Week seven--all inclusive buffet of manliness

By my calculations--and please do correct me if I am mistaken--I left off going into week seven. If that is the case, this is me, catching up to week 12?
My god, what have I done?

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Freewrites [2]
Had some of these written down for a while now, and decided to use them here. Just because I haven't been posting properly doesn't mean I don't have poems to show for the time I spent away.

1st Freewrite:

David Mathis
Interogation lights

I've grown up in Carrollton my whole life next to Roosevelt
who had a great grandfather who was Native American.
He had a dog, named it blue and left it outside for the rest of its life
where a back porch used to hang invisible until we put it together.
We put it next to the garden,
next to fat red tomatoes who sat in silence beside habaneros,
between the crushed fall leaves which remind me of the hamster I crushed--peanut.
Shelled him with my own two hands, just three weeks old and not even ripe yet,
but I didn't know I had done it--not for years.

I would like to travel to India which catches my attention because of women's rights,
curry, markets with saris in all the colors of the desert--the heat, sand, the unfiltered sun
as unhealthy as a carton of cigarettes lighting barefoot children who smile at nothing because
they have nothing and when everyone has nothing, it takes nothing to smile. And I smile at them.

Hound dogs bother me when I sit alone at night, far away from India. I can think there because
the chimney sparrows come out at eight and they sound like sparrows and I can watch the sun
set through a mesh of trees, thrusting shadows of hops around me like a fence because
the forest brews beer and muscadine wine.
I know because I drank it some nights ago and it was good.


2nd Freewrite:

David Mathis
Public Observations pt.1

Sitting outside right now, and there is a girl who is determined to walk slowly in the rain.
Her arms are tucked like a bird diving to catch prey, but she looks miserable,
more like an umbrella closed tight and dripping.

There is a crippled girl with arm braces--hobbling--nobody is helping her. I don't have an umbrella.
I'm not even dry myself, but she's so slow and she is so wet, and I can see the cold in her,
coiling into her chest and wreathing her head in a mane of steam.

There is a man on crutches, and he has his hood up, but he is so slow, and the rain is coming to a stop.
It holds steadily in a soft hiss like a creek with a lisp.
He holds steadily too and slinks away to feel his way up stairs and over bridges.

Saw a guy on a wheelchair but he was going fast and he seemed unimpeded by the water.
He glid along like a boat silently and blinked out of my vision before I could look again.
Out of all the people in the rain, he alone moved through and out the other side unchanged. Unfettered.

I want to be crippled like him. Maybe then I could be just as free.


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Junkyard [4]

"I want you to want to pretend to want to swim."

"Make way for the big, bad, Beowulf!!"

"I am a negation of a negation."

"There are always things along a river that probably shouldn't still be there."

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Calisthenics [1]

Calisthenic based off changing Queenie's awesometastic poem:

David Mathis with help from Queenie:
Between bare curtains

Pinching green out of leaves is like crushing burs from pine cones, only less painful.
There were nights when I would stare through glass, my body superimposed--giant--
standing in a yard dimmer than midnight whiskey. My featureless face broken by bark,
by a collapsed bird feeder, or by lights from houses which bled into my body like a river into an ocean.
Those nights, so serene, framed by two plain curtains wide open and threadbare,
the glass was a part of my hand and my head as a line touching a plane.
Though I can't live those nights anymore, I can recall them.
You made them.


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Improv [1]

Riffing off other people's work has always been a bit difficult for me--I have no idea where to start, you know? This is THE reason I became so bad at updating. I would hit the improv, and sit staring at it for two or three days before finally giving up. Not giving up this time.

IMPROV based on the work of Galway Kinnell.

David Mathis and Galway Kinnell together at last:
Woodwind

What do they sing, the last birds of the night who tuck heads behind wings and close their eyes as the world closes its eyes, tangled like lovers in leaves and sticks, banking themselves across woods filled with frayed wings, brambles, the glint of moon on water, staring wild-eyed from the pit of an eye socket?

Silence.
The space that fills the air between cicada chirps and wind gusts blowing ashes through the gaps in the stars to pepper the moon with the anti-song wrapped around Earth in banners as wide as Sloth, Wrath, Greed, and Fear, barring entry to the heavens, crossed like a child's heart and just as frail.

