Egotism in action.

[Cavatica]

I have no idea if the fact that my first post in this particular incarnation of the KT makes me pretentious or what, but, y'know, it won't worry me overmuch if it is.

I'll spare you all and start with something semi-coherent.

Oh. Recently, for whatever reason, I've quit capitalizing. I think it has something to do with wanting to maintain the stream-of-consciousness thing, but maybe it just comes back to me being pretentious. Maybe e.e. cummings and Wallace Stevens are taking turns reading William Faulkner inside my head. Who knows; I'll let you decide. If'n you like, maybe I'll post more.

This is for my best friend, whose poetry is inhumanly good.

Passion Fruit

nothing do i want so much
but to drink your words like
sweet star runoff
gathered and shining in a
cool dark pail

i would pour it into cubes
save it for a summer day
let you hurry down my wrist in
torrid shining poetry
in rivulets of glistening eloquence

then i could eat more than my words
for once
i could eat yours too
and suck them from my fingertips
with simple satisfaction

but nowhere do you burgeon
on summer-heavy trees
brimming with the weight of your own surfeit
nowhere can i tap
your cloying extract
so i can leech your ripeness
simmer in a violet effusion

i can only make the thinnest broth
a meager and absurd imitation
that even famished beggars
would disdain
for i am no nutrition
and you a cornucopia
but though i may devour you
i never have my fill

[Cavatica]

Bored. Figured I oughta update the thread. Wrote this for the boyfriend back in May.

(Some potentially helpful notes, esp. for non-Americans: He's from Vermont, which is a Northern/cold State; I'm from Virginia, a Southern/hot State. He has a November birthday; I was born in July. Orion, the hunter, is a wintertime constellation; Cygnus, the swan, is a summertime constellation.)

Epistle for the Zodiac

Do not despair, winter child,
when you wake to find the night
is mistress of your sheets
and she has made a tundra of your bed—
for I am born of summer's grace,
will banish her to torrid dissolution:
a puff of twisted evanescence,
a sizzle and a wisp of silver steam.
When she is gone,
we will try to count the sequins
embedded in her sometime skirts
(I would wear them for you
but the velvet is too rich for me),
will find ourselves in myriads
alight from dusk to dawn—
you, the blazing hunter,
I, the swan.
Though we will make spring of her salt,
and taste her fall on our fingertips,
our pleasure will be solstice, winter child—
the longest nights and
shortest days
when we are sultry tropics
and more than just a zenith
but an equinox.

[Milo]

I was scanning the forum, and I thought it said "Eroticism in action". I looked again and it said Egotism, but I clicked nonetheless, and I'm glad I did. :applause: very nice cav.

[Cavatica]

I was scanning the forum, and I thought it said "Eroticism in action". I looked again and it said Egotism, but I clicked nonetheless, and I'm glad I did. :applause: very nice cav.Perv.

...like they'd let me post the smutty poems.

[Milo]

Perv.

...like they'd let me post the smutty poems.
It was... uh... a trick of the light... yeah.

Hey, I'm allowed to be a teenage boy sometimes aint I?

[Cavatica]

It was... uh... a trick of the light... yeah.

Hey, I'm allowed to be a teenage boy sometimes aint I?You know, I often marvel that the scant few teenage boys who occupy these forums AREN'T smuttier. I mean, hello-- they're surrounded by chicks.

And, even if they weren't, you know. They're teenage boys. ;>

[ilona]

Nice poems Catavica. Look forward to reading more.

[Cavatica]

Well, then, more you shall have.

Autumn Poem II

Here, then, at the cusp of a fog-heavy dawn,
with the unlight scattered by ragged rain
on murky, stagnant pools
forever asphalt-bound,
will I wait

at the edge of smoky dreams
undispelled by sun;
and with the wet world plastered to my window
in grizzled shades of morning,
some secret part of me will marvel
at the life in all the dying
and wish for some little windblown piece of you,
all shredded red and gold.

If my own decay
should be so glorious,
I would want you there to catch me as I spiral
to my death—
though my edges aren't so smooth now,
with these probing caterpillar bites,
and though I feel so small and fragile
in the clement contour of your hand,
more delicate than mine—

and I would wonder, fleetingly, at the way
I floated on your palm

till you crushed me in your fingertips
and condemned me,
a million pieces,
to a brittle autumn wind.

[Cavatica]

And, here, one more. This is the poeticized form of a freewrite I knocked out at insane-o'clock in the morning.

