Passage - A Personal Challenge from Manicdaily (the Outlawyer), Karin Gustafson

Good morning Monday to all the Toads in all the corners of the Garden on this fabulous Monday.  Herotomost here.  Arm yourself with a cup of coffee (maybe with a little Bailey's) and sit down for a minute before the hectic work week begins and give yourself a little treat.

It was my turn to put up the Personal Challenge here at Toads and I chose Karin Gustafson!!! But, like most of the stuff I do, I procrastinated a bit and it came down to finally getting a hold of Karin while I was on my annual trip to Mexico. So as I was emailing her from my sunny spot beachside, she was in New York battling the crisp, cold New York weather.  It hardly seemed fair. But, as you know, Karin is an ever-present personality in our little garden community and always has a kind word for those who try to express their life, love, joy, desperation and frustration in words and hope that they find common cause with the anyone else in the universe.

Because of our polar opposite positions in the world at the time I presented her with the following prompt.  I told her she was in her room in New York and there was a curious door that appeared to go nowhere, but when she finally opened the door, she saw that it was a portal to a tropical sunny place, one of her choosing and to use that juxtaposition to write a piece about the differences, the similarities, the vibe etc.  of instantly traveling between both places.

I have to say, not that I was surprised at all, that Karin nailed it. As you will see below she painted a picture not only of physical location but one of emotional connection to the "what if" nature of the challenge.

I greatly appreciate Karin taking me up on the challenge and applaud the effort she has put in,  If you get the chance (and I am sure most have, visit her blogs and have a look a the wonderful writing and illustrations she has, she is an amazing artist, seems like an amazing person and her new nickname may have to be Ms. Murder, because she always kills it!!!!!!

Thanks Karin!!!!!!!!

Passage

The passageway to warmth
is as wide as it need be--
the breadth of your body, the breath
of your body--
sighs sized to stretch us both
into foreshortened
longing--
a night narrow
as two spoons.

But when, feeling lone,  
the brain becomes
a dislocated bone,
when crevices
hutch stone, darkness thickens
and even walls pass judgment,
one confuses
ways-away.

Some mistake
an unlit oven
for possible passage (the speckle
of its inner midnight misread
as splotches of star),
consider cuts channels, purge
as release, oblivion
a coveted tease--

when--I have to believe--
if time could just
be waited upon, warmth might alight
in windowed panes,
great trapezoids of sun winnowed
from the meanest cracks,
brightnesses to bring us back
into blink and dazzle,
a radiance that lets us wear
its raiment as our own, quickening
whatever lists into its frame and, too,
what simply looks on. 

**********************************

Manicddaily, Karin Gustafson, here (somehow also known as Outlawyer, due to a momentary blip years ago--agh--Google never forgets!)  

Yes, I may just call it a draft, since I’m still changing this, and frankly, am not sure it shouldn’t simply end with the first stanza, simply as a kind of love poem.    

Many thanks to Corey for thinking of me to do a challenge, and for coming up with this one in particular, which led me to write a couple of different poems, and was an especially appealing topic in frozen New York. 

Tales from the Minneapolis Jukebox - A Personal Challenge

Hey Toads Herotomost here!  Hope this finds everyone having had an awesome Christmas and getting ready for an even better New Year.  Sooo... I am here because Izzy gave me her last challenge.  She graciously asked if I would accept...are you kidding!  As most of you know I have been around the blogosphere for a while and have camped out with some outstanding writers and individuals.  The only reason I found my way to this site was because of Kerry and once here, people like the incomparable Isadora Gruye just sealed the deal for hanging in the garden.  Its been love at first read since our Writers Café days. I came a hairs breadth from meeting her last summer (yay for me, probably not as much for her) but alas, it was not to be.

For this challenge, she gave me a list of You Tube links of songs from local artists in her neck of the woods and asked me to write about one of them.  The list was really cool and I found myself listening again and again and tracking down other works by each of the artists.  I chose to write about the band Actual Wolf.  First off its a cool name, second she described them as "folk meets asphalt"...gotta love that and third the song and the video were just too cool for school.  Not sure I did this justice, I am a little rusty as of late, but it was fun pulling something together. 

IG, it has been a pleasure knowing you and a pleasure being asked to play in one of your challenges. Thanks for the friendship and I hope your 2015 is the best ever!

It's Where Songs Come From....

I wrote this after seeing an actual wolf

I was searching for treasure in Alberta
Like it’s the dragon’s lair, I beg to differ honey
But I did realize there are things scarier than you leaving me
And this song isn’t so much about anything
It just represents a point of disembarkation
And you don’t have to get it

We Interrupt this drivel for station identification…

     “Where do you get your Song’s?”

