Fun with find/replace

There is a rwp prompt for next week based on a lovely, and evocative photo of two pomegranates

My first impulse was to write something involving Persephone, who had some mythic difficulties involving the fruit, and I woke up at three AM and wound up writing over 500 words of something slightly better than garbage, but not much.  So, I’m still thinking, but while I do, here is a little bit of

HOW TO EAT A POEM(A-GRANATE)

Poems are quite delicious and can be used in a variety of recipes.

The trickiest part is learning how to eat them… or more to the point,

learning how to prepare them for eating.

Some grocery chains now offer the words in a ready-to-eat state.

Purchasing poems this way costs more,

but the convenience is well worth the extra money.

The biggest problem is the juice.

Poems juice can easily stain your hands,

clothing and countertops,

if you aren’t careful.

(Because of these staining issues,

many poem lovers choose to only eat them at home.

Some will go so far as to suggest they only be enjoyed,

while relaxing in a hot bath.)

Many people claim that the easiest way to eat a poem

is to score the verses multiple times

and then soak the words in a bowl of water, for up to 10 minutes.

Because they will float, it is best to weigh them down, slightly.

After the words have gone through this soaking process,

the emotions will pull away from the imagery

(or meaning, as it is referred to)

relatively easy.

Remember, the poems should remain in the water, while peeling.

Once peeled, pour off the water.

Since the images are heavier than the emotions,

they will remain on the bottom of the bowl… for the most part.

The emotions will drain away with the water.

At this point, it is very simple

to retrieve the images from the bowl and eat as desired.

They are extremely yummy just by themselves.

A second way to eat poems is similar to the first

in the respect that a bowl of water is needed.

Score the words several times and then cut or break into fourths.

Hold each quarter over the bowl and hit the verse side,

firmly, with the back of a large spoon.

After the meanings fall into the bowl,

follow the remaining steps as mentioned above.

Poem imagery can be safely stored in the refrigerator

or even frozen, for later use.

However, these words are so delicious

that they are most often consumed in one setting.

Have you eaten YOUR poems, today?

(most words borrowed from:

http://pomegranateinformation.com/pomegranate/how-to-eat-a-pomegranate/  )

Not much to say, recovery is slow.
Turkeyturkeyturkeywinewinewine

windwindwind

Playing with family pics

Had to add Glenn, since he didn’t come

along for a few more years.  Just don’t

have any pictures with all of us.

In writing, one way of explaining things about a character without going into his thought processes is to describe his surroundings.  A room with a bed, a lamp a dresser shows one thing; a room with a bed, lamp, dresser, wilted plant–that is something else. It can be an especially useful device if the object of the scene is to have the character discover something about himself.  We have seen the outward manifestations of his state, but he hasn’t.

Of course, it’s not mathematics:  you can’t count on the formal symbols of centuries past.  There was once a “language of flowers” so precise that a young woman’s little doily wrapped nosegay might as well have been a billboard to announce her interests and availability.  Beyond a red rose for passionate love, not much of that remains.   We recognize the meanings for a dove or a lamb, but would you or I place a peacock in a scene to imply immortality?  Or a stork for piety and chastity?  Still, if we don’t have the clarity of historic symbology, we have more flexibility.  The things we introduce to define the character’s state of mind are specific to that person, and as anyone who watches forensic mysteries can tell you, the scene is a narrative of the person as well as the act.

That said, we have company from out of town on the way, and I need to hide my thoughts.

Dana, at rwp has posted a different sort of challenge.  She suggests a little exercise in prose.  An essay, or rather two.  One truth, the other written as if it were.  Her examples were clever, and had a weird beauty to them, especially if you think of  in the sand as sad and lovely, no matter how many toes show up.

It made me want to try my hand.  Those who know the difference here are disqualified from guessing, but ought to try their own.

I once discovered that losing weight makes walking feet less prone to tripping, however gaining weight improves the standing stability.  Even ballanced on one foot, a sturdy woman withstands the buffetting of life.  I assumed it was my trifocals that made the world seem out of focus, but losing weight changed my perspective for a while.  I suspect too many cookies and chocolate stout bread puddings may be behind my recent fall.

I bought a hand mirror at the Goodwill where the drug store used to be at Main and Eastland.  It was small and fit inside a plastic sleeve, like something someone had a product or service name on as a giveaway.  When I pulled it out to clean, I blew on the mirror, the way you do before wiping your glasses, and in the fog, this appeared:
smile.

Odd, I can spend five hours lost in details:  just how big is a lard stand?  what’s the proper ratio of eggs to meal in cornbread?  what’s the difference between fried pies made with sweet dried winter fruit and summer fresh ones?

