2024 NaPM 30 April

[RiverNotch]

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.

Write a poem about innocence regained.

FORM: As with days 7 and 8, the form you used for the prompt on the 1st of April is the form you have to use now. Hope you didn't pick something too tough xD

[Mark A Becker]

playing catch

I once again feel
life’s easy as playing catch-
a refreshing breeze

teaching you the game I love
breaking in your brand new glove

tanka

[busker]

A lover’s note

There are ends to intimacy
on the internet, my lover
across the seas, in your lacy
lingerie or corset, in corn stover
land, Wisconsin (Dorset)
or Kentucky, where the hillbilly clans
hunt for ones such as I,
who doth with their sister wives lie.

There are ends to what I can tell thee,
there are ends to what I’d like to.
For after all, to bell thee
and attain what I’d call strike two
is the ultimate goal, according to reddit.
To woo it and to bed it
is what alpha males do, I’m told.
You’re friendzoned if you aren’t bold,
and who wants to be friends with a chick?
If you don’t want someone sexually
but merely intellectually,
they’re better off having a dick.

And following Reddit’s advice, my lover,
I am not your brother
but a red blooded male with a prick
that wants to insert it
in your racy bits.
They say tasty tits
are a myth, but I differ,
who is no depraved sniffer
of Victorian unmentionables 
but a respectable man with a jaw
not chiselled like David’s, but a maw
gaping like Covid, for your kiss.
And the bliss that’s a chainsaw 
made in Texas, no less.
Not bought in Marrakech 
and imported to Dallas,
to be offered up to Pallas,
but a local make that longs for your elfin flesh.

[RiverNotch]

If ever he was condemned by his genetics
to suffer from dementia, he broke his face
and died of stress in the overfull
emergency room before we knew.

Instead, there were only the times
when the older sister who'd cared for him
during the war like a mother
was rolled into the crematory furnace

or when right before his end,
after a couple of nights' oscillation
between crying out in pain and cussing out those around him,
he quietly apologized,

that we saw my grandpa so regain
his innocence.

I hate that, to keep the sonnet form (which, quite frankly, is better), I had to exclude:

or when his prodigal daughter, the youngest,
suffered a stroke before the two older,

[dukealien]

Last Times


Once innocence is lost it cannot be
regained - experience puts paid to it...
but are there mechanisms by which we
repair our injuries by grace and wit?

Consider, for example, pardoning
a fault or mischief with the firm intent
to carry on without remembering -
this once - when they admit it and repent.

Forgiveness, if reciprocated, may
thus seal a wrong as if it had not been
committed.  And regardless of what they
do next, a virgin chapter can begin.

[TranquillityBase]

I am blank, trigger happy and assured
that words can calculate my innocence,
never really lost, just crushed beneath
the evidence of my persistent folly.
My everyday clothes are stained with blood
and ashes, for my waking life seems more
a slaughterhouse than a casual stroll
past Eden’s open glades where the menace
of knowing the wrong thing means trouble.
These are the only thoughts left standing
so I go with my gut and hang them out
like prayer flags whose every thread
is a plea for forgiveness, taken by the wind.
They fly, free from the ghost of my brain.

[Tiger the Lion]

Hiz Story

So tigers never really smoked?

                                            not even once upon a time?

I hear your coughs about a hoax
but tigers clearly used to smoke.

I've often heard them hack and choke
                                                                                     yet roar toward a finish line
                                                                                                                       like tigers who had never smoked,

not even once upon a time.



*** more triolet games

[Wjames]

I'm cheating and only wrote one stanza, but I like this stanza on it's own.
---

When flapjacks form a rested yawn
of dampened earth in bloom at dawn,
the sparrow sings a paragon
of better lies ahead.

[DisposeThisProse]

Hiz Story

So tigers never really smoked?

                                            not even once upon a time?

I hear your coughs about a hoax
but tigers clearly used to smoke.

I've often heard them hack and choke
                                                                                     yet roar toward a finish line
                                                                                                                       like tigers who had never smoked,

not even once upon a time.

**********
Wow that was a really cool poem.  I think the abstract is appealing and it bodies, like when you start talking about how they "yet roar toward a finish line."  And I like how you answered your own question "not even once upon a time."

*** more triolet games