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nichole r Jun 2014
one day my teacher asked me
why I always wrote in lowercase letters
her glasses perched on the top of her beak
she squawked,
"you were not taught that in school, young lady.
it is not proper, young lady."

and I gripped my pen tighter
or maybe a little looser
it's hard to tell lately.

but I looked in to her black beady eyes
and disapproving frowny face
and whispered "see how I am whispering
do you see how you are leaning closer
like I have a secret
more intimate, correct?
that is my writing:
an intimate secret.
for you"
Q  Dec 2013
lower-case slices
Q Dec 2013
I used to do it slow
Drag the knife like a violin bow
Just to see my blood
Spill out the way it should

slices in lowercase
BLOOD pours in caps
pAiN is togglecase
CaLm is toggled opposite

I used to feel spite
Nipping at my heart day and night
But then I found the knife
And everything was alright

slices in lowercase
BLOOD pours in caps
pAiN is togglecase
CaLm is toggled opposite

I used to be so good
Better than any child ever could
And then the pAiN found me
So dense, it is, I cannot see

slices in lowercase
BLOOD pours in caps
pAiN is togglecase
CaLm is toggled opposite

I used to write letters
And hope they'd know me better
When I finally left this world
Ripped free like an oyster's pearl

slices in lowercase
BLOOD pours in caps
pAiN is togglecase
CaLm is toggled opposite

I'm a different person now.
I'm no longer in pAiN
I'm living in apathy
In ever-constant rain

Slices are merely cuts
And blood is nothing big
Pain is simply life
And calm is nonexistent

The method behind the madness
Always shows in the end
I cut my arms to see my blood,
Feel the pain and realize I'm alive again.
no one  May 2014
lowercase
no one May 2014
such a small word
blending into the background
always making an appearance
but never recognized
so used
so beaten up
so lost among the swirling fog
such a simple concept
but as familiar to us as water
slowly trickling over our sentences
over our words
embellishing our writing without us even knowing
sometimes
i like to think
that we should become more aware
of the little things
of the tiny details
of the lowercase
in our lives



-k.l.
Em Glass  Jan 2014
lowercase
Em Glass Jan 2014
i.
as we get bigger
our handwriting gets
smaller

ii.
stars are bigger than
the sky itself
but their light forces
the past into the present
and forces our wishes
into the past

iii.
there are so many
women out there with
my name but
this increases the likelihood
that you've said it
out loud
and identified me
with sound as i have
you
sound travels slower
than light but we are never
alone

iv.
she showed me your
picture with some words
square tight around it
and two dates in the caption
and said
nothing is ever worth this
until i wanted to reach
into the earth just to
cover your ears

v.
the dementors couldn't
distinguish between crouch
and his mother because
this illness doesn't discriminate
so i don't know why
people do

vi.
you and even
i
are lowercase letters
today
with no punctuation
r i p
emma jane Jun 2015
I don't expect you to get why I have such a hard time moving on, forgiving.

But I also don't expect you to get how bad it hurt.

How it tore me apart.
How your four letter word burned.
1. u
2. g
3. l
4. y

How much that twisted
what I saw in the mirror.
And how it killed me to look at those lowercase ls on my wrist and have them spell
fat
and
ugly
and
you
will
never
change...

Maybe I don't get it either, maybe I don't understand why I let it hurt me.

But it did

and
now
we're
here.

Wondering what happened to
our first love.
urg
Jenna Aug 2015
english teachers detest me
because i never capitalize my i’s
but they never once bothered
to come and ask me why

uppercase is a privilege
at least, it is in my mind.
it’s reserved for war heroes
or a painter who is blind

i have done nothing remarkable
i have hardly even tried
everything good i’ve done
is eventually cast aside

why do i deserve an uppercase?
or for that matter, why do you?
we’ve done plenty of bad
when there’s plenty of good to do