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Peer Reviews [2]

++1st Review

Kyley:
Wheat Stalk

Church doors always open,
Swung wide at late hours of the night.
A man in a brown trench coat,
Pockets hidden inside overflowing
With loaves of wheat and grains.
A woman, hoarding children away,
Playing during a slumber party,
Gawking in awe of the bearded man.
He wants help, shelter, feet washed by Christ.
The woman directs him to a shelter,
Too far to walk, but she needs to rid him,
Like a fungus infection on the sole of your foot.
She can’t give him money like a harlot,
Or a ride to the shelter like a charitable taxi service,
for the safety of herself and the children,
She can’t even give him deli meats and cheeses
To adorn his tall loaf of white bread tucked in the coat.
So he tracks sewage into the church,
And leaves just the same,
Christ could not heal him at his haven.
There is no saintly presence beneath the steeple.
All that man was good for was making children glare,
 Wide eyed at the miraculous loaves of bread,
From a white young image of Christ,
And all wondered, “Where was the wine?”

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What I liked: The whole damn thing. Especially the ending.
I liked the overall themes of the poem--you know, the big sweeping picture stuff. As far as that goes, I liked the direction that you went with it--disdain apparently at Christianity, a commentary on how ungiving people can be. More locally, I liked "where was the wine?" as an ending remark. "So he tracks sewage into the church, / and leaves just the same" was a good one too.

Improvements: "like a fungus on the sole of your foot" doesn't necessarily sound like it fits the tense or the style of the poem. All of a sudden, you talk about "you" and bring the reader in, and I think it works best as a narrative that the reader stays away from. other than that, I didn't get the ending as much. Are you comparing the homeless man to Jesus? I think that could have been a bit clearer there. Other than that, I would say going into the next draft, why not derail yourself just a bit harder? You don't do that a lot here. DERAIL LIKE YOU MEAN IT! PURPOSELY DRIVE THAT TRAIN OFF THE TRACKS AND INTO THE WATER!!!!
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++2nd Review

Samaria:
Untitled


I almost forgot the smell of new acoustic wood
after I started to order my lead pencils. My
scratched down strings needed a change.
One that sucked in summer semester hours
filled with why brains reject culture or why
culture absorbs brains. I don't enjoy the taste
 of culture lectures. It's not my genre.
I want the thick crunch of a girl's version
of "Eminence Front".
I want to smile above the waterline for chills.
I want to be the North Atlantic ice pick
that sank your sober ship.
Don't come to my party dead and still
or be killed for thrills.

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What I liked: I liked the "I want" part, but maybe only because I wrote a poem with a lot of that stuff in it too. "I want, I want, I want..." But regardless, I also liked the alliteration in "sucked in summer semester hours." "I want to smile above the waterline for chills" is an especially awesome part of the poem. I like the way you phrase things sometimes, and that is certainly an example of something totally awesome that you say here.

Improvements: Extend it. Yep, keep it going, and going. If you run out of something, just don't stop. This is nice, but it isn't super polished yet, so why not add on copious amounts of material and refine it back? Most of the drafts for my final portfolio are likely going to be huuge pieces that I've knocked into smaller pieces. My best piece of advice is to go, go, go. The way I do it is by making the biggest sentences I can, but everyone has their own way. Go for it. Just go crazy on this junk, and then look back and take all the boring stuff out. Sometimes you're too close to a work to do that. So distance yourself, hack it to pieces and build off of the good stuff. 

Freewrite--kick the blastin' blasticarium blasters with freewritin' freewriters.

Been so busy lately that I have just about had my hands tied, and all this making up work is killing my back, but I am going to keep at it. Must do that catching up thing. Just remember as you read this that I love you tenderly like nobody else could ever love you.

David the Mathis:
Her Husband Died in a Train Attack

Not that trains attack like a savage heart out in the wild, stalking prey, because they don't--not normally, and even when they do, you never can tell when they're going to. They show no warning signs such as painful arms, or a swelling of the leg. Train attacks don't fill a person with premonitions of death for a week before they strike, or coordinate with other trains to optimize the attack vectors. For that matter, trains are generally quite docile and carry people inside themselves at great personal risk to transport those people from one area to another similar area, usually from one point on a landmass to another point on the very same landmass. They share nothing but exits and yet they're connected by a stream of people who walk out of one exit, into another exit to be taken to another place, but always the same door--only it leads to a different place.

Still though, on a day that was both sunny and windy, she heard the news from the radio before her family could call her, and the attack that she laughed about would later pester her into insomnia and wide-eyed she would stare at walls, she even still stares at walls with blackened eyes and a mind so withered that she says she can still remember the sound of steel as it bit the tunnel with ire to grind itself like a fourth of July sparkler, like a match, and struck itself flaming to kindle funeral pyres. She says she remembers the bodies, scattered like ashes over an ocean at sunset, gilded by the flame of a dying day. Maybe she does remember sitting in that seat and staring at the inside of a tunnel from behind a tiny window when the world ignited like the night sky with stars that arced themselves to form new constellations that she says are still etched into her vision which is why she can't drive. Or maybe she was never there and years of empathy have hurtled her mind through layers of time to arrive at the crash and her frail cortex never was meant to sustain such travel.

