Pandemic Lockdown

 

On earth we’re briefly gorgeous,

before declining into beautiful ruins.

After the unbearable lightness 

of being blithely unaware

that something wicked this way comes,

we must evade the forest of hands and teeth

choosing instead what feels like one hundred 

years of solitude. No love in the time of cholera!

For Friday Writings #238 at Poets and Storytellers United, Magaly invites us to include in our writing an intriguing book title. She gives us these examples:

1.        Beautiful Ruins

2.       The Forest of Hands and Teeth

3.        On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

4.       The Unbearable Lightness of Being

5.       Love in the Time of Cholera

6.       Something Wicked This Way Comes

7.       One Hundred Years of Solitude

I decided to be a smart-arse and use them all, but the only subject which seemed at all plausible for such a combination turned out to be the one I've used as my title.

This Modern Life

My energy provider does not 

use AI to speak to me.

I love their customer care! 

Patience. Efficiency. 

A polite human

who understands my elderly

confusions on details.

Also, the quality of music 

playing while I wait 

in the ubiquitous phone queue

is excellent.

A quadrille in response to Sanaa's Q. 252 at dVerse: exactly 44 words excluding title, and using  the obligatory word 'care.'   I came off the phone from the experience described above, to see this dVerse prompt in my email, so the above pretty much leapt into being. Apologies if you were expecting deep and serious poetry! (But, believe me, this matter IS serious.)

Gathering

I gather trinkets now. Indulgences. Now, at last, when my life grows late. 

A silver ring like a fox; earrings like silver roses – though why I need them I don’t know, knowing we can take nothing with us. Nothing, perhaps, except our memories. 

Will you remember me? Now, I know you do; but always?

‘Shall we meet again?’ I asked the seer, soon after you died. He looked, it seemed, into some kind of space, at once inner and cosmic. After a few minutes, said, ‘Nothing surer.’ Then, after another pause, ‘But not in this time.’ 

Well, duh, I didn’t want to encounter you next as a new infant and I an old lady!

Then again, I want always to encounter you. Whichever way you come, whatever body you’re dressed in. 

There is no body you inhabit now. (Well, not as far as I know.) There is the one I remember … in which to dress your soul … your soul which I also remember.

The trinkets are simply symbols. I wish they might also be signals. Do you receive them, in the ether somewhere?

Symbols.     Signals.     Sigils?

I fill them full of intent.

Exploring the zuihitsu form: 'following the brush' – or the movement of the imagined brush.

Sharing with Poets and Storytellers United, for Friday Writings #237: Favourites Revisited, in which I invite participants to identify a favourite prompt and write a new piece inspired by it. When I came to do that for myself, I discovered that there is no particular subject I prefer, but that I most like prompts to which I am inclined to respond using form, particularly some form I feel I'm not adept with and need to explore. One of my current favourite forms to fit that bill is a style of prose poetry called the zuihitsu. I'm not sure I'm even getting it right – but making the attempt is one of my poetic pleasures.