     "Really?”

     “What?”

     “That’s the sort of question a third grader might ask?”

     “I think your fan’s would like to know.”

     “Let me tell you something David……my fan’s don’t ask me stupid questions. All they really want is to hang out, be a part, get a little close, OK man.”

     “Sorry.”

     “Listen, if you really want to know where I get my songs then open your damned ears, I’m only gonna say this once. Count this down, David.”

     “Its Maggie’s dingy thong showing every time she sits down. It’s my grandmother blowing smoke rings with her pipe.  It’s Eddie Vedder in the mother fucking rafters.  It’s Dolly Parton and her shitty coat.  It’s mom making heart for us kids because she’s making liver for dad and we hate liver.  The only thing is David, heart is no damned consolation to a kid. It’s thinking about how cool it would be to walk on the moon.  It’s smoking a cigarette after the show with Justin Furstenfeld.  It’s shelling out your last hundred bucks to go see the Avett Brothers. Do you see what I’m saying David?  It’s that stupid look on your face right now.”

     “OK.”

    “Of course you don’t get what I’m saying David.  You are not an actual wolf.  All you got to do is sit down and fucking listen man…just listen.”

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming…

She wrote that after lying with an actual wolf

After the proselytizing was done, she was convincing
One word can be a savior, a salve, a poultice for the soul
Which word depends on how far down that road she’s been

You can take her out and sniff your territory together

But when the snow starts blowing and the wind cuts
It will be nothing compared to the bite she takes out of your ass

Who’s the actual wolf now

Attempts Spine Poetry, sort of wins.....

Greetings Garden Dwellers.....


In late October, Hannah threw down the gauntlet and challenged me to write a spine poem.  The concept is brilliantly simple: use the titles of the books on your bookshelf to build a poem.  This allows me to repurpose my favorite titles into a piece of my own, and it gives you a glimpse into my personal library.  Easy?  Peasy?  Lemon Squeezy?  Hannah advised she'd let me cheat and add a word or two of my own; however, I decided to see this one through without it.

I couldn't settle on one final product, so I've brought you four spine poems today.  So have a look a around!  I tried very hard to keep only my most favorite titles while building these poems, do you recognize any of them as favorites of your own?   Tell me all about it in the comments!

                                    Marabou stork nightmares,

                                    the anxious object

                                    rotten stiff

                                    a clockwork orange engine empire.

                                    The birthday of the world

                                    my mother: demonology.

                                     Do androids dream of electric sheep?

                                     The elephant vanishes.

                                     Art and fear stand still

                                     like the hummingbird.

                               Dance dance revolution

                               never let me go.

                               A canticle for Liebowitz,

                               fear and loathing 

                               in Las Vegas in caddis wood. 

                                         Pussy, King of the Pirates.

                                        Alias Grace.

                                  All of tomorrow's parties

                                  trash St. Lucy's home for girls raised by wolves. 

Erasure? Sure! – Personal Challenge for Hannah

Yay!! I was picked and here’s the challenge…

Björn says, “I want you to present a piece of erasure poetry. The idea is simple – take a book page – provided by me. Then by erasing everything but the words needed for your poem present it (together with a picture of your book-page). As an additional (which should be easy for you) the poem should have an autumn theme).  So print it out and black out all the words that are not part of your poem J. The words have to be used in the exact order that they appear in the text.”

I didn't actually print it out because the gremlins got into my printer but I used my writing program and highlighted in black. Unfortunately, you can still see the original text through the highlighting but actually, some might be interested to read the context, (a page from Bleak House), from which I’ve carved this poem.

I hope you enjoy it…I certainly did! Thank you for the challenge, Björn.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chanc-

This is my compiled and titled version...probably easier to read. :)

Autumn Afternoon

Looming fog in streets,

sun from fields seen by boy.

Light before time – seems to know.

Look

raw afternoon

near that Temple

at the very heart of fog,

fog thick, mud and mire

deep –

hold this day in sight

heaven and earth

an afternoon sitting here

glory softly fenced with crimson

addressed by a little voice,

brief and direct.

Lantern can see on such an afternoon

mistily engaged an endless tripping –

running horse…

walls of words play on an afternoon inherited.

Fortune in a well

(look for truth at the bottom),

red silk owns answers –

mountains piled.

Candles here and there stain windows

and light of day may initiate from streets;

through glass panes entrance by owl

and languid echoing…

the lantern has light in it

and fog. 

I'm looking forward to picking on someone for the next challenge - so keep an eye on your inboxes Toads! 

