Dream

There was terror
Mass delusions and countless bodies.

He ripped through europe in half.
One corner to the next in a matter of time.

Florida is gone.
Snapped off by him.
Texas sea coast split in two.

Ripping the US in half.

Watched on the news with Dan Rather
mockering how it could not be.
He said it couldn't happen.
Yet I watched on the screen as it did.

Now we seek shelter because our turn is next.

Creative Writing: Week 2

Bruce Beasley - Self Portrait in Ink

Other Links: A Reading Podcast

I chose this poem from the reading because I liked the imagery and comparison. In The Self-Portrait in Ink, Beasley talks first about an octopus who blasts its ink into the water. The ink, naturally, a defensive thing for the octopus vanishes anything around it. The dark deep image of the ocean spotted with a cloud of bluish-black color. He then talks about the ink smudged on his fingertip. As a left handed writer, I can visualize the ink on the finger. As I write ink blots its image, sometimes even mimicking the words and letters I write onto the side of my hand as it glides across the words I just wrote. If you think about it, an octopus spitted ink into the clear water is the same an ink smudges from a pen on a blank piece of paper.

Upon reading more his poetry I find a lot of it dark yet true. He has the ability to see through this black cloud for what it is and relating to the human world. I enjoyed how he related the ink from the octopus and the pen. It is almost as if he is talking about life. Not your typical life, but that lost place in your mind when you become entrapped into the spirit of ones true self. He is able to humanize and directly relate things we don't think of, to something we can see in our mind.

Creative Writing: Week 1

Cleopatra Mathis: Moonsnail

Other Links: Audio Ploughshares

In Mathis's poem Moonsnail, she talks about the moonsnail's shape, color and how one would expect it to feel if they ran their hand next to it. How it is beautiful and the reader becomes delited at the narrative description. The color how it traveled from aways upon the ocean water to land on the sandy area. She finds a group of them. I enjoyed this poem because I become so entrapped in something and fail to think of the other things. I too can lost in the look of something. Maybe not a moonsnail, but an broken egg or dried up sponges and seaweed from the ocean.

Things change in the poem when she divulges that she does not like the empty ones per se; the shell still needs to be attached to the body so she can flip them. Then after the sun bakes them and the ants go away will a load on their back she can shake to rest, leaving a nice fresh look inside the shell. I posted the pictures above so others who might not know what a moonsnail was. :)