'Popularity Contest' is the name of the exercise

I have this book called Smash Poetry and it's got some very quirky exercises in it but because I've been a bit shaken up lately my attempts to be write from my scrambled mind have been futile, so this particular task attracted me. I don't need to explain what it is- you'll figure it out.

I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.
You're barking up the wrong tree.
Take a sad song and make it better.
He's got a chip on his shoulder.
Live and let live.
The play's the thing to catch the conscience of the king.
Dying is an art, like everything else.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond-
The flowers you planted, mama, in the backyard, all died when you went away.
This the stuff that dreams are are made on.
Two heads are better than one.
I think I made you up inside my head.
An eye for an eye and the world goes blind.
The lights are on and no one's home.
So the women come and go, talking of Michael Angelo.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed my madness.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
If I should die, think only this of me-
Catch 22.
Curiosity killed the cat.
I took the road less travelled.
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.
I carry your heart in my heart.

Home

The daisies on the heath are growing tall.
I walked through the grass, a thistle made me fall.

Maybe this is just how it goes.
The back and forth that life throws.
And maybe that's why I know
That I'm just starting to grow,
Just starting to learn to throw,
Until at long last I can show-

That I'm coming home.
I didn't think I would dare.
Didn't think I'd ever go home.
Thought I was already there.
With open eyes, I wasn't there.
With open eyes, too much, I care.

The love in your words makes my world warm.
When I wake up at six I think of you at dawn.

And you're not just my mother
And I've been such a bother.
I wouldn't debate what you say
If you wanted me to go away.
You're stronger than you portray
And I just hope that someday-

When I am truly home.
You will teach me how to cope.
You welcomed me back home.
I thought that I'd lost your hope.
I look at you and I'm there.
I look at you and I'm not scared.
I look at you and I'm cared.

When you came, wrapped me up and I felt your tears
I didn't expect you to forgive those unspoken years.

I do still need to heal and maybe it's not real.
But forgiveness is absolute
And that's saved me more than truth.
Now I'm welcome back home,
I don't foresee more hungry cold
Just a warmth and smile and glow-
So chaos, give me a throw.

I'm landing back home.
I've been away too long.
I feel the warmth at home.
Like an Otis Redding Song.
This is where I grew strong.
This is where I belong

I look at you and you care.
You look at me and I care.

I Need A Phone Call

Not poetry really, just something I just had to get off my chest before I go to bed.
Thank you, you know who you are.

There is that concept that they name 'stranger danger'
and of course, thunder can clap and the unfamiliar
can hurt you. Detectives examining bruises,
police stations in general; I'm blessed to have someone
there to hold me while I fell into a broken leaf.
But danger doesn't always come from storms
or from strangers. Sometimes it comes at the hands
of the familiar, of those who you thought loved you.
It's been a long time since the first stranger.
Even longer since the familiar.
People are good. They are basically good.
People are good. They are basically good.

A phone conversation today meant the world to me.
Reminded me of what happened, what I came out of.
Felt my heart breaking a little- the voice that spoke to me.
It's been over a decade since we knew each other,
and yet I want to hang on to every word,
and I want to speak of things I have so long buried.
Friendship works that way, I am sure of it.
People are good. They are basically good.

i'll never give up on that.

Haik-true

The fear I'll become
who I am most afraid of
keeps me up at night.

Free writing

The hours strike apart like broken plates because
my hands are familiar with the anxieities.
the best intentions of mine get tangled up
and I wonder if cutting myself open would help just to show
what’s true about what I really mean, underneath, inside.

The terror bleeds through without a sound or word.
It’s just a simple unravelling. But this is nothing
compared to the world, the television and sweet sweepers
and being bitten by memories of nightmares with eyes open.
Thousands upon thousands of circles, futility and reflection:
unchangeable. I wonder why he wrote that it’s April
that is he cruellest month when any of them, any month
or cycle of the moon, can be cruel and can be kind or both?

Will we see parts of the universe through a telescope?
Transcend, transport, escape? We can see patterns all over.
We’ll look for stars, even the dead ones staying on to carry time.

I have been betrayed before. Sometimes I ought to be wary of hoping.
At least I remember to breathe and look up at the city blocks
scraping the sky, instead of at my shoes  Reason clouds the heart,
or the other way around. At night it’s fragile evocations,
a mixing of memories and hallucinations of winter dawn.

Will it bloom this year? The broken gate from where words flow
without resoution? No answers. No reason, that only there with emotion.
There are answers but all answers are followed by doubts
and different answers to the same questions.

Eventually I will write about the history of fire escapes,
the mysteries of the two hemispheres together and apart
and how they lateralise when the words and visions overtake us.
And the forever-land of forgiveness I'll find without forgetting the path.
The delusion of freedom, and wanting to believe- I couldn’t count
all the things I’d like to believe. Then there’s. wondering what is real.
He says it’s nothing and everything is a hologram.
I don’t know much but I know I’m not hollow, and whether or not
I’m real or any of this is, I’m glad to see what I see as I see it.

In Berlin

In Berlin I hear the art on the brick walls is better
than you might find in a gallery, and everybody recycles
and they even dispense clean needles for the local junkies.
I’d like to go someday. Maybe I’d learn something.

At least it might be worth the weight, carrying names,
toting around the hundreds of faces I’ll never forget
and having to hold on to the ones that failed me,
or the ones that I failed.

Two- A Message; Not Today (both using the Gyrin/Burroughs cut up method to some extent, taking the new formations/juxtapositions/images not for the purpose of 'beating the machine' but to express newest felt truths by means of 'cutting up' the past)

I heard you were married and then
left behind and you were afflicted
and I never got to say I’m sorry-
never got to tell you about
the black echo, then floods of light
that all calls to the heart.
Never got to tell you the message
I should have when I did not answer
and pretended to be unafflicted:
you don’t dust it all off like cat hair-
it is the door you leave through.


Eventually, dusting off, the emptiness of eyes,
the time gathering in between the pages of books-
where had they gone, those mornings of smoke
and flower petals and fool’s gold? Why is it now
just choking and tiny wounds, turning white?
I can’t see them. I should be able to, I’ve known enough.
The door is broken. The alarm is ringing.
The wound from the old loneliness is one black hole
pooling my introverted silence into the floor,
a collection of stupid words and jumbled reveries.
Suddenly I’m on an edge and I can’t breathe.
Fear like that burns and folds into the clouds
until the even sky looks wrong. But still, I can’t do it-
I can’t bury every day as though somehow
my hands have become portals to places where
I was another me and I never had nightmares,
and to places where time to today didn’t happen,
not as I saw it through eyes wide and a halo of gold
sometimes, then sometimes through the shadows
carried by the hauntings. I started over once,
when my mind fell apart and when I pulled back the veil,
saw for the first time that I did not exist without it.
I started over but I do hold the memories in my luggage,
making my weak backbone buckle, but hauled up
on genuine shoulders. The kind you can cry and laugh on.
I can breathe now. Something as simple as speaking
has made me brave, and I am not broken, not today.