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.
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.
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
“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.
Our swan meets Nikki Papandreou,
The Greek Olympic diver
Eye to eye and nose to beak
They keep their poise and watch each other
She waddles to the edge of grace
Submerged, he breasts for air
Wings cut through air,
Arms slice through water
How fierce the thrill
That twists as one?
How strong the force
That separates them?
Jackknifed time entangles
Their fall as flight through space
Becomes reunion of bone and skin and
Hand and feather, a merging and emerging
Yet such ecstasy, transgression,
Cannot queen the body long
This body’s reaching out for that
Still point, where rise turns into fall
The ancient moment, amphibian mind –
Zeno’s paradox suspended
A moment free of up, of down, all
Movement frozen in a blue eternity
Conspirators: qbit, sarasouthwest
qbit’s Renga Challenge – Swan Dive
For Jilly’s October Casting Bricks
Our swan meets Nikki Papandreou,
The Greek Olympic diver
Brandishing a cygnet ring
Bargaining with Poseidon’s wave
“Nikki” she laughed, “suburban demi-god.”
“Prove your flipcraft of the Argonauts.”
Oh, Siren, thought he, in the face of her derision
Fifty heroes shall stand and see
A white Medusa, her neck a downy serpent –
“For Lysistrata and the Amazons!”
“Apply the wrench, my lovely wench”
The Golden Fleece denied
Head over heels, they mirror the gods
Unbounded by the sea or heaven
A Promethean dive from dizzying heights
a mythological echo and splash
Their wild swan chase to raise Atlantis,
Oysters, smoked in their beds
Ocean crossroads deal carved in stone
Volcano ash scatters the sweetest atone
Conspirators: qbit, Jilly
qbit’s Renga Challenge – Swan Dive
For Jilly’s October Casting Bricks
Our swan meets Nikki Papandreou,
The Greek Olympic diver
[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 October Casting Bricks Challenge
More background and thoughts on Regna: here.
The following is a voice recording of the Renga that Charley and I wrote, called “Road of Ashes” The link to the written text is here, but it really comes alive when read out loud.
Charley and I take on The End of Times and Quo Vadis of the soul in this Renga full of vigorous language and vibrant imagery! Make sure your seat belt is fastened!
qbit has taken up this crazy challenge! I will update our ongoing collaboration through 10 couplets. Stop by and see what insanity he & I cook up! If you are interested in joining in, stop by the original post for On the Road of Ashes and let me know! This is a part of the September Challenge of Casting Bricks; join us! (plagiarized from Jilly’s blog almost verbatim)
I was on the way, on the way
and suddenly, precipitously, I wasn’t
Tourmaline voices cracked like stones in a fire
Broke my path wide into rust or grey choices
To labor as herdsman over sheep seeking knowledge
or waste my life recumbent on a hammock
Such are the sheep of Yeats
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Cry out agonies in languages better gauged
to bear pain than in lingua hominibus
Vulgate promises
That will not redeem
Poets…
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qbit 