There isn't a Mr. Linky today but if anyone is inspired by this challenge and wants to play, please feel free to leave a link to your blog below or paste an offering in the comments.

Have a wonderful day Garden Dwellers! 

From free to form - Personal Challenge for Björn

Hi there, dear amphibians of a virtual garden, here is Björn, a quite recent tadpole, unaware of consequences of signing up I got an email from the renowned and most skilled poet Hedgewitch. I had missed this slight drawback from signing up to be a toad, but at least one of you will have to expect an email from me the next few days. As many of you might have noticed I share the rare interest of actually write poem to form and meter.

The challenge was fairly straightforward: to take a piece of free-verse of mine that I think could gain from being elaborated to a form poetry such as a pantoum, sonnet, villanelle or terza rima. Often I write my  form poetry because they help me get inspired with the progression of the poem, the rhymes for instance help me to push the story ahead (a little bit like found poetry). On the other hand when I write free verse I’m often inspired to start with, so form come secondary. Therefore this was more of challenge than I thought to start with.

A while ago Marian wrote a prompt on the music of David Hidalgo. I saw some of the music as a kind of death-dance where the dawn was the end, and I used a refrain there “this night of sanguine hips” and thought that this would work in a villanelle. I thought I wanted to keep the dance in my poem so I went with tetrameter instead of pentameter to make it more in line with the origin of the rural dances that are supposedly the origin of the villanelle. I have reworked this a lot more than I usually do with my  form poetry but I hope it works for you.

This glowing night of sanguine hips

In glowing nights of sanguine hips,

we shed our last maracas tears;

and sway away when sun has slipped.

From burning cheeks, mascara drips,

but doom of dawn is not yet near,

this glowing night of sanguine hips.

With graveyard dust on blood-filled lips,

we’re dancing with the utmost care;

and sway away when sun has slipped.

We’re blessed by songs in sooty scripts

within this shroud the light is dear,

in glowing nights of sanguine hips.

Cause 6 feet under, worms will grip

our corazon of moonlit years.

We sway away when sun has slipped.

You gently let your eyelids zip,

to quench the dread of concrete fears.

Our final night of sanguine hips,

sashay below when sun has slipped.

There is no link-up today, but if you feel inspired to write something from this, put it on the comment section or link it up on an open link challenge.

Personal Challenge: Love, Death And Carnivals

Circus arriving in Seligman, Missouri, late 19th century

Public domain via wikimedia commons 

Greetings dear toads, toadettes and assorted followers. Hedgewitch here, responding to my first personal challenge, which comes boldly from one of our newer members, the ever-effervescent
Magaly Guerrero. This is the gauntlet she flung down for me:

"If you choose to accept this personal challenge, I would love to read a poem set on a carnival or circus during the Autumn Equinox. You can focus on whatever you like, as long as it happens in the setting and time I mentioned."

Well, of course I chose to accept, and I immediately wrote a love poem full of masks and feathers set at the famous Carnaval do Brasil in Rio De Janeiro. Then I realized that particular festivity takes place, like our Mardi Gras, shortly before Lent. Which is not the Autumn Equinox, when night and day are of equal length, taking place, as a matter of fact, today. So....back to the drawing board.

I followed many twisting pathways down the haunted lanes of the internet before I arrived at the grisly tale below, about two lovers who met at a carnival in September and ran away together the following summer, their lives and their untimely ends, based very loosely on an unsolved Territorial murder from 1905. A fuller explanation of the facts I have wreaked havoc upon follows the poem, and there are yet more on my blog , but first let me thank Magaly for the challenge, and my dear friend Shay (Fireblossom) without whose often dark and always bewitching poetry and short stories of lesbian love I would never have found my 'solution.' 

I hope you all enjoy this little slice of grim.

~*~

Dead Woman's Crossing

When the moon was a witchboat small and tossing

in the fade-time where night can see day as her twin,

down the rough blacktop to Dead Woman's Crossing

came the carnival rolling on a dustbowl wind.

They spindled the midway, freakshow and toss-ring,

before they spiked twenty ripe melons with gin

for Harvest Home in the dark of September,      

so the marks can do what they won't remember.

There was Jacko the clown, stringy as a rat,

Ma's name and a snake his tattoo valentine,

Rudy the barker in a ten dollar hat,

talking apple butter, smiling turpentine.

The Doll from Philly worked the striped gypsy-tent;

her brown eyes had just the right mad dog shine.

