Hello/Welcome to the Gather forum of Borders Open-Door Poetry. As one of the show's grateful, giddy co-creators, I'm tempted to give you my blissed-out marathon cartwheel tour of the each episode's every literary epiphany. But I won't. With this line-up of transformative poets, I know the epiphanies will just find you. What might not find you, however, without a little doting nudge, is your own inner poet. I know it ain't easy to ignore the tittering critics, the self-doubt loops, the chronic naysayers, but here's your doting nudge: Wrap a pretty fuchsia bow around all those collective harrumphs and bid them bye-bye, even if it's just for 60 seconds of free-writing.
Your honed poems are still welcome here (and also welcome in our show's free poetry contest judged by Billy Collins), but so too are your whirring observations, conversational accounts, disjointed visions, grammar-addled ramblings, and absolutely anything that can be expressed in one free-writing minute. 60 seconds. Give or take whatever seconds you can give or take without hesitating to write. Consider it just an exercise - a little judgment-free jumpstart to get our pens/keyboards moving. Try not to edit or judge or jump off the hypercritical deep-end. Celebrate the act of attempted expression. Pulitzer prize-worthy? Perhaps; perhaps not. But heroic nonetheless. It's inertia toppled. And believe me: Words beget words. Writing is kinetic. Say something and the next somethings will come easier, until enough somethings are said that, who knows, the beginning of your Pulitzer Prize-winner may reveal itself.
For now, it's Pulitzer-less me and I'm sticking to one free-writing minute of this:
My heater clicks at me like a stout, tattered, faux-silver Swahili-speakin lunar rescue robot ushering me to safety. "Go this way and that way," he clicks and sputters. "I'll take care of everything."
Candice is the first name I think of, more for candy's penny memories, I'm sure, than for a long-lost girlfriend named Candice who I've never met.
15 more seconds left says: curricular, candela, ephemeral, clandestine, comaraderie....Camaraderie? Camaraderie. Friends are friends however they're spelled.
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Structure. Routine. Plans. Deadlines. Time sliced into neat pieces. What would it feel like to break out, run amock, see, feel, dream, be, act outside of the grid, outside of the schedule so neatly fit into 24 hours of life?? Life... who dictates all this? How did life become this grid? Life. There is something about saying the word LIFE... living, live, life. It makes me want to rip up the grid or draw beautiful bright colors of swirly doodles all over it and then breath in the air that I toss it up into letting out a whoop of release and freedom...
I vy-league gawking
J bird blues
K Fed scuttlebutt
Or maybe I just need another cup of coffee.
landing in the street, stepped on and left to rot and other,
gathered up as a mother shelters a new born;
an artist covering a piece
not quite finished
but soon, soon
and the light of truth will tell
i'm not at borders, would starbuck's do?
And thanks, EVERYONE, for your many courageous freewrites. Please keep em comin.
... keep em comin 'round the mountain-ous terrain, the precarious crevasses, the word blocks stacked skyward and other myriad blockades, brigades, brocades. Even pretty things procrastinate. So freewrite past them. Jagged seas get pleased when poetry runs freely until it reigns, until words stream serenely, until terrines...turreens?...tureens of poetry pour like long-awaited rain into the parched and pursed, penurious, Serengeti plain.
The way change sounds you would think there would always be more of it, more for the bus ride or the laundromat, appearing from the black the way change happens – everything dark in one moment and then windfall, a conversation misinterpreted and then you're in Rhode Island, two days later, not knowing how you traversed four hundred miles or afforded gas money or how you found the Motel-6 where you're spending your last quarter on a vibrating bed you thought only existed in movies, and you certainly don't know why the highway lights – popping on one by one like flares, like a motorist's flat tire every quarter mile – can make the room look complete, can work some alchemy to change the air and the smoke of your last cigarette from its invisible ever-present canopy into a tincture of cloudy tap water and pale amber beer.
I'm aching, aching to write, to explain the real me, the way my mind works, gives me fantasies of the truth, tells me like it is, helps me hear other people's words, wisdom, Oh, I stopped to look baCK AND I'm not supposed to do that, it's all in the words, all in the keyboards ability to keep u[p with my thoughts, my fingers to tap like there is no next minute, far less tomorrow, because, who knows, there may not be a tomorrow, but there is another minute so I'm OK to keep typing like ...another word escapes me, so I take a chance and rejoin my thought till I think the minute might be up and I think I'll stop.
Tomorrow, I'll try for longer!
While my fingers work as well as they always have, finding the right keys almost effortlessly, my brain has not kept up. My fingers pause and wait, lightly tapping... come on, come on, they encourage you can do it. SAY SOMETHING NEW, something beautiful, something poetic. My mind yawns and withdraws... wordless and pathetic.
And that's why the novel sits unfinished and the 2007 poetry file contains only six poems and the research for the new novel is only a few hours and a few pages long.
waiting for another one
sun up too soon
turn off the tv, quit speaking to me
what's up with the moon?
full, then crying for another chance
The chase is on, but so is your favorite song. And a tightrope wire sprinter gets a splinter in his heart. And the viper absorbs winter with a bottle and a spark.
The lack of words,
spoken softly still have meaning.
I give up trying.
But never leaving you,
but still I hear your words.
Your words with out sound.
In a space of a heart beat,
nothing needs to be said.
Words, words, thoughtrush
Gathered here haphazzardly.
Sporting your Tatoos
and looking happy,
Here I am turning grey and wrinkley and
looking for myself in you.
The page can't stay empty for long, see the firecracker is keeping score today. Just like a lit fuse calls the pissed muse. And hauls the editor in for a talking to. But the writer needs to break the lines. Start, caution, finish.
who was known for having quite light feet.
She donned some gold shoes,
hoping to dance away her blues,
But found her toes and her *ss shook to quite different beats.
Amazing
Here I am, a Viet Vet, MFA, retired
etc and I love writing
and loving writing I started a writing workshop
at Borders 7 make that seven years ago
a cultural contribution,
overflow participants, buying customers
and as a reward I was told, Borders Open Door Poetry
is not for me. Is not for me. Is not for me.
I wonder if Borders after banning writers this year
will ban readers next year
Amazing Chas P.
An episodic poem this is
and I am trying to figure why
the world is full of such contemptuous
lies or is it BS. Is there a difference?
Borders Open Door Policy...don't believe it
chas p
Rum raisons are for ice cream and dates for Roman tarts,
but fresh figs --
fingerlingerlou --
bring sweet sweet joy to my Italian heart.
The music tunes out Time
from our imagination
to the intention
of the rhythm
in sync beyond
profane seconds
trapped within
mundane ways
and hours we
forget when
a tune resounds
like a spiritual ritual
our souls must digest
for nourishment
or die.
Off the top of my head. Hmmm. . .what do you think?