NaPM April 15, 2018

[Todd]

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.


Topic 15: Write a poem inspired by an accident.
Form: any
Line requirements: 8 lines or more


Questions?

[Knot]

Yesterday's News.


A three wheeled vehicle, makes me think of Del Boy,
and I guess it would be funny but the four in it are dead.
The were making 'preparations' said a spokesman, no names
given, as if that was an explanation or even epitaph at all.
But the reason that I mention it, this everyday stupidity,
is the words used in the headline said the explosion,
and their deaths, were (conveniently enough)
a "work accident"

[Richard]

Time of Departure

Leaving would be easier
if I could just think of you as an accident,
the result of a makeshift passion
because I was tired of on the one hand
congratulating the other.
If I could just pretend your blue eyes
weren't mine, that I misplaced them,
then these words would smell of wine,
instead they reek of iron.

[just mercedes]

Yes, that lodge did burn down


The cause? I’ve always blamed it
on the day. First top-to-bottom skiing
of the season, black trails open, even
some powder, early, among the trees.
Perfection.

I worked that night, Lulus then Keller,
others went to Rudy’s for dinner, and sauna,
came to the Keller for the new band.

Afterwards, we still needed to party.
All invited, we crammed into the lodge.
I remember seeing three naked men swing
hand to hand along the roof beams
thirty feet abve me, wearing brown paper bags
on their heads, and the cries of recognition:
Dunning, Farne, Duncan! above the laughter.

I left soon after, had to work that morning,
and woke to the sound of the fire engine.

[dukealien]

Long Tail of Three Cigars


In September, 1862
quite by accident some Federals
discovered Lee’s campaign plan wrapped
around a trio of cigars.

With this, a competent commander
should have beaten Lee
like a drum; McClellan managed
to produce a slaughter and a draw
(technical victory: more Rebs
than Federals were killed,
and Lee withdrew a bit).

Abe Lincoln used this win on points
as occasion to emancipate
slaves only in states which
were in rebellion - leaving owners
in Kentucky and in Maryland
undispossessed.

Such self-bargaining
three-quarter measures
lasted on through Reconstruction
and its ending, Jim Crow,
and its dribbling away,
laws and court cases, all dishonest,
then reversal into quotas
and “diversity” still lacking
candor, honor, and respect.

Three cigars, false victory—
false emancipation,
bitter history.

[CRNDLSM]

I skipped a day of napm
And lengthening the gap, embellishing
Loads of crap, pimento
From my cold wrap. I'm
Afraid I'm not a happy man
This year to just slap 'em
Together every day . Shits too real. Loving what I'm reading though

[RiverNotch]

The End of History: An Accident


Are we here, now, and has history ended?

What do you mean?

Have we moved into the future at last -- or does the very saying root us in our past?

Nothing lasts.

What about something? We're something, aren't we? What we see, what we hear, what we feel: they become memories. But what remembers the memories? Who beats his chest, reads his words, watches the moving picture?

Something has not been proven to last.

Why believe in what has not been proven, when what has is not is, and we know very well has does not last?

But what do we know? What we learned then, we learn not now -- we only remember, and remembering is not knowing. The knowing -- the knowing is fleeting. Perhaps the knowing is even synonymous with nothing: if what we see, what we hear, what we feel, they become memories, then why not our thoughts, our insights? Are they not flashes of light, too, or bathtub screams of "Eureka!", or tingles of excitement down our spines?

Why must remembering not be knowing?

Because I didn't really know you, my love. Otherwise I wouldn't have loved you.

But you know that you did love me?

I remember I did -- perhaps I knew -- but I don't really know. What we remember may have been warped by how we felt, or what we heard, or what we saw: it's easy to gaslight the self.

But does the knowing really matter?

It does -- it does! Knowing is having faith, is believing in the power to know, is believing in that which is known. If I do not know that I loved you, if I do not continually know that I love you -- if the flash of light does not become an image, or the bathtub scream does not become a song -- then what does that memory mean? Nothing, as the knowing is nothing, and if it becomes a foundation for something, that something can easily crumble into dust.

So for you to have loved me, you must still love me?

