PAD CHALLENGE, April 30

The last prompt: "Farewell"

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT
We are the ones
who say goodbye to all that,
the latest stomach aches
from eating too many sweets,
blood on our calves
from walking through briars in the field,
the lonely echoes and dead sparks
inside these bodies we live in.
Goodbye to all that.
We are so alive and so afriad

PAD CHALLENGE, April 29

Prompt: "Never"

NEVER THINK OF PRAYER
Never think of prayer
as an obligation.
Pray to your confusion.
Ask that you not be felled
by sinister thoughts
of obliteration.
Pray not to become,
only to be.
The world is visible.
Pray to see.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 28

Prompt: "Sestina"

SEND ME

If you love me, send me to Avalon
Send me, else my spirit go down
Send me, knowing I’ll never come back
If you love me, let my body be forgotten
Let it be the empty space in all your houses
If you love me, send me to the land of apples

All life begins with the taste of apples
They grow no better than at Avalon
From their taste grow the strongest houses
Houses in which we will never fall down
In which the best in us is never forgotten
Spirit made of apples has the strongest back

For my journey I will stiffen this human back
Already in my mouth is the taste of apples
Spirit red, spirit green and gold, never forgotten
I’ll find my spirit in the orchards of Avalon
And there I’ll freely tear my body down
I must make space for the spirit houses

I want to live in the spirit houses
Send me, I want to never look back
The body does what it does, goes down
The body falls like the ripe apples
Fall in the land of Avalon
Where spirit is not forgotten

What I really am, you’ve already forgotten
My spirit has had no place in your houses
If you love me, let me go to Avalon
If you love me, let me go back
I know I can only live with apples
Let me go before my spirit falls down

Already my spirit is falling down
But something in me hasn’t forgotten
My tongue still remembers the taste of apples
In dreams I look out windows of spirit houses
If you love me, let me go back
Back to apples and back to Avalon

I will journey to Avalon and be light as down
I won’t be back; I’m glad my body will be forgotten
Give me spirit houses, give me the sharp taste of apples.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 27

Prompt: "Longing"

LONGING
The cafe,six in the morning.
He tears toast into tiny pieces.
When somebody
else comes in, he looks up
from his plate.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 26

Prompt: "Miscommunication"

CONFERENCE
It was Fall semester, near
Christmas, and the rain
was turning to icethat was going tick-tick-
tick on the windows.

He was telling me about the day
his dog was hit by a car
and the dog was not
dead, but suffering.
I only wanted to get home,
which was forty miles
away on country roads
untouched by salt
trucks or plows.

He was telling me how he
had to do the manly thing.
Only now do I realize the
importance of the story.
He had taken the gun from its
proper place.
The dog could not have understood
what this farm boy
was there to do.

He was there to shoot her,
he was telling me, and she licked his damned hand.
We say our animals understand us.
She could not have understood
why the gun was about to go off, and
it was because he loved her.
I only wanted to go home.
Ice hit the windows.
For a moment that was the only sound.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 25

Prompt: "Event"

MENTAL EVENTS

Our lives are important.

We cannot predict tomorrows or todays.

Our condition is a cosmic tragedy and
cannot be improved.

Our lives are hideous and amazing.

We cannot be giving away our hearts just
to be stepped on.

Our lives are too short.

The easiest way to find something you
have lost is to buy a new one.

Our lives are changed forever.

We cannot be giving away...
We cannot be giving away...

Our lives are ours alone.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 24

Prompt: "Travel"

I won't be posting my poem for April 24 here or at Facebook. It is too closely related to the work I'm doing on my novel and I'm not ready to make it completely public yet.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 23

Prompt: "Regret"

THE ABSENT SIBLINGS
I used to speak of them
as though I was the lucky one,
the one who survived nine months
in the mother's belly,
the one who lived to eat
chocolate, have sex before
marriage, marry, and have children
of my own who I imagined would
be tiny replicas of myself.

My absent siblings never died;
they were lives which
never happened.
When did that change?
When did I give each a face?
One a sister
who would have saved me
the other a brother
who would have sent roses
on my birthday

There's a wound now,
and luck has nothing to
do with my life.
Now I must learn
to live without them.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 22

Prompt: "Work"

NIGHT WORK
is when my goatish self
becomes my sleek cat self
no more nibbling at garbage and grass...
night work is blood work.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 21

Prompt: "Write a Haiku"

Deer standing in field--
I long to touch it, but why?
Way to forgiveness.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 20

Prompt: "Rebirth Poem"

A REBIRTH POEM
should be easy to write
but not today
when I am undone
by the simplest thing:
It's raining, the
car won't start,
and I've someplace
important to go.

