The Quantumverse
To understand the curl that distance
makes with homesick fingers,
To itch beyond calamine,
cursed out of your name,
By the flat of a shovel
struck into dirt.
Arthritic with weeds that
rash from your mouth,
Your voice staccato,
tattoo of mothers and thistles
Can’t brand deep enough;
you start and end with blood.
Love and longing and technology by Sarah and me!
Windows
Come and stand beside me at the window,
the world is out there waiting for us,
the way we used to wait for first and second post,
news of lovers stepping out from their rooms.
Now we just wait for them to post
selfies from their bedrooms or their bathrooms –
Seconds from you now in postscripted time,
never farther from what we first needed:
How we move together in…
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This Renga boldly goes where no Renga has gone before! (There’s probably a good reason for that, LOL!) Take your pick, time, puns, camels, rockets, we have it all!
Saturdays are promises misspoken that carry
ammunition for the week. We enter
a range of exhaustion,
bullet bright, concentric motifs
that rifle us past the Sun. Mooning our loss
of respite from the race, a legion rattles
Is velocity even a question?
What deserts scorched at perihelion?
Melting sands swirl – camels in glass.
Weapons droop into ploughshares.
Still the hardened days untillable,
“until” hocked like a promissory
note. Hooked on through dies Martis.
Humpday comes as oasis breather.
Then Fire-day our trial by splitting
the distance between caravanserai
and the Gobi-tween. Dates blend.
Hookah left at the next pyramid.
Time burnt in offering, smoking skyward.
The camels shift nervously in their traces.
qbit has taken up my Renga Challenge as a part of Jilly’s January Casting Bricks to Attract Jade Challenge.
Wild ride Renga by Jilly and me. Hold on to your hats, and enjoy the creative process in the comments!
qbit has taken up my Renga Challenge – it is bound to be…interesting; stick around! Jilly’s January Challenge of Casting Bricks to Attract Jade is in full swing. Join us; everyone is welcome!
Like sweet peas in water colors
echoes cross the river
Our dung, our beetled life, our turvey sleep,
we fall into carapaces and disjointed limbs
Guttering wings
grid of prophecies emeralding mold
Divined by eyes upon our backs
that see us once, see us twice
Skittering wake caroms,
threatens our sight; our sight
Our slight, slightest, lightest
saucy flight our taste of heaven
Indigo’s bitter blue
crushes, crunches veins of penicillin
Skewered through the helix,
twinned and twined to origins
Euphrates yellows our canvas
diminished chords return unanswered
Tigris Tigris burning bright
our garden silenced by such fire.
What the winds can’t heal
The contrails sever
Winter howls
from a wounded sky
Spliced fragments of discontent
litter the cutting room floor
Boneyard
Of the hunched and hungry
Light that has never shone
Moloch’s restless domain
Its bitter meal
usurps our Threnody
Offspring of the beatnik fringe
slice their tongues on prosody
Their teeth drowned red
from parsing wine
The young so wise
abbreviated flights in time
Dovetail earth and sky
mulled, singular, primed
Jilly’s Renga Challenge – Winds Can’t Heal
For Jilly’s December Casting Bricks
A response to Charley’s Challenge. Charley’s original is in the center, and my response is the “frame” around it. I had to load as an image, as it was the only way to accurately preserve the formatting.
For Jilly’s December “Casting Bricks”
I blew up last night
while you were asleep.
Between your soft breaths
my fuse was lit –
twelve seconds – not much
time to run away
from myself to safety.
An unstable charge
That has no out but in,
Its umbilical reactor
Collapsing in hot fusion
Of your skin and mine,
Where you dreamt
The center of the sun.
From Charley’s “Casting Bricks” challenge “Destruct”
Charley in bold, mine follows.
“Human teeth contain a kind of poison, for they dim the brightness of a mirror when bared in front of it and also kill the fledglings of pigeons.” – Pliny The Elder, “Natural History” 79 CE
So feckless to smile at birds along the river,
Of course we knew that we were wanton
Splitting innocence with inured jaws,
Hawking the feathers caught in our teeth.
Unable to face our hunger, plunder,
Our eyes dim our necessity,
Denying our faces, averting our senses,
We leap into the decadent watercourse
White and fanged, the rapids of history
Tears us to ruins
Rise, we sink to rise again;
Birds chatter at our decay.
The currents of time wash out our bones
The sun pristine over the primal estuary
Stripped of all but naked truth
Ancient words take flight
Magnificat, the mother song of creatures,
St. Francis delirious with canticle
Counterpoint, drifting up and downstream,
Reflecting sinners, spawning saints
Conspirators: qbit, Jilly
qbit’s Renga Challenge – We Were Wanton
For Jilly’s November Casting Bricks
“Human teeth contain a kind of poison, for they dim the brightness of a mirror when bared in front of it and also kill the fledglings of pigeons.” – Pliny The Elder, “Natural History” 79 CE
So feckless to smile at birds along the river,
Of course we knew that we were wanton
[Your couplet…]
[Repeat 5x]
Administration, Thoughts, Plots, Plans &tc:
Proposed as a Renga of unstructured couplets for two people, but certainly fun if folks want to do one with more people, although then we’d probably want 20 couplets instead of 10.
I’m hoping that by keeping each writer to two lines, our push/pull on each other stays strong, but leaves enough room to develop a new idea, pivot, etc.
PLEASE SIGN UP IN THE COMMENTS BELOW, and we will work out logistics and kick off the working versions in another post.
Group Renga for Jilly’s November Casting Bricks Challenge
More background and thoughts on Regna: here.
It’s never about birds in poetry;
it is about our inadequate,
marrow-filled bones that
weigh us down
reminding us of the immediacy
of the dust.
It’s never about stars in poetry;
It is about drinking from the night
As from the floodwaters of Noah –
Watching the Ark pull from shore
Without you. At least you
Will not die of thirst,
Those receding lights
Your final comfort.
From Jilly’s November “Casting Bricks”
Jilly in bold, my abomination follows.
qbit 