Tag: broom

With two Halloween themed shows coming up – Cabaret Noir and The Beautiful and The Damned – I’ve been indulging my dark side a bit more than usual to write some new, steaming blood-hot pieces. I rarely get seasonal in my writing, though some holidays do slip in, but rarely during that holiday. My few Christmas poems were written in the summer.

I have tried at times to write for subject specific anthologies – food, flowers, love – and have not been all that successful. Give me ten minutes and flowers as a prompt  and I can do well enough but give me two months and roses as a subject and I’m flat. So far I’m having ‘fun’ with blood, guts & zombies.

Finding that balance between sort of scary, funny and over-the-top is always a challenge. Writing in character is easy enough for me, sometimes so easy, and with such relish that people start to think that ‘I’ is ‘me’ – as if poetry can’t be fiction and that every poem is either confession or it’s not authentic.

Okay so my Dad once managed a cemetery and I rode a lawn mower over graves – that doesn’t make me a blood hungry closet ghoul goth – really.

November 1-30 – participating – NaNoWriMo

Decisions

a fresh start

or an old finish

which do I want today

which works best at the start of a new year

at this arbitrarily defined point in time

there are no measurements in reality

we are trapped by minutes and hours

into a sense of things slipping away

of the past being gone

of the future being ripe for measuring

noting the days and weeks

as if they were mounting up to something

but time has no substance

there is no start or finish to it

there is no tactile sense to reassure me

that time is actually real

that the moment isn’t a dream

that the dream isn’t someone else’s

reality isn’t real

time is a psychotic fugue of control

when there is nothing to control

something that can be controlled

it only serves to force monetary value

for this transition from light to dark

we witness and attempt to codify

for the reassurance we have some role to play

in this passage

where as we are merely in it

not a part of it

not propelling compelling or causing it

here we are here

time’s unsuspecting subjects

looking for mercy where there is no capacity for emotion

a transition that continues for its own purpose

not for ours

for hours for minutes

we measure and are trapped

caged by the measuring

caged by the clock

chained to the phases of the moon

struggling for meaning and running out of time