Or maybe, there was no train attack and she sits, crocheting her hours into loops and hooks until she crochets her memories of star-dappled tunnels and funeral pyres carried down rivers into net and catches herself like a spider catches a fly.

I think I need one more review after this to catch up?

Can't stop a review train from roaring down the tracks. Time to get some more reviews under my belt, and into your mind. I have things to say about stuff and you'll listen to me by God, or my name is Extremely Pete.
Windex
by: Diamond the Forde

And that was when I realized
that I really fucked up this time.
when the windex bottle beat
a blue stain into the Berber carpet
and I was left standing wide-mouthed
in an open-mouthed doorway.
That long hall never seemed so short.
That fuming man never seemed so tall
and that was when I realized that what I did
I never really remembered anyway.
How quickly did my mistakes,
or lack thereof,
transcend through the contents
of that plastic cleaning bottle?
When did it explode
onto the scene and leave a trail
of Oh-My-Gods or
You-Fucking-Bitch's that I was quite prepared for?
Did I ever really know how to duck
the verbal abrasions like I learned
how to dodge that bottle?
Or did the bottle dodge me?
Maybe if it had hit me
I would have become clean
and without streaks I could have glistened
into a transparent pane
on a rectangular plane.
Why couldn't I disappear?
Why couldn't the words hit me
and bounce off like birds?
They left smears, greasy trails
of You-Dirty-Little-Whores
and Get-The-Hell-Outta-My-Sight's.
and as I slammed my door shut
to FD&C Blue No. 1
daddy's little girl turned blue too
and with my eyes closed
I couldn't see the glass fragments
of my insides shatter anymore.
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What I liked: I don't think anyone's writing in this entire class has grown on me like yours has. This poem is fantastic in a lot of different ways. I'll start with "wide-mouthed in an open-mouthed doorway." I love that phrase and I love a lot of the little things too. "greasy trails/ of you-dirty-little-whores" ect. All those moments are wonderful. I like that you took our advice and wrote a poem about windex throwing. And I like how it turned out.

Improvements: "that fuming man" is a little problematic for me in the same way that Somaria's class critique poem bothered me when she talked about the woman and the man of the house boy. Something about the phrasing bothers me, and while that sounds vague the phrase "That fuming man" is also vague. At first, it seems like you dropped the bottle and only later is it clear that the bottle was thrown at you, so I would clarfiy that. I don't know what the glass fragments inside you are, but I feel like it could have been a cool dynamic had you been more clear on what they are.

All Together: I think this is a really strong piece. I would fix some of the vague places, touch up the end of the poem where it talks about the glass inside you, and make the beginning a bit more clear. After that, I don't see much wrong. Keep pumping out work like this, and you'll be a contender for the strongest writer in the class, easily.

MOAR REVIEW!

This is even moar review times...
THE REVIEWER PT2! RETURN OF THE REVIEWER!!
This time, Imma' take a look at QUEENIE!

SLEEPING IN CEMETERIES
The city is a cocoon spewing maggots
Light forces on eyes like rape
Hidden, Hiding, tiny plots of land
Dandelions blossom underneath Magnolia buds
No one can hug you like damp crab grass
No one can kiss you like marble tombs on cheeks

Ants marched in a single file line towards eyeball, towards
Clit, towards flesh
Nudging off everything that made you human,
And carry it on their back
Piece by piece.
Ambulance cries, dirt on skies,
Make camp in between thighs
Of deep fried chicken
Found in garbage cans.

Warmth is found in candle sticks
Soup in desperate dicks
Suffer under sticks,
Old milks Haggard chicks Cop-tricks
And Deer ticks.
They cry because you are gone and kiss
The tiny saliva bubbles on your lips.
Tired smiles, from me, because you are here,
Six feet under
They hucked a loogie on you.
But you told me I am pretty
And I need a place to stay.
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What I liked: I think you're one of the few people who can completely ignore tense and subject-verb agreement rules and still not bother me with it, so I give you props for having some inherent gift in that area. I like you because you just put shit down, and it doesn't matter if it hits the fan, or if it flies--you're just here to put language down in an interesting way, and I can completely get behind that. I love the second stanza. It rhymes, and it changes tense, and I love it. Love the move with making camp between thighs, but then you enjamb it with "of chicken" and it's completely unexpected. I love you for "nobody can kiss you like marble tombs on cheeks."

