Fall Semester Poetry

Hey everyone! So I know I skipped last week's post... I've been skipping a lot recently. Sorry :( I forgot to post because of Thanksgiving. So, that's kind of a valid excuse?

Anyway, I thought that today, since the fall semester is wrapping up (and don't I know it, with two giant papers constantly looming over my head), I would share all the poetry I wrote this semester. Since I'm not taking a poetry seminar, I haven't been as prolific as I was last year. However, I am taking a poetry literature class; that is to say, I've been reading a lot of poetry without writing a lot. The poetry I've been reading has inspired my poetry to take new turns, which is pretty cool.

So, here's some of the poems I wrote this semester:

Poem 1: Trees

I look on trees naively,
as though they are my friends,
who cannot speak as I do,
with lungs and mouth.

And yet at least
for my imagined mind,
they sing-

I'll never know whether
their music is real
or merely
an imagined thing.

Poem 2: October 21st

Summer tore its way
into today.
I tried to wear a sweater
and have a cup of tea
but the day would have none of it.

Three days ago,
I tasted snow.
Now the ice cream truck sings
its way down Glen Washington Road,
and

the inexhaustible exhaustion of summer
drifts its way down
to cloud up my mind.

This morning I shot up
sure that my alarm clock had failed
to go off on time.
Nope- it was just 9:29.
Lucky no one had seen
my foolish dream,

which bobbed pleasantly
behind me,
the rest of the day,
singing, "back to sleep, sweet"

I'll drift back to sleep
in my warm and empty room.
When I wake up,
it will be October again.

Spoken Word Freewrite

I hate people.
My biggest fear is birds.
All I ever do is watch Parks and Rec
and I eat way too much.

Everyone hates me,
or they're annoyed by me or something.
I'm way too full of myself to notice, though.
I'm so vain,
and honestly everyone's sick of it.

I talk too much.
I'm not even good at the things I think I'm good at.
I'm sick of those scary dreams.
I'm not afraid to die.
Everything, even this last line, is a lie.

Experiment Poems
(So, some backstory: we were reading Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons in class, and I honestly did not get what the hell was going on with that book. So I tried to make myself understand it by attempting to imitate her style with a few Stein-esque poems of my own. I still don't really get it, but it was a fun writing exercise.)

VASELINE

The clear in yellow peels off that I ate blue. I didn’t eat because I coughed into the phlegm universe. I smoothed over the skin of my back down into the caving stars where I slept and came. Alive, and that is that I drank in jelly. I wanted to glob out into caves of napping. Napping into the nose that takes me swirling down into pillows I ate swallow alive. The fall into sleep I fall asleep.

CURTAIN

Edges on the paint. Someone brushing, their hair bristles into the holes that stars pin. Yum, licking, the dark licks at the sky and the smearing glass. Break that I pull and pull that I wake into waking. Walking up reams.

JACKET

Fist balled takes the shadows red into the seams. Curl like the curves of my fast and vigorous dream into swan voids. Whole, hole, into the space away from the hard. Oceans of menstrual blood in the tapestry Oriental carpets of autumn dreams. Nothing is turned upside down. Some hang and some just crumple.

(Then we read Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, and those inspired some tiny poems too:)

CLASS

Sync-o-pa-ted

Early whistle of rain

            Drops

and I am exhausted

            ah god

            violet, exhausted

PANIC

                        crack

            untapes down my scalp

         eggshells crinkle my vertebra-

                                    vertebra-vertebra

                        shot, shock

                           flushes me live

NIGHT

soft incense, thunder

       brushing my hair

elephant curls itself

        into the starry darkness

DEPRESSED

the sweater is

   fuzzy Microsoft

heating my throat

            into tears

LATE 

swallowing swallowing

canvas nebula

eye swallowing

let me fall in water

(I wrote some more poems inspired by Stein and O'Hara but I'm not going to subject you to all of them)

The Night Campus

 

Wood wet, driftwood, on the triangle stage of the Yoko.

Cigarette smoke like onions

One girl with a big long coat and a ponytail

walks ba-a-ack and forth on the edge of the street

talking on the phone in french

            with a cigarette

            using the city-sponsored pavement to get away with it

Two small students sit on the sidewalk bricks

            breathe gray

            lean into each other

Everything is shadows

on the night campus

People smoke

on rocks and side-street stones

            underneath the

                        puddle of street-lamps

Trees don’t say anything

The world is small

with the clouds close on us,

the frame of the angular library

The two girls are just talking

Groups cluster outside the library

The phone girl is still at it in French

Shuttles wander down

            Glen Washington Road looks like

the streets of kindergarten TV fantasy dreams

Smaller than the world

            leading to nightmare realms

People walk

There goes the tiny ember of orange on the end of their cigarettes

And it’s cold

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That last one was a little inspired by Frank O'Hara, too. I might use it for an upcoming assignment so like... hey, if you're my poetry teacher Googling my work to see if I plagiarized it, I really did write it, and it really was inspired by Frank O'Hara.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed at least some of those poems. I had fun writing them. 

Good luck to all those currently suffering through conference season/finals season/actually living in the real world outside the bubble of college,

-Ariel