Turquoise Monster

I have also been mucking about with what I think of as ‘cross word’ poems and ones where you just write the sentences from the first letter – these again are very much visual and I have been attempting to combine them with a concept I came up with which is the Code Poem.

I’ve found that most of these have been about the environment, global warming and human impact on our planet – I think this maybe because my little girl is doing A Planet in Peril at school and we have been reading a lot around the subject.

I quiet like doing these poems as I sort of see them as possible teaching aids or things for ads etc… Once I made the pictures that these poems really are I will post them on here!

I have actually been spending most of this month creating a set of visual poems which I am calling Putting a Face to the Name Poems – I literally create a face out of a persons name and it is harder than it sounds!

I need to do the finials of these before I can really show them on here!

Wizzen broken monkey
Skin grey
Wrinkeled crepe paper
Downey whiskers
Sharpe dowdy white
In striped pajarmers
Convict of the ward
On death row
Drowning in food
A mistake
A cull?
Tortured
by those who save
Broken ribs
From pumping you out
Cracked lips
From resusitation
Now blue
Eyes revolve
As a horse in panic
They can not save you
They can’t now
But they did not want to
Did they?

I mentioned before that I’d written a poem for an anthology I was trying to get into – well the poem Where Are You has been accepted 🙂 It can be seen here on the Year Zero Writers Blog and I believe it is avaliable in some e-reader format from Amazon too 🙂

I was asked to write a poem about Edith Piaf the French singer who sang during the second world war ect… This I suppose was the first time I have been commissioned to write a poem and I found it easier than I thought. Before when I went through a phase of entering competitions I found it hard to write something in the time frame on a given subject or in a given form. If it was an open competition I tended to do quiet well but if not I handed in the lamest things ever.

But Edith’s life was so full of the extraordinary that I had the shape of a poem before I had even finished reading all the information about her!

Plus I think thanks to attending poetry events and taking part in the poetry challenges such as WoPoWriMo and NaPoWriMo I am beginning to be able to polish poems in a far shorter time span than before. I hope they are still of the same sort of quality. It’s not that there are more poems being written by me its just there’s more on subjects I am willing to share. Mind due the subjects I am willing to share has increased as well!

The other thing about this poem was that I read it out to a room of mostly elderly people who were there for the music – the organiser was worried when I showed her it as it contains words like Hoar but I refused to take them out and the reaction of the audience told me I had made the right decision. Even the singer was asking for a copy of it!

I am probably going to be reading it out at a few similiar events at other points in the year too which is exciting (at least for me!).

Pale Segmentation
Acidic Wheel
Fizz
Discolouring
Icy Dark
Drink

Beginnings – times when the balance shifts
As the chaos of annilahation settles to new order
A beginning
Never the beginning
A wheel turning with star strewn spokes
Twisting renewal into death pangs
Stretching the twilight distinction
Between the two
A change of form
A change of state
Beginning? End? Transformation
The same from different angles
viewed
Misconstrewed as distinct
Life from decay, decay from life
Beginnings rearrange that is all.

My ensuing death
Barks at my heels
Demarnding to go for walks
Asking for water
With languid eyes

My ensuing death
Packs itself neatly
Into my luguage
Hoping to holiday
In the sun

My ensuing death
Follows me to the bath
Popping the bubbles
Leaving a hard
To clean scum

My ensuing death
hovers whilst I hoover
Reminding me of the times
We have already
Seen together

This was again from one of the fantastic photographs by Ella Gale used by WoPoWriMO on the finial day of the challenge – I think there were two poems that came out of this exercise – here they are:

Colour on the surface
Reflected ripples
bifricated
tinged with empathy
of me

Standing for eternity
Stone
But living
My eyes see and ears hear
Thirst increases
The drink opened before me
pages turned to stone
So I may not turn
May not know
The end
Maybe forever

You may have noticed I am sending live a mish mash of this months poetry challenge and February’s WoPoWriMo poems. The reason for this is that as I am doing mostly Visual Poetry for this one I am coming up with rough sketches basically and I want to make them into nice images that I can at least photograph if not fiddle about with in photoshop or something.