Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
ConnectHook Apr 2023
With a host of furious fancies
Whereof  I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander
.

                                    Tom O’Bedlam

Born of tobacco, borne on air,
Heeding the piper’s fragrant call,
Rising, as they lose their form
Circles waft aloft then fall
Shimmering ghosts of dead ideals
Magnificent in their demise
(Unlike most human enterprise.)

Wraiths emerge, phantasms form, mutating, dissipating; organic ephemera swirl and dissolve, interpenetrate in airborne Eros, a pas de deux to the power of three, wherein polylectic philosophy is revealed as a dissolving circle:

Rings must rise. There are fires to stoke:
An unnameable emotion
Mutability in motion…
Pipe enthroned in seraphic smoke.
The glowing altar: an abyss
As coals illuminate the dark
The wicked burn: a smoldering spark
Below the briar’s rim, a hiss . . .
Omniscience, celebrated, burns
To send forth children on the air
While grace eternally returns
Specifically to . . .  everywhere.
Exhaled, philosophy’s sad ghosts
Bow down before the Lord of Hosts.
ConnectHook Apr 2023
Zhey is to Them as Zhee is to It...
The argument: God got it wrong.
Your singular identikit:
A plural and psychotic song
The selfish language of the young:
Confusion -- that’s your mother tongue.

The pronoun wars have lost the day.
We shall not call you what you wish,
Nor let you serve yourself this way
From your strange cracked and leaking dish.
Freshmen claim to be dysphoric,
Acting merely sophomoric.

We get it. You’re a special kid.
You came, confused, from mama’s womb
With daddy’s chromosomes outbid
By better buyers, we assume.
Have your tantrum—we won’t take it.
Girls are girls and boys can’t fake it.

Regardless how you cut and paste
Or wax autistic at your foes . . .
Reality can’t be defaced
And sin’s rebellion ever shows.
Your gender was confirmed at birth
When you arrived on God’s green earth.

Proud warrior of the gender war:
Change Romance languages, and ***.
Then count your chromosomes once more…
Till Y no longer follows X,
The Lord is God. That does not change
His truth has power to derange.
DYSPHORIC:
adjective; pertaining to dysphoria,
or of being in a state of dysphoria
ConnectHook Apr 2023
Set your alarms, y'all. I'm mad WOKE.
Order Chinese—send in the clowns.
(General Tso, you know, was white . . .
Africa's in on the corporate joke)
And every lion-tamer frowns.
Sleeping late on Sabbath morning
You might miss my woke-*** warning;
Time for you to get it right.
Soccer moms talked on, inept
Wokesplaining Blackness to the slept.

Hoping lion's would not bite'em,
Lambs were roaring, panthers leapt.
(Lamb-chops are a pricey item...)
Blind-men too, received their sight,
Discovering new shades of white,
As one young sheep, determined, kept
Wokesplaining Blackness to the slept.

War on Whiteness! Dark the night.
Time to dis-empower their light.
Pull the plug on those Caucasians;
Afro-centrify all Asians!
Full-court press, seconds remaining
Final quarter: there's the game
Light-skinned Latins start complaining
People of color hold no grudge;
Whitey look for who to blame.
Take notes, brother. Here come the judge.
Fools held court. The jury prepped:
Wokesplaining Blackness to the slept.

Then— the basketball was ended.
Cross-country skiing now the rage.
Black was under-represented;
Social justice facts presented:
Winter sports now turned the page.
Nordic culture was up-ended.
Pride makes possible all, except
Wokesplaining Blackness to the slept.

St. George Floyd is celebrated
Neighborhoods get burned to ashes
Racist rioters compensated
Whiteness hits the brakes—and crashes.
Mary murmured . . . Jesus wept
Wokesplaining Blackness to the slept.
Stay woke, y'all
ConnectHook Apr 2023
The wokeness is so deep: they're sleeping.
Clueless legions are on the march . . .
Ignorance has Wisdom weeping;
The wokeness is so deep they're sleeping
Through the harvest, and the reaping.
Behold the view from Titus's arch:
The wokeness is so deep they're sleeping—
Clueless legions are on the march.
PROMPT #4 
try writing triolets. A triolet is an eight-line poem.
All the lines are in iambic tetramenter (for a total of eight syllables per line),
and the first, fourth, and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines.
This means that the poem begins and ends with the same couplet.
ConnectHook Apr 2023
Woman, thy nastiness to me
Is like old Nikes on the floor
Where sweat and mildew disagree
And force me to the nearest door
A stench I can't ignore.

Your heart weighs less than styrofoam,
Thy stinking feet, thy scowling face,
Belong in some state nursing home . . .
Free me up some breathing space,
You mean-hair clipped-face gnome.

Lo, in yon dark recliner-chair
How meatloaf-like I see thee slump,
Upon your wide immobile ****,
Ah! Harpie of the greasy hair
Unholy Frump!
PROMPT #3

Find a poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite.

To Helen (E.A. Poe)
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
ConnectHook Apr 2023
The problem you have is you've nothing to say.
These MFA promptings are good for a yawn..
So scribble some **** and then call it a day
Since most of your readers have long since moved on.
Today’s prompt asks you to begin by picking 5-10 words from the following list.
Next, write out a question for each word that you’ve selected (e.g., what is seaweed?)
owl / generator / fog / river / clove / miracle / cyclops / oyster / mercurial / seaweed / gutter / artillery / salt / elusive / thunder / ghost / acorn / cheese / longing / cowbird / truffle / quahog / song
Now for each question, write a one-line answer.
Try to make the answer an image, and don’t worry about strict logic.
These are surrealist answers, after all!
After you’ve written out your series of questions and answers, place all the answers, without the questions, on a new page. See if you can make a poem of just the answers. You may find that what you have is very beautifully mysterious, and somehow has its own logic.
ConnectHook Apr 2023
Seven Crystal ***** break first, with terrors—
Lightning vaporizes Rascar Capac
And leads us south into Andean errors
While the maidens chant to Pachacamac.

You have to have read it to have known it;
The Inca splendor, glimpsed in perfect art.
Truth recognized, and Hergé has shown it . . .
Calculus and Haddock: both play their part.
PROMPT #1:
try to write a poem based on a book cover
Next page