Parrot

This experiment with mediocrity
tolls like a mournful bell:
rhythmic clanging at unpredictable hours
sunset
sunrise

Her name was Melinda and I was fourteen and she asked me
"would you rather be subpar at everything
or excel with a demon perched on your shoulder who
reminded you constantly of your imperfections"

I smiled with sealed lips because of that
crooked tooth I hide
on stage, narrating with nonchalance

(Melinda went to California)

that teenager could not choose
and decades later did not have to because she had option one down pat
and the demon of option two arrived like an unexpected houseguest

#22: True Dat

I am God and
God is love.



--
prompt: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” –Hemingway. Write a short poem that is also “truest sentence that you know.”

#15: The Bop

The young pale-skinned red-headed English teacher
(the thin one other teachers complained about for breastfeeding
under a blanket at the faculty meeting,
the one who inferred my fourteen-year-old secrets from my writing portfolio and kept them quiet)
blows her nose, how she weeps as we
write for the fifty minutes until the bell jars us awake.
Every so often I look up to her silhouette at the black chalkboard,
did she know someone in New York in those clouds of smoke and
panic and terror and frenzy, coughing up their lungs until there were no alveoli left?

It takes years for the young to understand the pain of their elders

Time passed and the bleeding, the amputees, the horror
etched into their faces like rushing rivers that make a canyon
echo, oh, Boston, we flirted for a mere few days before your streets
charmed me, and I loved your chic quaintness even post-heartbreak,
and this stomach weathered enough since New York to sink
and burn and spill its acid from my eyes.

It takes years for the young to understand the pain of their elders

I remember her encouraging handwriting
the wide cursive letters, friendly but elegant,
the angled imperfection of the stem of the "d."
Twelve years have taught me the depths of her love for
strangers.

It takes years for the young to understand the pain of their elders



--
prompt: Rules, Schmules
"Experiment with a poetic form. Break all the rules! Not sure where to start? Check out this list of forms: http://bit.ly/3JIt9K"

This is not a poem

I find myself waking up everyday wondering why I am doing what I am doing with my life. The feeling began to gnaw at me a few months ago. Now it bites me at night and I wake up to find blood all over the sheets.

I used to enjoy cooking. I used to relish the creative process. These days, my ATP is scarce. I'm in Guatemala. I mostly eat out of a deli. I bring the plastic-wrapped food back to my room and gulp down whatever sandwich I've picked. And then I breathe a sigh of relief, because I have avoided social interaction with the friendly Canadians and Koreans who currently share the communal kitchen with me and the hostel owner.

They're sweet, but the itch of what I haven't resolved pulls me upstairs behind a closed door and into a faux-solitude. I half-heartedly and unsystematically respond to emails. I close facebook windows as quickly as I open them. And I procrastinate on filling in the outlines that stare at me from black and white word documents, because I am afraid of what I won't write: a masterpiece.

People told me over the years that most MD/PhD students go through mid-PhD blues. They say it has a lot to do with seeing your med school classmates graduate and leave you behind to your life of fairly unrewarding tedium--you're typically still at the stage where things are not working.

That's not what it is for me. The wiser ones have told me about another struggle: accepting that many of us will just be "good enough." We will not revolutionize our fields, but we will be good-enough researchers. We will not be mind-blowing clinicians, but we will be good-enough doctors. The recognition has been sinking into my bones slowly, but I'm still trying to fight it.

There are dying embers of hope that I try to stoke in the hearth of my heart: embrace imperfection, this uncomfortable feeling of straddling two horses, and maybe you will again be able to craft words as easily as you did when you were ten, and the poetry flowed through your veins.

The child, imagination wild, possibilities endless, barely lifts her quill from the parchment. The twenty-six-year-old is lost in an open space, full of potentials, but confined in her mind, too worried about the future to think freely and scribble and doodle and make a literary mess.

How I miss that freedom.

#10: I Remember

I remember the bright brown old oak table we used to have
I remember the night that it rained so hard that water leaked through the roof and we put buckets all over the house
but not soon enough to save the table
I remember how it bulged up at its seams when the water seeped in
and the water never seeped out

I remember how I used to love myself with abandon then
I remember the first day the Neutrogena commercials began to brainwash me
I remember wishing my hair were as straight and predictable as Jennifer Love Hewitt's

I remember the daily battles with mediocrity that started when my age creeped closer to 30 than to 20

I remember the seasons changing in the leaves of the maple tree in the front yard
which we eventually cut down with hollow hearts because its roots prevented the grass from growing
I remember how the grass never grew back



--
prompt: Don't Forget
Listen to an excerpt of Joe Brainerd’s “Remember” here: http://buff.ly/14GJb1c Write your own version.

#7: I Regret to Inform You

I regret to inform you
that these words that are bursting forth from my left
ventricle don't circulate in my blood in the pattern you were taught
in school but move through my sternum as a sound wave suppressed
that is channeled into my fingers.

I regret to inform you
that these thoughts are so dark
that those who love me are too scared to finish reading
and I am too scared to read these stanzas to the ones
whose blood my smile helps pump

(better that I howl absurd as Allen Ginsberg
than close my eyes to make the world drop dead
as Emily Dickinson)

I regret to inform you
that sometimes these poems are reminders of
the essence of life as death
and the enjambment can only make me hope that
after death
comes nothing.



--
prompt: 7. I Regret to Inform You
"Write an ode to one regret that you have."

#5: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner Soup

Pink spice, orange sugar, yellow zing, white sulfur
water
pressure
lentils
and the love of a friendship that continues to grow
in new directions after many years
but at the base has always been
cumin.



--
prompt: Look What I Made
"Make something. Anything! Write a poem about your spontaneous making experience."

#4: No hay señal

This webpage is
NOT AVAILABLE!!!!!!11
google
chrome could not load
the webpage because
w
w
w
DOT
amazon
DOT
com
took-too-long-to-respond;
the website may be
down
or you may be
experiencing issues with your Internet connection.
Here are some suggestions:





--
prompt: Found Poetry
"Look to Craigslist, newspapers, Twitter, anywhere for unintentional poetry. Using the original text, punctuate and use line breaks to turn it into a poem."

#3: Brother

You left in the womb gifts of nonsense and nicknames
and at birth they were in my marrow.

That mixture of aching love, admiration, fear, and guilt
that arcs through our aortas for the ones who gave us life--
we share a secret knowledge of how to titrate
what makes that blood.

The loveless lives of sad struggle the astrologers predicted for
both of us
don't depress me
because we will walk along, cursed hand in cursed hand,
under inauspicious full moons and pernicious sun beams,
laughing until our lungs breathe their last.




--
prompt: "3. Just For You"
Write a poem to someone and share it with them.

#2: Acquaintances

There are many of them
who will gather dust
as tattered new years resolutions
as moth-eaten dresses in dim attics
as shattered glasses in a library
full of books
and a crumpled old man
thirsting for words
and eyes too weak to see them
finds no respite from
solitude or
irony.

--
prompt: "2. Ink Stains"
Write a poem on paper quickly without lifting your pen from the page. Post image if possible. No edits.

#1: Two Tin Roofs

21: Sweating foreheads, father's tears and baby's yellow skin in a corrugated oven

26: Gray clouds rattling holes in the concrete and the loose-lipped husband
fingers grazing the wife's wincing stomach and quickening pulse

Did your naïveté give you the gift of hope to save a life
and did five years of books jade your heart about losing one?




--
prompt: "1. Easy Does It"
Write a short poem (less than 5 lines). Be sure to include at least two strong images. Don’t over think it, just do it!