Personal Challenge #1 for 2014

fair use image

Welcome, Toads and Visitors, to the imaginary garden with real toads.

Kerry, aka HeadMistress Toad, has elected - in the spirit of the new year (2014 in the common, or Christian calendar, as opposed to, say, the Lunar or Chinese calendar where it will be 4712 on January 31st, or the Jewish calendar, where New Year’s Eve, 5775 isn’t until next September 24th) - to re-invigorate a Garden tradition:

The Personal Challenge, last seen in these parts way back in 2012 (4710/5773) (cue up the Victrola, let down the swing-arm to the vinyl... dunh dunh DUNH). That is, prior to my hopping into the garden.

Some of these challenges were quite deliciously wicked. (Pay a visit to the archives and you'll see - I highly recommend it!)

HeadMistress Toad must have been feeling benevolent, since her task to me is simply this (and so I quote) (not that I will be so benign, fellow to-be-victim Toad): 

"Here is my challenge for you: I have selected 3 of D.H. Lawrence's poems and created a small word pool from each one. I want you to select one of the choices I have given and use at least 9 (of 10) words in a poem of your own. Alternately, you can select three words from each list and slam them together in your poem. Up to you..."

Enough parentheses.

Frankenstein, as it were, cobbled by the mad doctor/poet from the flesh of Lawrence’s pens. Being stubborn and vain, I used all 30. Please see below the post to view the seed poems and selected words.

Thank you for coming this far; please visit the sidebar, where each Toad's own blog is featured, and hop over to read their pens.

Spoils

The new year slipped
in, no stranger
to the chaos of clinked flutes and ambiguous hospitality
painted on the hollow
cheeks of somebody – everybody – who fled exile
from their usual blinked screens this speckled night
(like every other
but for the last
digit)

Keen-eyed, the year looked up
then winged a curving arc
between ottoman and chaise
to the carob-tree decked in borrowed hair-fine tinsel, a groomed
specimen of sober patience, presentable in her bark-chip skirt,
leaves plucked clean as brows

Unobserved together
they swayed as to Sinatra in a bygone day
until the never-subtle crowd
(a singular beast lapping bubbly with a two-forked tongue,
an undivided seething eddy of flesh-gouged-sequins
groaning and tramping the old its annual death-
throes, bones melting with the usual slackness
reserved for one liquidly cheering the red end)
suddenly fissured - a crack in the make-up -
a chiming perversity cleaving the collective shimmer
into suddenly self-aware units

and the year snapped
to, wedged itself (pierce as a tack)
into the numbed, personal grey
residue that always gathers
when the gathering convulses to solitude

As every w(ye)ar has its spoils,
every party has its villains to be avoided and beauties
to be pacified, often from the same perch.
The fellow who at first appeared sleek? turns
out has yellow teeth gating breath black as soil
- and that eye-glint was only a leer

so welcome, welcome, the new year

.....

.....

As you no doubt can tell, other than the singular words selected by Kerry from D.H. Lawrence’s poems (all from PoemHunter), this creature has nothing at all to do with his craft.

Snake:
carob-tree, slackness, fissure, pacified, perversity, hospitality, convulsed, exile, curving, two-forked 

How Beastly the Bourgeois Is:
Presentable, Tramping, Specimen, Sleek, Bygone, Hollow, Upright, Seething, Soil, Groomed

The Song of a Man Who Came Through:
direction, wedge, chaos, winged, fine, spoil, borrowed, subtle, somebody, keen

~ M