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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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Pumpkin Holiday
awake into early chill, season of frost
and the pumpkins are all in, yards bedecked
for holiday of unholy . . . never
one to participate, our family hunches
behind cinderblock walls, hoards its candy
and hides from the general hostility
society seems to bear. this benign
distrust seems born in the genes, showing true
as well in all mother’s sisters, one who
now geriatrates in the recliner,
quietly persevering as death crawls in
on foggy feline paws. winter coming
to the year; winter snowbound in her life,
and mother watching for her own winter’s end.dmpitchford
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Down on Fifth
forever the beggar, king of no kingdom
but the dusty lanes of nowhere, he smiles
for his dimes, a blessing for a dollar;
at midday, or when whim strikes him, or
once the coins add up to a little something,
he slips down to the huck’s on carpenter
street for a magnum of malt (and a pint
of brandy, E-n-J, on a flush day).
he’s the emperor of has-been, alone
but for the voices that torment him, his
hell on earth, exacerbated by hang-
over and depletion of niacin
causing his brain to burn, soften, and betray
him, his personal brutus, the bottle.dmpitchford
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Boomer Granddame
sad-eyed she says he needs her, but she can’t
stand him. he’s a habit she’s had forty
years now: how’s she supposed to quit him now;
she mourns her wasted youth, though praises god
over the seven fine children they raised
together—though one is dead and a daughter
is in prison for life—she wonders aloud
to that same god where everything went wrong,
but thanks him for pulling them all through
the hard times, when life got really tough; she
can’t recall when it was good times and apple
pie, but she swears up yonder . . . in heaven
with her lord and all the angels and the saints
gathered ‘round the throne—it’ll all be good.dmpitchford
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Roadtrip
it was time for a change of scenery;
too long we’d danced in stagnant rain on prairies
and wanted for some elevation, or
perhaps bigger sky or broader blue scapes.
undecided, we headed west in the car
playing novels on CD as the miles
slipped by, the asphalt river racing past
beneath worn tires and we watching roadsides
for occasional animals, hawks by
day, eagles near the mississippi, deer
at dusk and night, plentiful in the plains
that time of year. by morning, two novels
in, we found ourselves in albuquerque,
and, of course that’s where we made our wrong turn.dmpitchford
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Sanitarium
she asks if I suffer hallucinations.
no, I suffer them nothing; I do, though,
enjoy them much more than most other folks—
I mean, I like my imaginary
friends better than my real ones, not that I
enjoy hallucinations more than other
folks enjoy hallucinations; I mean,
your average jo either gets caught up in
games of denial and confusion between,
or among, realities—how narrow-
minded is that? it’s the scope of these things
that tends to overwhelm most; they forbid
themselves the growth, and so their fragile minds
splinter and fragment and then comes madness.dmpitchford
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Nighthag
she’s followed me home every day this month,
lurking in shadows, just out of sight. first
I laughed at my own conceit, my own sad
paranoia. but then a friend asked me
about my shadow, so I watched closer,
more surreptitious, and there she was, coy
as moonlight and insidious as night.
last night, I heard her panting outside my
window, her heavy breath dogging me deep
into the night, into dreams rife with fear
and shadow, terror nameless at every
turn, coarse broadcloth of night devoid of stars
though saturated in threat smell of fear
sweat, and always her heavy breaths hounding.dmpitchford
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Salmon’s Envy
I was talking to a salmon and the
salmon was talking back, he’s a friend of mine,
about the value of oxygen and
the problem of gasping for breath once you’ve
stepped out of your element to walk in
another’s shoes . . . it occurs to me that
a salmon speaking of sneakers is quite
absurd, but there it is . . . and the salmon
told me of a life he’d spent, a whole day,
as a dragonfly—eaten by a duck,
he assures me—and how blue the summer
sky when one has only that day to live:
we agreed he was a fool to envy my
bicycle, and me to covet his gills.dmpitchford
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Between Saying and Doing
you once told me that we all want to be
beautiful. you told me it’s a natural
impulse, biological, organic,
written deeply in the genes, those micro-
cosms whence we spring. you told me you were
certain that on deeper levels we all
are equal and lovely and basically
good; you told me evil was invented
by lazy old men as a way to rule
over younger, stronger folks. you told me
you loved me, that it was forever, that
nothing could ever make you cease to love
me. you told me never again would you
trust me, you told me . . . and now you are gone.dmpitchford
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how silly it all was
later that night, after that incident
with the nudists and the police, I was
getting closer to sober and you brought
over a bottle for us to share, though it
was only a pint, and you had been drunk
hours before I started on the whiskey . . .
we toasted the cops and nudists and made
jokes about protests and how silly it
all was about fur and animal rights
when we have yet to get the whole human
rights thing under any semblance of control—
then suddenly our eyes met and magic,
lightning, fireworks, and your tongue on mine,
our clothing shed . . . and soon police found us.dmpitchford
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From the Peak
snow falls on the mountainside among stones
ancient as the earth, patient as stars, cold
as the ice eating their skin inexorably
away year after year into millennia.
just as these mountains creep along their slow
path to oblivion by way of wind,
water, and time. water falling from the sky,
melting from sunlight on peaks high above.snow falls on the mountainside among trees
young in the earth, their brief spans lived quickly
relative to mountains. firs, pines, cedars,
and aspens tiered down the heights ridge to ridge.
upon the homes of cougar and bear, elk,
moose and hare — on the mountainside, snow falls.dmpitchford
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