english teachers detest me
because i never capitalize my i’s
but i will have reason to someday
and i hope that is not a lie
jonchius  Sep 2015
201509-w2
jonchius Sep 2015
resuming textual trip
testing experimental procedures
visualizing model tsunami
augmenting facetious environment
catching abstract architecture
noticing rhythmic exchange
projecting subtextual database
airhorning reggae royalty
adding atypical party
resolving twitter question
noticing emotional mission
awaiting emotional dialect
installing metaphorical experiment
intensifying animated trip
displaying dynamic victory
programming abstract development
releasing emotional exchange
deriving fata morgana
glorifying referential sequence
intensifying facetious map
noticing harmonic trip
observing radical ratio
compiling nomadic message
predating google rebranding
reticulating facetious panda
using hyperreal feedback
exploring virtual panda
speculating graphic gallery
throwing mundane exception
targeting graphic experiment
replenishing emotional trap
localizing asemic animal
dropping rhythmic trip
propagating immortal experiment
displaying lowercase database
invading orange bubbles
crashing animated trip
running conceptual topography
remembering collapsed buildings
crashing hyperreal coverage
propagating hyperreal stipulation
finishing western library
envisioning neon tessellation
reciprocating network likes
processing animated device
releasing haptic quality
examining building seven
awaiting rhapsodical ratio
sampling death sauce
sensing lowercase clone
examining symbolic tour
processing potential development
encapsulating spatial lottery
displaying digital paragraph
reticulating theoretical source
perpetuating western paragraph
transmitting monochromatic structure
anticipating ambient quality
transmitting asemic environment
intensifying atomic quality
remastering history poem
keeping future light
hypothesizing eternal game
using future library
rearranging masonic language
transmitting masonic development
continuing ceremonial ritual
questioning party's legitimacy
deferring western coverage
finishing asemic hypertext
mollifying ostentatious presence
synthesizing allegorical icon
forming categorical unions
sketching app wireframe
programming immortal repository
second week of September 2015
Samm Marie May 2016
i sit in the background
and watch the world continuously pass me by
i help everyone around me advance
as fast as they can
as fast as they want

i'm hidden in a corner
waiting for it to be my turn
but as soon as i help excel one person
another fills the void
another calls for my aid

i lie in bed at night
and realize i am doing nothing with my life
until i remember i live vicariously
through everyone i assist
through every action i help create

i awake in the morning
and i question my purpose in this world
because i am a lowercase kind of a person
living in a capital case kind of world
living in a show off your greatness kind of life
Vivian Oct 2013
just another lovesick poem
written by another sad boy
about
being alone or
rejected or
"in love"
as if any of you
*******
have the experience
to look at another human
and know
to the depths of your soul
that you are
in love
all lowercase
because
love isn't trumpets and fanfare
love is
quiet mornings and
simple dinners and
a willingness to be
vulnerable
love is
"hi babe
I know you've had a rough day at work
so you just lay there and
let me make you
***"
or
"I'm gonna make you dinner
and then
I'm gonna tie you up and
*******"
love is not
what we were taught in church or
on the Disney Channel or
from a Stephanie Meyers novel
love is not
what your parents told you
"wait to have *** until you're
married"
abstinence is good
condoms are bad
your *** should be vanilla
men are dominant
women are submissive
missionary is the only position
*** is about procreation not pleasure
love is self defined; find it for yourself.
LJW Feb 2014
I've given poetry readings where less than a handful of people were present. It's a humbling experience. It’s also a deeply familiar experience.

"Poetry is useless," poet Geoffrey ****** said in a 2013 interview, "but it is useless the way the soul is useless—it is unnecessary, but we would not be what we are without it."

I was raised a Roman Catholic, and though I don’t go to Mass regularly anymore, I still remember early mornings during Advent when I went to liturgies at my parochial school. It was part of my offering—the sacrifice I made to honor the impending birth of the Savior—along with giving up candy at Lent. So few people attended at that hour that the priest turned on only a few lights near the altar. Approaching the front of the church, my plastic book bag rustling against my winter coat, I felt as if I were nearing the seashore at sunrise: the silhouettes of old widows on their kneelers at low tide, waiting for the priest to come in, starting the ritual in plain, unsung vernacular. No organist to blast us into reverence. No procession.

Every day, all over the world, these sparsely attended ceremonies still happen. Masses are said. Poetry is read. Poems are written on screens and scraps of paper. When I retire for the day, I move into a meditative, solitary, poetic space. These are the central filaments burning through my life, and the longer I live, the more they seem to be fused together.