My husband
tells me each disaster
is simply the price
for breathing.

It's April,
the same month
my mother died.
It was ten years ago.
When they told me
I noticed the
trees were just
getting their leaves.
I remember thinking,
She would have liked this.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 19

Prompt: "Anger/Angry poem"

LIGHTNESS
Anger should not rule us.
Let Death rule.
Go to a junk yard or cemetery
& resurrect.
Fill the sky with lightness,
wise Knights in rusty armor,
little animals that
tunnel in the dark,
lips & eyes, lungs breathing
ever more gently.

(I think when I revise this I may say "little animals that tunnel patiently in the dark)

PAD CHALLENGE, April 18

Prompt: "Interaction"

STARMAN
We no longer have the old gods
to birth us to wonder.
Movie characters change us in small ways.
We cry in the dark where no one sees us.

Give us the being of pure light
who will visit us from a star unknown
become like us, suffer the needs this body has
for sex and Dutch apple pie.

We seem to have the galaxy to ourselves.
When the beloved dies there are no second chances.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 17

Prompt: "All I Want Is..."

All I WANT
is to sit in my yard today and every day
watch the cats go down to the pond one
by one to take a drink.

All I want is to walk past the brown
leaves collected in the old glass
bowl left outside the door this winter
hear the blackbird on the limb
ruffle its feathers and call
hear the other one answer
from a far part of the yard

All I want is to be there when the frogs
let loose the whirring in their throats
and then stay silent a long time
turn and see my husband looking at me
say to him I'm not much to look at
hear him say Speak for yourself
say You're stuck with me
hear him say That's music to my ears
Peel an orange
throw the rind by the busy
mound of ants

PAD CHALLENGE, April 16

Prompt: "color"

SEEING RED
I'm seeing red today
my father in a southern springtime
raking and burning
deadfall from the pines
a huge red ring of fire
blackening the earth.
Our kitten runs to him
jumps the flames
loses all
whiskers in that bold action.
I think of that kitten
whenever there's something hard
I must do
and my father raking his
piece of ground
the red ring around him
getting bigger, spreading
out to burn the world.

PAD CHALLENGE, April 15

Today's prompt: change up the title of a published poem.

A GIFT
Someone has left for me,
wrapped in a brown paper sack
on which my name is written
in blue,
a gift--
the Journals of Dan Eldon.
Inside is an unsigned note
saying, Come let us
explore and record, with
the eyes of a child,
horror, irony, traces of
paradise, traces of hell.
The note ends,
Enjoy.
A number of poems have "gift" in their title, including "The Gift Outright" by Robert Frost and "The Gift" by Li-Young Lee)

PAD CHALLENGE, April 14

Prompt: "Love or Anti-Love Poem"
I did this quickly, between classes!

WHERE IS LOVE?
He's never had the right maps
never known the right roads
always the crumbling
the falling apart
a twisting in his bowels like
Adam and Eve fleeing
going where the righteous hand
sends all bad people
the million dollar question
is, "Where?"

PAD CHALLENGE, April 13

PROMPT: "Hobby"

I KNOW NO HOBBY BETTER THAN SLEEP
(for St. John of the Cross)

It is only called sleep--
It is rapture.
It is where the deer
goes in search of her
stag who lies wounded,
high on the mountain,
next to green waters.

The stag burns.
His wound is red.
The skin is transparent
over his ribs so that the
clenching heart is seen.
Soon, he will be cooled by
the ecstasy of her flight.

The hobby completes.
I am deer and stag, both--
the two have but one feeling.

PAD CHALLENGE, Aprl 12

Prompt: "So we decided to"

SO WE DECIDED TO
(for Robert Frost)
keep vigil
over our empty spaces
& the hawk floating above
so that we need only
to open our mouths
for the other
to say
I hear you

PAD CHALLENGE, April 11

THE OLD ONES

1969 Volkswagen Beetle.

Ivory, the color of old bone.

One antenna.
Asymmetrical.
Warrior that has lost something in battle.

Hubcaps, rusty due to piss from the old
cat Sam who repeatedly marked it as his own.

Sam's skull.
Now rests on the mantel.
We found it years ago under the pokeberry.