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Yearend Challenge
Today I challenge myself to write 100 poems by midnight 1 Jan 2024. During this challenge, I will forego alcoholic beverages and drink ginger-lemon tea instead. All poems will be blogged and sequentially numbered. Daily poems are expected; numbers deprioritized throughout the week must be made up on weekends. Minigoals: 12/4 20; 12/11 40total; 12/18 60t; 12/25 80t; 1/1/24 100t.
Most poems are expected to be quatorzains, though not required (it merely follows the evidence as my forte).Poem 1
Happiness is such a huge idea,
But what is it, specifically? Is it
An emotion? A mindset? A heart tuned
To the favor of fortune, God, nature,
Or specific higher powers unnamed?
Is it pleasure prolonged? Joy unbridled?
Perhaps merely security ensured?
Such a broad range and deep is happiness.
Joy is much simpler, I think. And as such
More readily attained. What each is worth
Certainly must remain a subjective
Case. How attainable each certainly
Must depend on mindset, for even those
Sorely traumatized have sought and found both.Poem 2
Despair is the dragon. Has it always
Been? In childhood, dragons seemed plentiful
As wasps and spiders – all the scary things
That sting and burn and bite. Now adulthood
Spills in on tides of years and washes clean
The earth of most such fears. But despair, dark
And cunning serpent that it is, curls up
Within the deep shadows of unconscious
Mind, the turbid depths of the heart, and lurks
Await . . . death visits to rob us of dear
Ones, and the beast arises to devour
First our pretty red hearts, then our grieving
Minds, takes hostage confidence and poisons
All . . . how can we slay this dragon within?
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Picking Back Up…
From my apparently unrecoverable blog bitterhermit.wordpress.com
The 1000 poem project was completed some time in 2013. Time to start another challenge. Perhaps a bit less ambitious? My day-job pays the bills, but sucks the soul out of me; I write in fits and starts these days. We’ll start with a hundred-poem challenge and see how that goes.
Top of the Hour
blurry eyed too close to waking
allergy season – not a favorite time of year
coffee calls, and I waft in on its aroma
content in the kitchen to wake slowly
14Sep2023
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Deep Dark: a Walk Among the Ghosts
Moonless night. Perhaps New Moon?
I hold no calendar to confirm.
Out without my smartphone, disconnected
to a reason, thank you.
Clover and wild onion spongysoft
beneath my steel-toed work shoes —
after shift in the deep night, shallow morning.
Only the sounds of distant traffic:
a train a mile away sounds of electric whale;
a bustle in a hedgerow ten meters north.
Last thing I need, a skunk with anxiety.
Now my head is arguing with me:
was it Hughs or Lowell? Skunk Hour?
Wasn’t Frost, we’re certain. Lowell, then.
Why does Hughs even suggest himself?
Eliot keeps his cat out of the fog, no option.I arrest myself, internal argument a stratagem:
let the skunk go its furry way,
perhaps tomorrow we’ll bring a torch.dmpitchford 3/14/2024
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An Altar for Julianne
we have no candles
neither an altar in our home
our sacred spaces all lie within
not so much by choice
as by accidental embarrassment
of riches – a house too full
of banality to house the holy . . .yet how many hours we send
prayers into our hearts, up
unto the heavens, out to
manifest the universe . . .tonight, Juliane, I wish
I had a candle and altar
for you as I whisper prayers
to recognize your passing – I
lend salt back to Mother Earth
running rivers from my eyes.dmpitchford 01012024
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#86: Lost in the Stacks
surrounded by thirty-eight volumes of poetry
diverse as the centuries of art history
I prime my mind, heart, fingers, tongue
for this final lap around the verse-arena
Borges, Natalie Goldberg, and Leonard Cohen
cheer me on in echoes from beyond;
Samuel Taylor Coleridge has brought
his ministry of frost, sailing a Dover thrift edition;
Kit Stokes helps me navigate broken music
while my fingers attempt the right keys;
Yeats was brought into this via reference
in the latest Poetry as well as from
Mary Kinzie’s poet’s guide to poetry;
Rimbaud tried to French me, but my mood
remains Latin – I searched for Neruda,
but his captain’s verses remain lost in the stacks.
Shelley asked me earlier why it is
I have such a hard time with Wordsworth,
more often than not calling him Wadsworth
and I have no excuse but for divergence
and a memory sacrificed for imagination.
