Post-Dated Checks

[scraps]

I don't mind writing these, if you don't mind not cashing them.

March

1. The Big One
2. Hometown Shopping
3. Imagists
4. Hair Brain
5. Wind Trading

February

1. Dead Names
2. Space Widow
3. Lossy
4. Escapism
5. Growing Out of It
6. What a beautiful and/or wonderful day
7. What's the difference

January

1. A Giant Among the Orange Pickers
2. Pastoral Care
3. Precocity
4. Five-Year Plan
5. H O L L Y W O O D
6. A Deer in Love with an Asteroid

December

1. Weak Ending
2. Trouble with Tenses
3. Boring First Lines
4. Refusal to Transcend
5. Over-Associating
6. Sex Stuff

November

1. Friendship
2. Devotion
3. Summer
4. Gratitude
5. Praise
6. This Rain
7. With My Back to the World

September

1. I've always been late to flowers
2. A Higher Power
3. klienderencese
4. I've been watching myself
5. Pretending to be somewhere

July

1. The complexity of simple tasks

May

1. Informational Alchemy
2. Fordlândia
3. Part II
4. Part III

March

1. Pronouncement
2. Pareidolia
3. Thursday A.M.
4. [Two Found Poems Spliced Together]
5. Humans Pay Good Money to Die on Mountain
6. Accumulated Interest


February

1. After a Period of Deforestation
2. Recent Events
3. Indoor Skydiving
4. Dying Old
5. Compromise
6. In the Many Cities of America Named Cairo
7. This Morning's Wordle Poem


January

1. A Hopeful Monster
2. Long John Silver's Restaurant
3. long gone rain
4. winter cleaning
5. At great personal cost,
6. Melissa, Texas
7. Dilation

December

1. fear, gore
2. offal
3. dysmorphosis
4. Blown
5. Mastering the Art of French Cooking
6. mother heart
7. mother night


June

1. There was no Internet and
2. Super Power
3. Potential
4. Manifest
5. 3D Chess
6. Nonverbal Cues
7. settling in


May

1. Nothing secedes like success
2. Passion in the face of the impassive face
3. A window remembers everyone
4. Hustled
5. You weren't supposed to see this
6. or anyone.
7. To all the daughters

March

1. The Ambidextrous Billionaire
2. Vacate and Vacation
3. .
4. What is the weight of absence?
5. Brood X
6. Vacuum
7. Kleptocracy

February

1. Looking Back on Desire
2. Miss Reading
3. Polygraphy
4. 1 of 6 Times by Antony Gormley
5. Key Words
6. Bad Plum
7. Also Rans

January

1. pear pressure
2. lat/longing
3. body:
4. Scratch Burns the Black Ark Down
5. Up and Adam
6. Space Travel: Cheap
7. Early Memory

[scraps]

pear pressure

gangrenous green sky
comma butterfly
scutters by

they keep asking for your alibi
but what we have they call — lullaby

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

Clever play on words in the title and throughout. Keeping to a mono-rhyme can be tough in English (I've tried the same thing on occasion), but it works well here almost as an aside to the wordplay and surrealistic mood.

BrianIs AtYou

[philip john]

Hello scraps,
A fantasy nonsense poem?

Perhaps, some of the lines can be shortened, for a more consistent form.

gangrenous sky
comma butterfly
scutters by

asking for your alibi
but all we have
they call 'lullaby'

keep on keeping on.............Philip

[JFN]

Steve, "pear pressure" made me laugh as a title. I like this as a simple image of butterflies around a pear tree, and I like the ending, but oddly I found the monorhyme a little distracting. It has been a long day though, so might just be me.

Looking forward to more.

John

[Scrow]

Hi Steve, and Happy New Year,

I like your comma butterfly/scutters - nice dissonance and subversion of expected sounds. I'd love to see the metaphor of insects as punctuation explored more, too - fab idea.

Sarah

[drumpf]

pear pressure - The alleged criminal has time to daydream. Quite a perspective I deserves to be expounded upon. The haiku is like an intro of sorts. Is the criminal reading words in the sky, hence the butterflies as commas? How are these words occurring, from his input or from out there?

[scraps]

Thanks for stopping by and reading - I really appreciate it!

[scraps]

lat/longing


I think about the places that I leave people.

I leave my mother in her house —
now whenever I imagine her, she shows up there.

She wants to wander the halls, but there are no halls.
As soon as she starts to pace, she is in the bathroom.

She’s divided her life into Upstairs and Downstairs —

There are Downstairs things:
the laundry - the television - the door to outside.

There are Upstairs things:
the telephone - my old room - the boxes

of books, stacked on my bed,
almost the exact weight
of my teenaged body when I left.


I leave my son in his car —
across the country - in a parking lot - smoking.

I think it is a Target -
he is parked way out from the other cars,
the window rolled down, his long arm dangling outside,
the dark hair on his arm brushing the door,

his phone in his other hand -
me inside the phone.


I leave my grandmother, long since passed,
just a titch on the other side of

38.563395940964796, -76.07255093750774 —
the closest point Google Street View will allow me to visit.

From the road
I zoom as close as I can to her front door
until I press the wrong arrow
and I’m left looking at the sky above her house again.

I try to peer around the side of the house
and hope to catch her by her tomato plants,
the floppy brim of a sun hat covering her eyes,
her head tilted to the dirt,
thinking of me.

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

Hey Steve

Good to see you here again. Great title on the first one. I like the double read on "comma" (especially after I double-checked that the "comma butterfly" is a thing). The close makes me think the N is falling asleep watching comma butterflies on a pear tree, and the "they" just don't understand his indolence.

lat/longing. I really like this one. The three people parked in the N's memory (as well as in their various physical locations), each one in turn holding on to a part of him: the box of books with the weight of his teenage body, the phone with him in it, and the grandmother thinking of him. Love the suggestion of Google maps as an afterlife.

-Matt

[drumpf]

lat/longing - Interesting concept. Using negative space in ways. I like where the poem ends, it definitely needed an emotional texture.

[Sorella]

Steve,
Nothing is as delicate and enticing a fruit as the pear, its fragrance, its taste, the subtle colour mix (OK, the s h a p e is on the plump & heavy side!) ---

and the commas -- this one is inspired-- the lovely sonics of alibi and lullaby, the contrast in meaning, in worlds --
genius!

Best read for weeks.

Sorella

[scraps]

Hi Sorella,

Thanks for stopping by! How can you not love a pear? Even when I hear the saying, 'It's all gone pear shaped', I giggle to myself.

Steve

[scraps]

Looking Back on Desire

The lion’s kind brown eyes glow outside
the window.

You spent so long making sure your suit
coat was straight and perfect but when
you stood the wrinkles were deep and you
unaware.

And the days I spent thinking about kissing
your belly; the rest of your body a country
i feared to visit.

I’m helpless as an elephant swinging
from a helicopter flying through the dark.

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

Hey Steve,

Good to see you back for February. You've broken your one Sevens every seven years pattern, but I think that's a good thing.

Not sure I'm wholly getting this one, but I've enjoyed thinking about it. I'm wondering if this is looking back on desire from the viewpoint of age. The 'you' is deeply wrinkled despite what the 'you' does with their coat. And maybe the lion is desire, and has left the building?

Matt