Then night seemed to give a coyote-moon cough

that shook her gold earrings, and Katie showed up

with her deathrattle tale of carnival past,

how she, the schoolteacher, met the Fallen Dove

Miss Fannie, too red-haired, too ruined, too fast,

on a September midway, bent moon above;

how love like a cloudburst caught her at last      

a kiss-whisper in place of the stone cold shove,

a granite fist traded for a velvet hand

and a five dollar ring for her wedding band.

The Dove blew out of Texas like a broken branch            

running  from Jesus, Daddy Jim and the law.

When she hit Mrs. Hamm's Saloon and Hog Ranch

she knew she had almost no time left at all

but still more than Katie, hellbound for a ditch,

face pale through the water where the black crows caw.

Thru plugged ears Doll could hear the walking night moan,

thru shut eyes see the bridge where Katie talked on:

The heat lightning flickered as midnight slammed shut,

Katie in a nightmare where she was the wheat

waiting dry in the dirt for the thresher's cut;

too many whiskey hard times in tangled sheets,

one scar too many from a cheap White Owl blunt

while the tumbleweeds wrote her name in the street.

She put on her bonnet, she packed up her grip,

met the Dove smiling with her child on her hip.

They sat down stiff as strangers on the noon train,

the nights and the men left behind in the dust.

They got off at Clinton in the quick July rain

with the last of the wheat burning red as rust.

When the moon was a witchboat sailing the plains,

as diamond eyes came home to lily-white trust

in the carnival night, storm in the willow,

the teacher slept sweet with her red-haired pillow.

The next day at midday, two girls and a child      

left town in a buggy to laugh and laugh last.

Fannie screamed like a bobcat, the wind went wild

when Katie's man came up through the tall sawgrass.

The Dove saw the buck-knife draw a cutthroat smile;

all she knew was to make the scared horse run fast

from the man who had Katie back, all his, dead.

All the Dove had was poison and a red dirt bed.

When the moon's a hook, a witchboat, a sickle

when the last of the wheat stands brown in the ground

while Orion runs after Hecate the fickle

above the dwindling lights of a dying town,

the Dove does her dance to a penny whistle

and a dead woman calls her child with that sound.

The next fall, when Doll's carnival topped the ridge

it rolled without stopping past Dead Woman's bridge.

 ~September 2014

~*~

Process notes: The bare bones of this story are true, if extremely conflicting, anecdotal and incomplete. Katie De Witt James was a schoolteacher seen boarding a train in Custer City, Oklahoma Territory, with her fourteen month old daughter in July of 1905. She had just filed for divorce from her husband Martin James on grounds of cruelty, and was supposedly going to stay with relatives in the small town of Ripley, about a hundred and twenty miles away. She never arrived.

Instead, she left the train in Clinton, a town only about fifteen miles further on, with a reputed prostitute named Fannie Norton, who also went by the sobriquet of 'Mrs. Ham' (which I decided to use in a wordplay on the frontier practice of referring to a brothel as a 'hog ranch.') Katie spent the night with Fannie at Fannie's brother-in-law's house, and the following day the two women and child rode out in a rented buggy to the countryside near Weatherford, the location of the creek and bridge in the poem, saying they would be back in a few hours. Fannie returned, after dropping off a baby in blood-stained clothes with a passing farm boy, but Katie never did.

After not hearing from his daughter for some weeks, Katie's father hired a detective to find out what happened to her. He traced her movements, and finally tracked Fannie down in Shawnee, where  Fannie vehemently denied killing Katie, saying Katie had 'met a man' then dissolving into incoherent tears. Later that night, Fannie took poison, killing herself. The divorce never went through, and Katie's husband, fitted up with an unbreakable alibi, and with suspicion diverted to Fannie, filed for custody of their daughter, inherited Katie's estate, which he subsequently sold, and left the Territory.

After Katie's body was found at the end of August  by two men fishing along the creek, with a bullet through her skull, her head severed from her body and a 'five dollar gold ring' on her hand, the tales began. The ghost of Katie is said to haunt the bridge and creek, calling for her daughter, and the sound of buggy wheels on wooden boards is often reported there, despite the old wooden bridge being washed out and replaced with a concrete one in 1980.

I totally made up the part about the two women meeting at a carnival in September and falling in love, though I think it explains some of the baffling aspects of this story, like why Katie might have left the train long before her planned destination with a supposed stranger, and a prostitute at that. Logic leads one to think  Katie may have been killed by someone who stood to lose everything if she lived, but benefited greatly by her death, someone who might easily have followed her, then later cobbled together an alibi. Her husband. But that is something only Katie and Fannie would know.

Regardless, the carnival doesn't stop there any more, toads. Thanks for bearing with me, and with this long, long September story.