NaPM April 4 2015

[milo]

nice triolet milo
should it be [slips] in the penultimate refrain? i like that it doesn't feel forced.

good catch, billy.  fixed.

[Harry Carlisle]

THE DEVIL'S SCRIBE


With black-plumed quill to fashion blacker verse
The Devil's scribe sets Hell-born thought to flight
To some a curse, to others sheer delight
A dark Enchanter's spell, a Sandman's purse
Of nightmare visions pilfered from the moon,
Or blue-gray phantoms glimpsed in age's eye
That walk the empty halls of childhood homes
With cobweb feet and caterpillar sigh
And wisdom culled from time-forgotten tomes --
Each verse, each line, each word a witching rune.

No bardic lute or gypsy mandolin
Attends his spindled lyrics as they fly
On ghostly fingers through the unquiet sky
To pierce the inner eye where dreams begin
In rabbit screams when met with nightbird claw,
Or savage drums that ancient urges stir
Within the throbbing breast of one who sates
His passion's thirst on opaline liqueur
Spilled from Venusian lip, who penetrates
Forbidden lands where angels stand in awe.

With all the cobbled pride of battle scars
They ride the nightwind, wild and unafraid
Immortal hellfires blazing unallayed
To burn the firmament like rebel stars!
In warlike measure march on Heaven's throne
Where constellated heroes lie enshrined
On battlefields where greater heroes fell,
Storm walls with verbal cannonballs designed
To soar above the parapets and quell
The bravest hearts with war cries wrought from stone.

Alone, his pen sets unnamed demons free
Damns priests, bedevils cats, bedazzles kings
Unleashes imps and all the wicked things
That dwell beneath the bottom of the sea
Or in those hidden realms where angels fall
And elohim move on the face of night
Destroying worlds in holocausts of fire,
Till dreams, like giant wicker men, ignite
As old and young succumb to blood's desire
Take heed! and hasten to the Devil's call.


HC - April 2015

[bena]

Epidermis



Skin loses its elasticity
like a rubber band
left in the sun.
It will stretch out
but oozes back sans snap.


Freckles that were once cute
become amorphous blobs
of liver spots.


Dry skin wafts off
in the breeze
as if desert heat waves are shoving them.


Wrinkles are only the surface of it all.

[Todd]

This was a day where I liked every one of those, though Dale, Billy and Bena just depressed me (especially with her final line), but that's the pain of aging.

My favorite standouts we're Mercedes for its fun and its wicked ending.

I liked Ray's old gardens probably most of all for the way it seemed to circle in on itself and the sequence "...made older by the sun/made brown like the leaves just lovely writing.

There were truly good moments in all the others: the record line (45/33) by Keith, being old is a consensual thing. the lobe of the ears comparison, the last three lines of ella's first stanza, milo's mountains and stars lines. Paul's I do not age/traditionally

This is a day I would revisit for workshop and revision across the board.