Interlude

woke from my prefix-dreams, oh
to flashes at the edges of my waking
too full of vibrato and haze
and terrible silence before the rain
comes and the sky
all a-tremble
at what it would become
it spilled over
white-and-sound and me all
naked and bundled in
that which does not comfort
so

i slipped from the covers
waded through menacing dark
reached for a garment
tip-toe because i hang it from a peg too high
let the lumbering light in and fell
in the pooling gray and
the air too thick to
see the forked tongues lick
the ground and
my shuttering eyes heavier than
mountains of cumulonimbus

i am ribbons of tempest,
the ragged frail gray-dying
sulking to the coastline
and the sea
a shredded diaspora on a
salted wind
too thin for fury and even less
for drizzle

[Cavatica]

I'm happy to report that "Passion Fruit" made it into the fall edition of my college's literary magazine.

In celebration, I give you another piece of unpolished crap. This one doesn't even have a title yet.
---

Little-girl body—
not the treacherous curves of an Amazon
tributary, but the ponderous contours of a Skyline
Drive. They cut
even so, penetrating deep woods:
now a cresting vista,
with a sad little
abandonment where so few tourists have stopped
to admire the view—
there are no impressive peaks here, after all,
just the sleeping hazy bluegreen
worn down under eons;
now a harsh descent marked by yellow signs that
give the angle of the slope (always a pathetic percentile;
there is so little of this landscape
perpendicular to heaven);
now the deepest glade, profuse with fauna—
she is full of life, the little girl,
but hunters have taught the animals
to be timid.
They must watch from her briars,
which tear
and are safe.
Few have trod her footpaths,
have roamed the many sultry caverns
gouged by patient time (she is a woman
inside; she has her own secret places,
her tunnels to the center of the Earth);
instead,
they look at a dime store map of her
little-girl body
and say,
"There's nothing interesting here;
let's go somewhere else."

[Cavatica]

Not that anyone's paying attention, as the lack of comments would indicate, but what the hell. Here's one I wrote today.

Meteorology

Rain is a time for lovemaking:
lover, make it rain for me--
make it hard
upon my windows and
wrap me in the rat-a-tat
drumming in the dusk
in which I can see neither
love nor rain--
for we are tangled up,
we cannot be undone:
not the rain or the love it makes

we make
our own precipitation,
our blinding driving grey,
and close upon each other
in our private fogs
of leg and limb:
two fronts collide
and on that line
we know
love is a time for rainmaking.

[Grey Bear]

Well, then, more you shall have.

Autumn Poem II

Here, then, at the cusp of a fog-heavy dawn,
with the unlight scattered by ragged rain
on murky, stagnant pools
forever asphalt-bound,
will I wait

at the edge of smoky dreams
undispelled by sun;
and with the wet world plastered to my window
in grizzled shades of morning,
some secret part of me will marvel
at the life in all the dying
and wish for some little windblown piece of you,
all shredded red and gold.

If my own decay
should be so glorious,
I would want you there to catch me as I spiral
to my death—
though my edges aren't so smooth now,
with these probing caterpillar bites,
and though I feel so small and fragile
in the clement contour of your hand,
more delicate than mine—

and I would wonder, fleetingly, at the way
I floated on your palm

till you crushed me in your fingertips
and condemned me,
a million pieces,
to a brittle autumn wind.


I like this one. I particular like "and I would wonder, fleetingly, at the way I floated on your palm". *le sigh* I wish I could write poetry. All I can manage are incredibly dirty limericks.

GB

[Priscilla]

I've been reading, and enjoying. I think that a lot of people have been reading what you've written, but not commenting. I guess that's unfortunate, because what you have is very beautiful. I especially like the one titled Meteorology and I "think" I've caught a little play on words in there? The fourth line from the end "two fronts collide" - EXCELLENT! At first I only thought of it in terms of love and then I thought "oh wait, a front is also a term used in weather forecasting" Very cool, indeed! :applause:

[Cavatica]

I especially like the one titled Meteorology and I "think" I've caught a little play on words in there?Indeed you have! And thank you for commenting-- it doesn't bother me when people don't, or even when they do and say something negative, but I'd much rather the latter than the former; at least it means someone's reading at all!

[Cavatica]

I recently was coerced into submitting a portfolio of stuff to a school-wide poetry contest with a prize of $50; while I'm 99.9% my best friend, who excels at poetry, will win, I have a very persistent poetry prof and figured all I had to lose was my pride.Dunno if anyone cares, but I am now officially the latest recipient of the Calvin Koonts Poetry Prize! There were actually two winners this year--me, and the girl who won it last year (she's another one of my buddies, and very, very good). I'm extremely honored to be considered of her caliber (and no, I didn't have to split the prize money ;) ).