And in that time forget whether or not I remembered to have breakfast.  Concentration’s an amazing thing, if not FDA approved to substitute for meals, and time spent wandering around in a fog is not to be confused with exercise

Of course, any sane person would realize you can’t be thinking about biscuits with thick home cured bacon and blackberry jam, or fried pies oozing peaches without your growling stomach frightening the neighbor kids if you haven’t had at least a little something.  Evidently yogurt laced with honey has a lot of staying power

If not, I couldn’t even watch this film (caveat:  not one for those who like their cooks and kitchens on the pristine side)

Rita and Mike coming in for Thanksgiving.  Long drive for a short visit.  I think they’ll be spending longer on the road in each direction than the duration of the visit.  Maybe not quite.  I’m reminded that I still haven’t sent Jo and Eric their wedding present.  I’m going to have to spend the gift card myself before it expires, and get another for them.  And those clever little newlywed extras are not quite so clever six months into the marriage.  Such a–what would be the proper word?  Procrastinator doesn’t touch it.

We’ve waited a bit late on deciding where to go for dinner Thursday, and that may mean trouble.  Glenn’s working on the place in Union Station, which is supposed to be  good.  Their bar gets great reviews, but I haven’t heard that much about the dining room itself.  The place is beautiful, though, and was re-done again about a year ago.  Nice history.  And right across the street from their motel, just to make it handy.  Of course it’s not a shoe in.  We may wind up standing in line to get into Monel’s.  Which beats the hell out of standing in line to get into Cracker B.

I’m running behind on my poems. Today’s supposed to be an “emergency” poem.  See if I can come up with something tolerable, and preferably something that will revise well.

“emergency entrance”

the dim dawn startled her
like walking into daylight
from a movie matinée
time playing tricks again
she stumbled over nothing
caught herself and stayed
upright, too tired to fall
with none of the raw fear
that brought her here
all adrenaline and energy
departed hours ago.
She thought a little wryly
it would be too much
to fall and crack her empty
head after all those hours
and finding nothing wrong.
She still felt like a fool
no matter what they said
a little joke better wrong
to think you’re dying than
wrong to think you’re not.
The clerk who checked her in
was leaving fumbling in
her purse and pulling out
a pack of cigarettes.  The
man who mopped the
floor around her feet
while she waited hours ago
was waiting at the bus stop,
and an ambulance was
drifting in, no siren on,
no rush.  And she had
an urge to call someone
and say I’m still alive.

quickly now,  about INVENTION

invention

needs

intention

(and:  parts)

.

and that, as I see it, is the truth

Okay.  I blew it.  Didn’t post on Thursday, and as 6central, I’m suspecting that it isn’t still thursday much of anywhere.  I first thought that, well, I can throw a link to my poetry blog, that one got stumbledupon or something yesterday and garnered triple it’s usual hits which I thought was pretty cool.  Only I see the postmark on that entry was from the day before.

I did post comments on some other blogs (she mumbled, sullenly, and under her breath)  As if:  oh, I loved your choice of words! and nice variation on the prompt could even be considered as comments.  That’s more like a verbal sneeze.

(the thought crossed through that thing I call my mind that I could have pre-generated some text, set it on “scheduled” and let it post itself, and thereby fulfilled the letter if not the spirit.  ain’t that the dorky idea.  there’s no prize, no penalty.  IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SPIRIT.  duh)

So, once again I have flopped at an unbearably simple task:  writing something to the web.  Nope.  I’m good and proper flubbed.  I was on facebook, playing farmer.  feeding fake clover to phoney cows does not constitute blogging.

Even my dreams are trying to pull one over.  I went to bed thinking of a way to manage the chapbook part of the PAD Chapbook Challenge, which is the part that means putting together a poem manuscript of works written this month to their prompts.  Now, I’ve been writing every day, but a whale of a lot of it isn’t fit for consumption, and even with revision to the point of throw it in the trash and start over, not all that good.  So I’m considering using the remainder of the month to reconsider my methodology.

All right, cheat.

I was going to look back at the prompts and find one or two of my poems that worked and come up with a theme, then re-do the flops in accordance with that.  After all, it would have been done within the month, and thereby within the rules, if not the spirit.

So, I’m drifting off and considering themes, preferably nice big loose ones.  Yesterday’s prompt was to write something about attachments, and I still hadn’t finished that one, was thinking about that and maybe the next rwp which is a thanksgivingly thought about food and its associations.  (it is so satisfying to hit two with one) HOME comes up and seems genius.  There follows a period in which I’m doing the construction thing.  Sometimes I build things as I drift off:  furniture, room designs, characters, ecosystems, philosophies.  They all seem brilliant at the time and rarely translate into anything that could be turned concrete.

Last night it was the structure for the book of poems.  I could visualize it , all nice and neat and looking pretty on a page, the mock-up to be filled in later with actual poems.  Went so far as to include little illustrations.

