Firestarter Challenge (9/20/07)
Firestarter Challenge Week 7 Title: Granular
(the categories of the exercises will change weekly)
- First Line: (take a line from a famous poet and use that to jumpstart your poem. “Drunk, I kissed the moon” from Another Awkward Stage of Convalescence by Bob Hicok.
- Imagery: Smell of mildew.
- Form: Prose poem. Here’s poets.org’s take on the controversial Prose poem. If it’s not too vain of me, I included a sample prose poem of my own that appeared in the most recent Pacific Review at the bottom of this article.
- Music: Concentrate on using many dentals: \d\ \n\ \t\ and \l\ sounds.
- Color: Burnt Umber.
Blue Night
We kissed under the bridge—the 5 Freeway where it passes over Laurel St. drunk on rum and coke. I wanted to say I was intoxicated by your beauty, but didn’t. You have to be careful what you say around writers, so much is laughably cliché, and I wanted your lips pressed against mine, not opened to the night sky in a laugh at the overused complimentary token. So I pulled you closer, and kissed you harder.
I carried you piggyback up the steep hill, while Nolan and Morgen staggered behind us, leaning together like an unstable playing card parapet. The jacaranda trees were in bloom, but the voyeur moon’s open eye screened everything in shades of variegated blues. At the top, I told you about a poem I’d written about the jacaranda’s lavender, and about living in the moment. You shushed me with a kiss, and we turned to watch Nolan and Morgen’s trek continue slowly, with each leaning on the other’s step in a sort of symbiotic walking. We smiled when they paused at a “No Parking” sign, and kissed.
Driving to Pacific Beach, I swear I saw the moon wink at us. And though I know the moon wasn’t smiling, that it isn’t a being with human qualities, as we sat on the lifeguard’s tower, it seemed somehow as if the moon approved. The whitewater of apexing waves washed baby blue across the parallel horizon. Above, the edges of cotton-ball cumulus gradated from a sliver of white to bulbous black, through ceruleum and navy. You sat across my lap, and shivered under three layers of clothing. I warmed myself with clichés kept silent, and looked away from the blues to your face for another rum and coke kiss.
There is no such thing as forever. Everything eventually decays, the sun will consume the entire earth before its last hurrah supernova, but I don’t care. This is now, and if I squint my eyes just right, and linger just a little longer locked on your lower lip, the words all blur together with the sky and clouds and waves and sand and moon and paint a landscape that I can only identify with the soft pressure of your nose against mine, the sweet cancer of time eating the seconds irreparably, the drive home with your hand resting reassuringly on the nape of my neck and your eyes closed.