Poetry is marginal, thankless, untethered from fame and fortune; it's also gut level, urgent, private yet yearning for connection. In all these ways, it's like prayer for me. I’m a not-quite-lapsed Catholic with Zen leanings, but I’ll always pray—and I’ll always write poems. Writing hasn’t brought me the Poetry Jackpot I once pursued, but it draws on the same inner wiring that flickers when I pray.        

• • •

In the 2012 collection A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, nineteen contemporary American poets, from Buddhist to Wiccan to Christian, discuss how their artistic and spiritual lives inform one another. Kazim Ali, who was raised a Shia Muslim, observes in his essay “Doubt and Seeking”:

[Prayer is] speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you're allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you're allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don't really think you're going to be answered. You'll either get what you want or you won't.

You could replace the word "prayer" with "poetry" with little or no loss of meaning. I'd even go so far as to say that submitting my work to a journal often feels like this, too. Sometimes, when I get an answer in the form of an acceptance, I'm stunned.

"I never think of a possible God reading my poems, although the gods used to love the arts,” writes ***** Howe in her essay "Footsteps over Ground." She adds:

Poetry could be spoken into a well, of course, and drop like a penny into the black water. Sometimes I think that there is a heaven for poems and novels and music and dance and paintings, but they might only be hard-worked sparks off a great mill, which may add up to a whole-cloth in the infinite.

And here, you could easily replace the word "poetry" with "prayer." The penny falling to the bottom of a well is more often what we experience. But both poetry and prayer are things humans have learned to do in order to go on. Doubt is a given, but we do get to choose what it is we doubt.

A God in the House Book Cover
Quite a few authors in A God in the House (Howe, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirschfield, Christian Wiman) invoke the spiritual writing of Simone Weil, including her assertion that "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." This sounds like the Zen concept of mindfulness. And it broadens the possibility for poetry as prayer, regardless of content, since writing poetry is an act of acute mindfulness. We mostly use words in the practical world to persuade or communicate, but prayers in various religious traditions can be lamentations of great sorrow. Help me, save me, take this pain away—I am in agony. In a church or a temple or a mosque, such prayerful lamentation is viewed as a form of expression for its own good, even when it doesn't lead immediately to a change of emotional state.

Perhaps the unmixed attention Weil wrote of is a unity of intention and utterance that’s far too rare in our own lives. We seldom match what we think or feel with what we actually say. When it happens spontaneously in poetry or prayer—Allen Ginsberg's "First thought, best thought" ideal —it feels like a miracle, as do all the moments when I manage to get out of my own way as a poet.

Many people who pray don’t envision a clear image of whom or what they’re praying to. But poets often have some sense of their potential readers. There are authorities whose approval I've tried to win or simply people I've tried to please: teachers, fellow writers, editors, contest judges—even my uncle, who actually reads my poems when they appear in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he used to work.

And yet, my most immersed writing is not done with those real faces in mind. I write to the same general entity to which I pray. It's as if the dome of my skull extends to the ceiling of the room I'm in, then to the dome of the sky and outward. It’s like the musings I had as a child lying awake at night, when my imagination took me to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. But then I emerge from this wide-open state and begin thinking about possible readers—and the faces appear.

This might also be where the magic ends.

• • •

I write poetry because it’s what I do, just as frogs croak and mathematicians ponder numbers. Poetry draws on something in me that has persisted over time, even as I’ve distracted myself with other goals, demands, and purposes; even as I’ve been forced by circumstance to strip writing poetry of certain expectations.

"Life on a Lily Pad" © Michelle Tribe
"Life on a Lily Pad"
© Michelle Tribe
At 21, I was sure I’d publish my first book before I was 25. I’m past my forties now and have yet to find a publisher for a book-length collection, though I've published more than a hundred individual poems and two chapbooks. So, if a “real” book is the equivalent of receiving indisputable evidence that your prayers are being answered, I’m still waiting.