Realized this morning that at some point in there I had crossed the line into sleep.  Those illustrations:  (lil)farm life  app from facebook.

ahat’s not rite. jest not rite

[this is a ps by way of preface:  (lest I forget, I have a poemish project in contention) inserted later in an even less appropriate place and stuck up here out of convenience and my accustomed lack of style and grace]

Good God Thanksgiving is NEXT WEEK!  All the Christmas ads that began the week before Halloween have got me royally messed up. We have company due in a week, and I have not begun to clean the house.  Not begun, and this will require a shovel and a box of big black bags or maybe two.  We have made a move or two toward looking into reservations (no, no, no I am not cooking).  I believe I may be freaking out.  Pause.  Deep breath.

Do not think about the novel.  NaNoWriMo’s just a game.  So it’s day 18 and you have slightly more than three day’s worth of words, so what?  You have FIVE THOUSAND (and many more-odd) WORDS.  Some of them are even good ones.  Yesterday you wrote:

long gliding steps parting the market crowd as smoothly as if a wind before her blew them gently from her path

which isn’t at all bad, and:

he caught from the folds of her robe or the deep dry crevasses of her skin the sharp smell of cracked green _____seed

I like that nineteenth Century effect the (blank) has.  Maybe I should use that more, and not only when I can’t come up with the appropriate word.

It’s becoming more than obvious that if I ever write a novel, it is not going to be a blitzkrieg joy of caffeine word binge.   However much fun that can be, it will not work for me again.  Damn that is hard to admit.  Like saying I don’t like being drunk any more, it does mean I have changed and might be growing up.  Hell of an admission for someone my age, and that’s a fact.

Truth to tell, I haven’t even had the kind of concentration and release of control it takes to READ a novel for some time.  It may be that in coming back to poetry I’m accepting myself or something equally sensible and life-altering.   I am not dreaming about novels and their characters, I am dreaming about poems.

.

Anyone who has a low tolerance for other people’s prosy dreams should stop here.  This, while chock full of irony, is bland and rather terrifyingly dull and straightforward, but I want to get it down and out and out of the way, because it needs to be done.

By way of preface, and every dream retelling needs a bit of that, I have not been sleeping well lately.  Blame it on what you will, (I choose too much caffeine and a sensitivity to strong dark chocolate; insufficient exercise is not to be considered) it has been over a week of short sleep or nothing nights.  And I was expecting the same thing again, sleepiness and a jolt of waking lasting through a nodding night.

Different this time, thankfully.  Just past midnight, having managed to transcribe the previous morning’s bit of novel, I was smashed up side the head with sleepiness.  And a trace of itchy throat.  I downed a Benadryl genera and crashed.

Not even Jim’s–irregular–snoring kept me awake entirely.  I drifted in and out, and only twice nudged him to roll over (he seldom makes noises lying on his right).  This is for me a good night’s sleep.  Only getting up once for the bathroom.  Major triumph of the Zee.

In there somewhere, there was as I remember now some sort of vaguely medico-sexual dream (which may carry through to later) involving draining a cyst or something on those lines, standing vaginal insertion notwithstanding, the theme was pain and lack of pain and the healing done by violence.  Some sort of meta-metaphor.

(at this point, my morning note says:  wrote a poem)

so:  wrote a poem.

Jim was gone from bed, and I assume from the house, since it was light, and he has been leaving in the dark as often as not, and on Wednesday when he has students at the hospital, almost certainly it would be dark.  So, I woke and felt like I’d been flattened by one of those road paving rollers always doing in the Wiley Coyote and other hapless cartoons..  I was mildly amused, thinking that sleep had been so hard on my joints, so strenuous.  Thought about having been frozen in one posture for hours by muscles too tired to move.

And a poem began forming about exhausted sleep.  It was short and dense,  ending with a long barreled needle drawing the words out of my belly, and I thought  “oh shit, here I go again writing in my mind and not on paper”.  Looked at the clock on Jim’s night table and saw that it was almost eight.

I considered all the things involved in getting up and writing.  I didn’t feel the need to pee, and thought that was a bit unusual.  Almost sidetracked by that thought, I began reconstructing the poem.  I was aware it wasn’t quite as good as the first, unwritten, version, but I reached the end/words/needle (such a long one to go through the bellyfat).  And woke up again.

Looked at the clock and saw that it was turned away, at an angle making it impossible to read, and even that had been a dream.

Of the poem that required a lancing to give it birth, I don’t remember more than that it was short, and dense with meaning and the needle was steel and long.

Marie thought I might need a laugh, and sent a stack of comics designed to elicit the rueful smile or two.

Some did and some did not, and that’s the way of things like that–nothing clicks with everyone.  Like horseshoes, though, leaners do count.  I got a chuckle out of one or two, but one of them was way too true (rhyme unintended)