In dreams I wander through the realms
Of convex mirrors, breaking glass
To find the shattered remnants pull
Together forming a flaneur
Like me who only wants to write
His name in water. Hand and hand
That feel like glass, they smear their sweat
And trace the letters of their self—
But one of them writes it backwards.
Read John Ashbery’s poetic ekphrasis of the painting above here.
\flah-NUR\ , noun;
I saw red gerberas, and as always
I suffered from recidivism; slid
Down, down a snake of board games on the lawn
And kisses in the creek and freezing nights
On an old cot beneath the twisting stars.
[ri-sid–uh-viz-uh
m]
Her words dissolved: reduced to flummery entwined with steady strums
Of her four favourite chords, distracting me from showing any tact.
This play with internal rhyme is about falling in love with musicians. If you’ve ever watched someone singing while playing a musical instrument and have, in that moment, been completely overwhelmed to the point that you’re not even listening to the words, you’ll understand.
\FLUHM-uh-ree\ , noun;
The Form of Education in Korea
Excessive expectations nullify education
Whenever examiners utilise categories:
Ostracised philosophical understanding abdicates.
A student drew this picture of me on the back of her exam... Bonus marks!
This poetic exercise is written in a traditional Korean form based on syllables. In Hangul, each line has four words composed of a specific number of characters each (every character is one syllable):
3 4 3 4
3 4 3 4
3 5 4 3
When my students first told me about this form, I thought it would be difficult to use in English because of the excess of monosyllabic words, but with a quick brainstorming session of related polysyllabic adjectives, nouns, and present tense verbs the poem did not take long to write at all.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Not a particularly happy poem…but happy wearing of the green to you nonetheless!
Three hundred shamrock petals tossed
Are my yearly forget-me-nots,
Decaying mulch for the next batch.
The Land of Youth a curse for me
Not in it; for me, left behind
By who, I hope, forgets me not.
The water-walking horse made both
Of us immortal: him, alive;
And me, a grey shadow, forgotten.
So should I leave the world for void,
Or wait another hundred shamrocks
To, maybe, someday be remembered?
This poem is based on the Irish legend of Oisín, who went to Tír na nÓg (Lord of the Rings Undying Lands) with the faerie queene Niamh on her badass water-walking (take that Jesus) horse Embarr (think Gold Chocobos in Final Fantasy VII). Three years in Tír na nÓg was three hundred in Ireland, so when Oisín returned, everyone he knew was dead. This poem is for those people (and sorry for all the parentheses).
Happy St. Patrick's Day from an Irish Chocobo!
write with lightning 