culture.

The second was inspired by Bhanu Kapil's interventions into the Urban Dictionary where she inserts her own poetic, obliquely narrative "definitions" into UrbanDictionary.com.