Also, at the beginning of the month I picked up the literary magazine's award for Best Poem 2005 for "Passion Fruit" (as well as Best Graphic Fall 2005 for this photo (http://pics.livejournal.com/brownridercat/pic/000c9w1q/g15?.f=1) of a staircase in the Vermont Statehouse--which, yeah, isn't relevant to poetry, but I got both awards at the same ceremony and figured it was worth sharing ;) ).

So... whoo!

[Priscilla]

That's wonderful, on both counts! I spent a fair bit of time looking at that photo (I like old winding staircases) and noticed that there's an interesting curved, almost heart shaped ring of light above the lamps on the wall beside the stairs. Kind of curvy in the same manner that the stairs curve, and rather neat, I thought, anyway. . . :D

[Cavatica]

I scribbled a thing at work the other day.

Something I saw in the North Carolina History Museum on July 28, 2006 at noon

a small blonde child
fair and light
took handfuls of her comrade's dark cascades
the dark unwitting
the light delighted
with a mane she will never have
a wild she will never be

[Cavatica]

Wow, been a while.

Here's one I'm submitting to the Balticon 41 (http://www.balticon.org) poetry contest. It's from a short story I wrote (but never quite finished) for my Independent Study my senior year of college. It's written by Our Heroine, the sole creative writer aboard the first colonial ship to Alpha Centauri A.

First Poem of a New World

How strange to see stars
from the other side,
the looking glass still all a-shiver
with the wake of our insolent passage—
no single step to bend
the light
but a giant leap across a gulf
of pliant time
(which is harder to grind into glass
than beaches of diamond sand).

My mother, my love:
you are less than a grain of it,
not even blue in the flicker-and-dance—
only one of so many
wayward dandelion seeds
set to spinning on the fringes of
a child’s arms outflung,
her petticoats a pinwheel
in the windy joy of pirouette.

I would that I could know all
her grace. Instead,
I will settle for a place among her
skirtseams: less than a fiber,
too small for dye,
still will I circumnavigate her stitches,
set my sextant by the sequins of her hem.

[Cavatica]

Minor update: My poem "Meteorology" (posted here on November 28, 2005) won Best Poem 2006 in my college's literary magazine, The Arrowhead. Even though I graduated in May of last year, I guess I'd submitted it for the Spring edition (I can't keep track anymore), thereby making it eligible for a 2006 Arrowhead Award even though I'm not a student anymore.

I am well-pleased.

I wrote another thing recently, but the forum won't allow me to retain its formatting, so I guess I'll post it in a hyperlink or something. Watch this space.

[N'vill]

If I was any good at poetry myself, I would find your work inspiring. No wonder you win prizes. I may be a moderator on a poetry forum, but that doesn't mean I am any good at it. I have recently posted two general things, one for children really, the other just pure nonsense for a laugh, and that is about as good as I get.

[Cavatica]

This is a random thing I improvised for a friend (the same friend for whom "Passion Fruit" was written) the other day. It doesn't have a title.
---

Conclude, my dear:

Auld lang syne is done and gone
(it says what it means, and means what it says)
so discard the wide spooling silver you wrapped it in,
toss the tinsel, the sad shredded packaging rent to death on Christmas morning
(in your mismatched socks, I'll bet)
and the little bits of tape stuck to your fingers, the failed attempts at making beautiful
the strangest-shaped objects in the world: they cannot be mended. The ball is dropped. The Times Square lovers are gone, gone.

the Earth swings sunward again,
turns her face from that longest night of December

But save some mistletoe for your clutch,
to keep at your swaying hips-- dressed in flouncing skirts, in pale yellow wildflowers--
you will want it for the spring,
and spring is coming.

[Jay_Quessir]

Well, Miss Cavatica! I do so enjoy your poems...*sighs* If only mine came out as more than the mindless teen angst it has been of late! You are a true inspiration (and I still remember our lovely talks about college and the like over AIM). I'm going to Pratt Institute (not sure if you've heard of it...but *shrugs*). :D

Back to your work...I've read the classics (and am studying them in my English class at the moment) and yours are just as wonderful to read. I love the symbolisms, the diction, and the clarity in your work. Passion Fruit is, however, my favorite.

[Cavatica]

I wrote this yesterday. It hasn't been revised. I don't know what, if anything, I'll do with it next.
---

Regarding memory.

on some days I look backwards, inwards:
I think
how far I go, how deep and long
a well, dark and hollow
my cupping hands cannot
reach the bottom
the bucket on its chain comes up dry
I splash myself with the drought and think
how I am
angry, angry

on days, some backwards, inwards I look:
think I
how deep and long I go, how far
a dark and hollow well
my hands, cupping, cannot
the bottom reach
on its chain, the bucket comes up dry
with the drought; I splash myself and think
how am I
angry, angry