January Challenge: "No Rhyme Nor Reason

[Chesters Daughter]

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The prompt for this month's challenge, as chosen by ned and Firemajic is: No Rhyme Nor Reason

You are free to interpret the prompt in any way you wish, though of course, site rules apply. If you are unsure of the challenge rules please read the 'stickies' at the top of the board. Please note that all entries are eligible to receive critique in the voting thread.

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This challenge will close on the 15th of January at 7pm EST.

[Chesters Daughter]

In their state of blindness
they could discern no rhyme nor reason
while I dug a hole in its proper plot.
Whispers of my madness
became my shadow
even when the earth turned its back
on the sun.

There wasn’t a shovel in sight
as I clawed an ever-deepening crater
in unforgiving earth that utilized
twigs and pebbles to flay my fingers
to the bone.
My presence there was premature
for the ground is aware when to ready
so it found my intrusion abhorrent
and kept its efforts to thwart me steady,
but like most souls, dirt is denied
glimpses of the future.

The sun rose and set
and downpours erased my progress
until my third week in
when I finally met the required depth
and was a spectacle no more,
just a poor witless woman
incapable of rhyme nor reason.

I retired to my rocker,
ragged digits wrapped in bloodied gauze
gripping its arms as I swayed.
It was six days until that toil of love
stolen from difficult soil
embraced what was left of my son,
and I dug it wide enough
so that on the seventh day,
I finally rested
next to my child.

On my bodice was pinned a note:

That shadow of insanity
bestowed upon me was unearned
As to no rhyme nor reason
I believe you’ve all now learned
Not only had I reason
unlike you I was not blind
And just to negate the former
I’ve left these words behind
You whores have just been treated
to my final fucking rhyme.

[aj47]

collection of words
with neither rhyme nor reason
called it ​poetry

[sas]

If you say “stay”, a faithful one
will wait at length for your return
to health; or lay on your body
as it decomposes, or so I’ve heard.

That’s what I told her after
we had far too many margaritas
with salt left over for her wound.
She laughed, but never healed.
He didn’t heel either.

I had no dog to bring her that last day.
Mine had died. She knew I let a vet just
send a bill, without a body. Her finger wagged—
“Remember, in dog years, I’m much younger.”
I smoothed sheets, to sit and wait for her
to whisper what she wanted done, with hers.
Instead, she said . . .

“Promise me, no rhymes.” She gave no reason.


.

[Firemajic]

I pulled on your old flannel jacket
wrapped myself in your familiar scent
felt your caress in brazen breezes tangling my hair
and tugging at my clothes with shy fingers
saw your blue eyes in stained glass windows
heard you in the silent mausoleum where I left flowers

Your memory scarred veins on my wrist

I confessed my sins to a disillusioned priest
we worked in shelters served in soup kitchens
I listened as he spoke about life and death
random suffering without rhyme or reason
his faith destroyed by the loss of his child
he prayed for death kneeling by a tiny grave

I felt my demons break their chains

I found religion with burned out junkies
turned tricks behind dented dumpsters
passed a pipe in alleys guarded by rats
baptized pain with a needle and spoon
and paid my tithes with the tracks on my arms

I stoned your memory

I shivered in doorways slept under bridges
sheltered my grief in hellish drug dreams
where I found then lost you again and again
I recognized my own hunger in starving derelict
dogs with sharp spines roaming dead end streets
felt relief when I saw my imminent demise

I saw the truth in a dead man's blue eyes

Wrapped in your dirty flannel jacket
gazing beyond littered cigarette butts
condoms and candy wrappers
stoned on despair I called your name
I heard your voice beckon me
from the mausoleum where you wait

I have enough in my needle to get to you

[Pete_C]

The Poet *Language*

The big-headed poet stopped a while,
and read his own words with a smile,
and having read them line by line,
he declared his poem “most divine!”

To justify his selfish praise
his qualifications he did raise:
“I’ve read the classics and the greats,
Whitman, Shelley, Cummings, Yeats,
Ginsberg, Plath and even Poe,
I studied their construction, so
I use their structure to ensure
my work is not verbal manure;
I reproduce their written turds ...
and then I simply change the words!

I’ve read the thoughts of learned men;
I've read them time and time again,
their wisdom has become just mine,
of meter, rhythm, scan and rhyme.
There‘s nothing that I do not know,
read my words and you’ll see so.
My creative light cannot be smothered,
I am a genius … undiscovered!”

The poet, with wisdom so sage,
then passed across his scribbled page.
The reader read the lines complete
and wiped his arse upon the sheet.

[Gumby]

It was easier
to sink into the booze
ooze liquid confidence
than to face the day without him.

Dr. Daniels gave a perfect nip
and tucked into a bottle
she was young again
on fire, like the whiskey.

It wasn’t the drink that rotted her gut
left a hole big enough
to expose the putrid thing
flopping about inside her
in desperate search of another beat.

It scared her shitless
she was starting to believe
this is who she really was.

[Pelwrath]

TITLE: Food for Thought

TYPE: Symmetrical Alliteration


Let peoples due diligence produce lies;

Lies produce interaction, producing life.

Them as tells, tell as them;

For us is honest, insulting umbrage forced.

Eat, drink, be happy; be despicable, espouse;

Talk becomes intercourse, begrudging truth.

Cake like bread loves conflagration.

[Darkkin]

Where Nonsense Dwells


In the fold of a moonglade, as far to west as Numb is east,
there is a place, known to neither bird nor fish, folk nor beast.
Yet there is something there, a something with a purpose,
a something that lingers, out of sight, just below the surface.
The surface of what—Well, the Firefly Tide!

For this is where it dwells, so far gone, it is lost and found,
a bright shadow, travelling o’er the earth without a sound.
Chased by the Sandmen Three, it leads them on a mad dance—
There and gone, a wraith wavering between a dream--a trance.
For that is its way—Tangible, yet fleeting, like smoke and sea.

Through sea and sky, coursing o’er the Firefly Tide—
Those Sandmen trying, catching nothing but a hint of hide.
Colours, who can say, dark or light, blue or grey?
Yet recognition flares as it disappears at the turning of day.
Why is it there in a memory so long lost, only to be found?

Nobody knows, but to ask, one must first know—Nobody.
So what is it that dwells beyond the Firefly Tide—Anybody?
In a sense, it makes sense, because it is born of sense of a sort.
But for this creature commonsense, would just come up short.
So what sort of sense remains, any sort of sense?—Well, nonsense.

Nonsense? That makes no sense—Nonsense would be a dragon.

[ArrowInTheBowOfTheLord]

Shadow Man from Mars

When you were five years old,
you knew that some Martian, eons ago,
lost his shadow in the sun,
and it skipped away across the iron soil,
laughing—“Can’t catch me!”
and it flickered across the pink sky,
becoming darker and longer, scorning
logic, disregarding
all the gods.

You knew that it must have run,
far, far, away, through asteroids and stars,
and finally, sliding down a thunder-cloud,
it found its way to earth. And it stole
the shadow of a carnival-man’s top hat
(the carnival-man who spoke to demons)
it stole that shadow and it became
part of it.

You know that, because you saw it,
bobbing along like the Monopoly man,
sometimes short and sometimes tall
and sometimes cruel,
especially at exact noon, when the sun
is like a floodlight; the shadow steps
along plaster walls, turning out its toes,
taking its time where no shadow should be
(and blacker than a shadow
should be).

You knew that it could be naughty and cruel,
but it was medicine to see the shadow from Mars,
because by seeing it you remembered that
you couldn’t say how everything happened,
you knew that you didn’t
know.