Bukowski is passed out on the floor after
punching me several times – Sandberg
insists on grieving with me, though he’s going
on about another laborer in Chicago . . .
moments of silence punctuate the click of keys
as I pause now and again to search phrases
like some proverbial magpie raiding for bright
bits of shiny to weave into my nappy nest.
looking back through these neonate lines,
I suddenly feel as though I have merged
into a mural on the wall of a Barnes & Noble.dmpitchford1.1.24
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New Year
Prophet of Midnight
he was torn asunder
at the Solstice, dismembered and disemboweled
by seven sisters dancing to Orpheus
and the Muses – then sewn back together
by one-hundred paradisal virgins
dawn of that next day . . .but the parts – more than one sacrifice
was disarticulated on the altar of their ire –
his left arm black, right
mongoloid; left leg native red,
right Inuit with frostbitten toes;
his cock a circumcised bit of Latin islands;
both buttocks Greek as his myths . . .Tonight he croons electric rhapsodies
knowing he is to be crucified
at midnight’s fatal stroke
to enable his inevitable
sunrise apotheosis.dmpitchford 12/31/2023
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81
the internet keeps warning us
but common sense demands
we remain skeptical – and yet . . .
strange to think, in light of current events –
Russians in Ukraine, Zion in Gaza,
the rest of the world posturing in protest . . .
somehow the world gone
berserk . . . war any moment, even
here, might break out. perhaps little
tremors, perhaps in full tribal violencethe rusted gun above our 65-inch plasma
where once may have stood a mantle of one sort
or another – and in the custodial closet,
with the brooms, mops, and vacuum cleaners,
beside the shorted Shark and dormant Hoover,
our ammunition gathers dust, cobwebbed,
nine-mill, .357, 12-guage, and .45 acp alike
(mama disallowed the .223 Assault Weapons)So. with which weapon defend
against that Pale Horse and its iterant
angel? time ticks down: the world ends
passed on, soiled, to the next generation,
and what prophesies of the end of days will
bequeath them our mushroom-cloud dreams?dmpitchford 12/31/23 123123
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New Year Eve: Challenge Poem #80
New Years Eve
I decide to go up
to Cincinnati
Hard Rock Café
gamble up some loot
for twenty-twenty-fourbut my prostate hates me
so I am forced to divert to Newport
on the way – so close to the river
the Ohio river, but still in Kentucky;
so once I’d finished not finishing
at the convenience mart, buying
a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes
to pay for the privilege of not quite
pissing in their horrid men’s room,I take a penny of my change and walk
down several blocks, half-mindedly,
to the shore and toss the penny
wishing into the Ohio from Kentuckyfeeling the chill wind, I walk back
to drive over the bridge, thinking
perhaps I wished wrongly
so I grab the first Ohio exit
Google my way riversideand flip a nickel into the Ohio
from Ohio land into the river
wishing now a less selfish wish,
such a tiny splash, and consider
my life in the dim dark of twenty-three’s
final night – such a tiny splashin a life decades longer than younger
me anticipated; too late to die young
too late to leave a pretty corpse,
but those values are far downstream
and lost as that ill-fated nickel.I shrug the thought away, heading
back to Kentucky, back home,
out the cost of gas and cigarettes
but somehow far from a losing hand.dmpitchford 12/31/2023
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#79: After Lisel Mueller
Tonight I Cry You a Song
This December
within this house no wind
blows but the heat pump outside
we have no trees in the yard
save a Japanese maple only
thirty-eight inches high these eight years
some old story in a poetry book
with its ancient begetting
lays me down to snore . . .
but I awaken to night
for we are night owls in this house
I had to make coffee for you
and you are off to work
of a Saturday night, after Friday
working through to dawn
you brought McDonald’s while I
drunk and sleep deprived
tried to listen while you spoke
of your adventures at the hospital
there is no radio, but the internet
brings news, or headlines at least
from places too distant to be real
a war in Ukraine, some action in Palestine
the West Bank is rupt again thanks, Hamas
whatever was bound to happen
in our story did not happen
at least to us in our cubicle
within the matrix . . . I know there are rules
but what rule cannot be broken
by the right colt in the wrong season
this is Kentucky, after all,
and the thoroughbreds rule
from paddock and manger
even as christ-our-lord jockeys
his sheep around New Circle
where perhaps our names change
each exit – what mistakes were made
did not unmake us, though the dog
was lost to breathless cancer and perhaps
a couple we do not know
faces this year with heavy hearts
that by all wrongs should have been
nonexistent.
dmpitchford 12/30/2023
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Poem 74
it’s the time of night – morning
four a.m. I would feed her
administer 11 units of insulin
and treasure her while she was hereshe is gone – the insulin passed on
to someone whose dog still needs
but here I am, parsing out food
for our Sparky and the grand-dogtears won’t wash my soul of this
and I haven’t enough time left
to outlive the grief of her going
though the conveniences offered . . .nothing in the world. Nothing. can
compensate this loss of love and affection.dmpitchford 12/30/2023
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Sax Sells: Challenge Poem #72
Sax in Every Room
not enough has been written
will ever be written – can words
even approximate a just figure
for the saxophone? smooth
as no other measure of smooth
definitive of cool in musics
across the spectrum: blues, jazz, rock
classic, fusion, ska, etc, and future
perhaps we should include
a full golden album of saxophone
on the next exploration drone
shot into forever, that immortal
we shall be known as smooth, cool
universal fourteen million years
from now when intelligent life
finds our bottle washed up on their shore.dmpitchford 12/29/2023
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Flour Tonic: Poem #68
I am a grease fire
smokey and volatile
do not cast your water
nor douse me with
the wrong extinguisher
I will blow up in your face
or spread throughout your life
and consume everything
I can touch with lick of flame
or heat or smoke or stench
your best bet
was to smother me
before you moved
beyond the introductiondmpitchford 12/28/2023
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