I must not look back at that love, and see it as an object to be cherished -- it must not be transformed into an object of the past, an object solely to be remembered. It cannot have been the knowledge of something if it was an object in the first place, especially not of love. Yes, for me to have loved you, I must still love you: and it is not the knowing that transforms, but the love itself, just as we grow and develop. Just as you become you, and I become I, and we are always here, now.

So do you still love me?

I don't know. I don't even know if I've become myself, in the moment that passed since we began this conversation.

What do you know?

That nothing lasts.

Are you sure that you aren't just gaslighting yourself? Perhaps what you see as nothing is just you blinding yourself with that damn lamp of yours -- let me see that lamp of yours. What is it? It's not love, surely, and not faith either. Is it knowledge, or the knowing, or the want for the knowing? Is it history, or the end of history, or the end of history transformed into image? What trauma transformed your history into image, your conception of time into something that wasn't, isn't, and willn't be, but is? Why do you compound our conversation now with conversations years back, with our first meeting years back, with you dancing me down some aisle and me hugging you near some gas station?

Hope.

Hope for what?

I don't know. I remember hoping that you would love me, love me the way I loved you -- then I became someone else, myself perhaps, and now I remember that I hoped I would be loved as I loved you -- and now I remember that I had hoped I would love again, as I loved you, as I would be loved like you. But now I don't even hope that, just as I know only that nothing lasts.

But then, my dear, your lamp is no longer hope, but the lack of it.

No, not the lack of it, but the face of it.

Ah! Despair, the bringer of hope, the archangel of death. Surely you do not wish to return to that question again?

But you asked it first: "Are we here, now, and has history ended?" You opened our conversation with it, even as we first met. And the answer, I know now, is obvious: yes, we are here, now, as we will be, as we die each moment and are born each moment, as we kill one moment and give birth the next, but the fact that we live and die and murder and create means that no, my love, history has not ended. History proceeds as it always proceeds, and history is nothing: nothing lasts, and only suicide will end it.

But even then it will not have ended. You said so yourself: "as we die each moment, we are born each moment." And besides, you know full well, your despair only clouds your judgment: it was always hopeless between the two of us. We were not conceived of as tragic lovers, but as two strangers, meeting again and again by accident, not like a dream but like a chronicle.

...I didn't say that.

Or so you remember, but I know. Now enough: you have answered my question. Time again to go.

[Todd]

The Dog Was A Lot Like Lassie

Su Su, the Shih Tzu didn’t save
Timmy from a well or catch
burglars robbing the town bank.
Su Su was as heroic as a war-hero
politician, who had never seen combat.
It resembled Lassie not in looks or temperament,
but in that, it was often mistaken for a girl.
Every day my grandmother would scrunch up
her eyes at that bad girl, who would always
lift her leg and pee on the carpet. 
Only, I could see the satisfaction in his hard
marble eyes telling me that this was no accident.

[vagabond]

left

he turned left
instead of right
he turned left
taking a chance
he turned left
on too narrow a path
he turned left
as if i know why
he turned left
with his tuned up bike
too young
to turn left
right into the lights
how to finish his story
barely beginning
he left

[Keith]

Accidental damage

The cold, beer-cellar bang of a daytime night club,
sticks to the stale ale carpets and painted purple corners,
dark enough to mask the faint smell of bleach and vomit.

But at night, the lights writhe in a snake pit of colour,
sweat arcs the air like blood splatter patterns,
tunes revolve the room. Fuelled by shot glass harmonics,
inhibitions burst in Prosecco bubbles, before they fall flat.

Outside behind the bins the exit sign
dims and glows above a drunken clash
of teeth and hips, stricken sailing ships
split masts wrapped around the midriff.
Below decks the crew blindly follow orders,
shot loaded and fuse set, a single cannon
seperates the wrecks.

The kitchen sink clutter of a dank tiny flat
clings to the smell of damp washing and nappies,
hard enough to hide the false smile of a teenage lament.

But each day, the walls peel away to reveal a darker stain,
he bought her flowers with the first pay cheque, they hang
as a reminder. Fuelled by a cry from a cot, and a worry
that if she starts to shake she may never stop.