Inenodable

National Poetry Writing Month, day 2. A poem based on a word from this Twitter account, devoted to "obscure and interesting English words." I scrolled for a while and then found "inenodable," which refers to something that cannot be untied.

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Remove the heart.

Let it live on it's own

for a short while.

Become invulnerable.

Let it pay rent

and shop at the market

and talk about the weather.

Let it exist apart 

from a binding cage.

Sustain irreverance.

Meet it for coffee

on Saturday mornings

and gobble up

the ghosts of your past

between sips of 

vanilla latte.

Musn't weaken.

Drive together to

a snowy mountain

and remark on scenery - 

there must be meaning

in an avalanche.

Withering still.

Open wide now,

it craves a safe return,

it craves a cage.

The cage is empty 

without it. 

An afternoon's adjournment

Mark this as my latest attempt to reactivate the creative parts of my brain. Will try to stay with the NaPoWriMo schedule of one poem per day for the month of April. This is for Day 1, writing a prose poem that is a story about the body. 

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Her mind drifts in uncatchable threads, each cast to a flowing

river of thought and drowned in rapids some moments later. 

But this gives her no pause - it feels mostly necessary at the 

end of a day like this one. Meetings, and meetings, and also

meetings, until a red, blinking laptop battery reflected her own.

It blinks ever onward now, peering from her bag in the seat

beside her. There is no solace in the cold glass of the train car - 

it bounces her head back and forth until she comes away with

an embarrassing red mark. She rubs it gently, hoping her stop

comes before the ticket taker. She rests her elbow on the ledge,

and her cheek in her hand - perhaps finally, the familiarity

of her own skin can calm this torrent of actions and ideas that

threatens to leak out her eardrums. Now the vibrations are cast

between wheels and track, between train car and humerus, 

and up her arm until they seem to counteract the frenzy in 

her brain. "Ma'am, I'm sorry but we've reached the end of the line."

She'd forgotten where she was. "What?" An uninterested face

stares at her from the front of the car. "You need to get off now,

this train's going back to the yard." The fog stays with her as

she gathers her things and disembarks. She finds the nearest

bench and sits. Her laptop blinks at her. It's too quiet here. 

Cancellation of a fever dream

a slow rhythmic drone

fleshes out a technicolor ribcage

until trapped lungs bleat for freedom

and the nerves drift from the body

a forest learning to flee

from a quietly pixilating soul

that spent too long throwing spaghetti

and forgot it needed to feed

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Playing on YouTube at this very moment:

Sun Ra Arkestra, Seductive Fantasty (the inspiration for this poem)

Ears before eyes

Hours have lived
and died
in the space of this whisper:
Something playful,
but also unfriendly,
the invitation to a fight.

Anger is the twang
of a breaking guitar string -
startling, abrasive, then gone;
all an act,
and the remembrance
of everything unnecessary.

So he dances like
leaves falling in autumn,
barely aware of himself,
and taken
by even the slightest twist
of an outgoing breeze.
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Song of the Day:
Shad, The Fool Pt 3 (Frame Of Mind)