Stripping Down

This week's readwritepoem prompt asked us to be inspired by the idea of "mental wallpaper." I found myself thinking about the wallpaper in our first house.

Our first house was papered inside,
A cavernous nightmare
Of interior design disasters
Every surface—walls and ceilings,
Cupboard doors—covered
In at least three layers
Of other people’s perceptions
Of pretty and cozy

Nothing about that paper was right
The stems and vines
Of the floral patterns
Seemed to fight for release
While the little farmhouse prints
In the kitchen seemed
Too small and suspicious
Of each other

And I worked like hell to rid myself
Of that paper,
Like a madwoman from a
Charlotte Perkins Gillman story,
I hunched and sprayed and scraped
And even gouged
The very walls I sought to rescue
From those layers of ugly

Oh, I know that the paper was once
Someone’s vision of home
But you can’t paper yourself
Into domestic tranquility
After a while, the paper turns
Into a sponge
Absorbing all the nasty smells
Of your past

I’d like to say I learned my lesson:
I’ve never papered over
A wall, never over committed
To a pattern but still
I’ve had to spray and scrape
And rip my way clear
When I found myself knee-deep
In my own domestic mistakes

Uprooted

This week's readwritepoem gave us this great photo by Sepulture to ponder. I loved this photo, and fussed over this poem for over a week. I'm still not happy with it, but here's what I have so far...

My position, precarious
My tenure, untenable
Where I imagined myself
Firmly planted
In deep soil, rooted
Where I fancied myself
So perfectly suited
Wasn’t there
Was a throne made of sand,
And a home made of air.
Was an anthology of stories
I wrote in my sleep
And recited like a catechism
Until they turned to beliefs
So I finger the beads
Of my sorrowful brain
And dig in the dirt
And hope for the rain

Writer's Block

Buds on the trees
In January
Have left me
Wordless.
Without my security
Blanket of
January snow,
The stanzas
Stand silenced.
My metaphors
Mistrust the warmth,
And they should.
A literal thaw
Brings no
Figurative good.

Redheaded Solidarity-A Haiku

I'm on Team Conan!

Funny, smart, pale-faced

redheads should be cherished, right?

Who's with me, people?

January's Child

It's funny...this poem might suggest that I am feeling depressed or sorry for myself, but I am not at all. This poem just came out. I kind of had fun with it.

January’s child is born into
Ordinary Time.
And celebrates among half-empty
Christmas clearance racks.

She is gifted with get-in-shape
And get-organized
And take-control-of-your-life ads,
Wrapped up tight in resolutions.

There are no angels to herald her birth
Or royal gift-bearers,
Just a post-Christmas budget crunch
And post-holiday belly bloat.

She is a child of the cleaning up
And the putting away
And the clearing out
And tax time.

She shivers each year to a start
Under January skies
While the twinkling lights
Of December
Fade to dullness in her eyes.

el pez

the old year flames out

and collides with our hunger

for a brand new start

(A haiku inspired by the burning fish Rick made for the annual Mayfield New Year's Eve party)

Illumination

This week's readwritepoem prompt gave us this beautiful photo by Shane Gorski for inspiration...

At long last the light
breaks in and brings the beauty
of the scribbles-- the
scratches-- I made on
the wall of my consciousness
to light.