It hasn’t been easy to shed the bitter urgency I’ve felt on learning that one of my manuscripts was a finalist in this or that contest, but was not the winner. Writing in order to attain external success can be as tainted and brittle as saying a prayer that, in truth, is more like a command: (Please), God, let me get through this difficulty (or else)—

Or else what? It’s a false threat, if there’s little else left to do but pray. When my partner is in the ICU, his lungs full of fluid backed up from a defective aortic valve; when my nephew is deployed to Afghanistan; when an ex is drowning in his addiction; when I hit a dead end in my job and don’t think I can do it one more day—every effort to imagine that these things might be gotten through is a kind of prayer that helps me weather a life over which I have little control.

Repeated disappointment in my quest to hit the Poetry Jackpot has taught me to recast the jackpot in the lowercase—locating it not in the outcome but in the act of writing itself, sorting out the healthy from the unhealthy intentions for doing it. Of course, this shift in perspective was not as neat as the preceding sentence makes it seem. There were years of thrashing about, of turning over stones and even throwing them, then moments of exhaustion when I just barely heard the message from within:

This is too fragile and fraught to be something that guides your whole life.

I didn't hear those words, exactly—and this is important. For decades, I’ve made my living as a writer. But I can't manipulate or edit total gut realizations. I can throw words at them, but it would be like shaking a water bottle at a forest fire; at best, I can chase the feeling with metaphors: It's like this—no, like this—or like this.

So, odd as this sounds for a poet, I now seek wordlessness. When I meditate, I intercept hundreds of times the impulse to shape a perception into words. Reduced to basics, the challenge facing any writer is knowing what to say—and what not to.

• • •

To read or listen to poetry requires unmixed attention just as writing it does. And when a poem is read aloud, there's a communal, at times ritualistic, element that can make a reading feel like collective prayer, even if there are only a few listeners in the audience or I’m listening by myself.

"Allen Ginsberg" © MDCArchives
Allen Ginsberg
© MDCArchives
When I want to feel moved and enlarged, all I have to do is play Patti Smith's rendition of Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl." His long list poem from 1955 gathers people, places, objects, and abstractions onto a single exuberant altar. It’s certainly a prayer, one that opens this way:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and **** and hand and ******* holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

Some parts of Ginsberg's list ("forgiveness! charity! faith! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!") belong in any conventional catalogue of what a prayer celebrates as sacred. Other profane elements ("the ***** of the grandfathers of Kansas!") gain admission because they are swept up into his ritualistic roll call.

I can easily parody Ginsberg's litany: Holy the Dairy Queen, holy the barns of the Amish where cheese is releasing its ambitious stench, holy the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Internet. But reading the poem aloud feels to me the way putting on ritual garments must to a shaman or rabbi or priest. Watching Patti Smith perform the poem (various versions are available on YouTube), I get shivers seeing how it transforms her, and it's clear why she titled her treatment of the poem "Spell."

A parody can't do that. It can't manifest as the palpable unity of intention and utterance. It can't do what Emily Dickinson famously said that poetry did to her:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only [ways] I know it. Is there any other way.

Like the process of prayer—to God, to a better and bigger self, to the atmosphere—writing can be a step toward unifying heart, mind, body, universe. Ginsberg's frenzied catalogue ends on "brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul"; Eliot's The Waste Land on "shantih," or "the peace that surpasseth understanding." Neither bang nor whimper, endings like these are at once humble and tenacious. They say "Amen" and step aside so that a greater wordlessness can work its magic.
From the website http://talkingwriting.com/poetry-prayer
ca May 2015
i only write in capital letters for a purpose
when my words are silent, i don't speak up
capitalization is symbolism for power

for cries and outbursts of dreams spread forth and shot down
because of the american dream

i only write in capital letters WHEN I WANT TO BE HEARD
to put forth an emphasis on my actions, to mask true emotions through my powerful speech

i want to write your name in capitals just so you know what you mean to me

(YOU)
(YOU)
(YOU)

YOU are ENOUGH
poem a day: may: day 11
Irate Watcher  Jan 2015
lowercase
Irate Watcher Jan 2015
chocolate-coated infancy
spilled torn sharkbit souls
hallucinating the
orange-creamsicle sunrise,
mushroomming cotton-candylike.
Sanctified, the horizon
of dog lovers empty,
but leashes lashing the common man,
for he is no icon.
Trying something new.

— The End —