Improvements: I have no idea what the third stanza is--cool that you don't shy away from the word "dick" and as a matter of fact, I kind of think it's awesome how much cussing you put in your work--not because I like cussing (which I do), but because nobody else has been quite as verbose with their language. I think you should probably tone it back a bit since I think they're supposed to have earth-rippling effect. I also think that not everybody will be as alright with your tense changing as I am here, so I would lock down a tense. It's rather confusing as is.

All Together: Love the moves you make with little phrases, and I think the second stanza is the best out of the poem. While the rest isn't completely bad, I would consider taking the second stanza and saving it. Never know where it might fit into another poem somewhere. Write it down, tweak it, and use it again later. Cutting up drafts like they're someone esle's drapes and then using them to make a dress later is part of the joy of being a poet. Now, go fuck some shit up because you're the man!

REVIEW TIME! LOTS OF REVIEWS!

Time to catch myself up on some reviews. Ready for a reviewtastic revision of revitistical reprecussions?
Then read on. This one goes out to the incredibly beautiful Dawn.

A Trained Man's Discovery
By: Dawn Siddons

8:45 a.m. I'm blue printing an ensemble,
preparing to match my genetic offspring,
flattering my wife—Debora; a genus
in the rose family, I eye the pear
shape of her body, region throughout the world
and surrender to casualties.
Today my family will be frozen,
made into preserves as well as dried
and used in such things as memorabilia.
With strawberry whitened teeth,
we'll fold perfection like the bath linen
expected after laundry day, that washed
away the previous night of beer, football,
and unpleasant smells, compared to skunk
spray or sewage.
Us men husked like Durian, kinged forbidden
the whole experience, partied until
my allotted funds ran out at 11:13 p.m.
I returned home as told, and my wife
she smiled with no effort satisfaction.
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What I liked: I really did like the overall tone of the piece--the repeated use of the fruits, especially "Strawberry whitened teeth" was nice. I loved the use of whitened next to linen even though they weren't tied together, but instead worked off of each other nicely.

Improvements: What do you mean when you say your family will be frozen and made into preserves? I like that it goes on with the whole fruit thing, but I don't know why you would say that. And I don't know why you go on to surrender to casualties. That sounds like people will die. I don't know what the phrase "no effort satisfaction" means. I am a little bit lost at times throughout the work, I admit.

All together: Love the fruit. I really do, but I don't know how it ties in at the beginning. Give me a reason to have your family frozen. Are you killing them and putting them into cryogenic sleep? I want to know about that, I do. How are they preserves? Are you preserving them for later? Eating them? I'm starting to like this poem, but only if that's the case--that's not true though because I like your poem anyway. What is the metaphor about with the linens. I love the linens because you used "white" right before it, but tell me what it means, because I don't know. Final instruction: Keep kicking ass.

FREE THAT WRITING!!! FREE IT LIKE A FLOCK OF BUTTERFLIES!!

We talked the other day about poems from our childhood, so I think I will do this awesome blog-tastical petry extravaganza about some playground memores because what childhood experience will trump that?
Nothing. I answered the question for you because I can read your mind.

C:\My Documents\plaground_1996
by: David the Mathis

I pick up the stone, hovering over a mound of dirt--a suspect ant hill.
The stone is cold against my fingers, but only where the damp earth still clings to the underside;
a hole waits in the ground for the stone to return, but this isn't a puzzle piece.
The stone will not return to it--instead it craters the dirt in a new place, boiling ants over--
they spill onto the hot dirt, ready for anything except two shoes heavier than Osmium.

I imagine they must feel nothing, see nothing, know nothing because they are exoskeletons;
filled with instinct, they bite at immovable objects that are more than 100 times their own weight.
My two shoes pressed against the earth are covered in ants and ant pieces and with each jarring
thwack of shoe on hard-caked clay, I feel my shins burn as they throttle dust against the sky.
With each cloud of tissue-thin dirt, another body is borne into the heavens and I laugh.

Later, A grasshopper tumbles from the trees and lands itself on my shoulder and I take its wings,
tear them slowly from its body--first wing slides off smoothly like a greenstick fracture,
second wing catches, shucks the head with it and I drop an exoskeleton into the pine needles.
That day, I felt remorse for shedding an instinct of its exoskeleton and sat in silence on a stump.

Yeah, sorry about all the delays... double junkyard SLAAM DUNK!

Yeah, so it has been a few weeks since I updated. Because of this, I am going to double up on this junkyard.

[1]
"I took a virgin heifer nightriding for a bit."

[2]
"Someone had a grade-A lungfish decorate their house."

[3]
"What's good is to get these goats for the computer industry."

[4]
"These are big shoes to stick my ass in--ass shoes."

[5]
"You have never seen your face before."

[6]
"What does a mirror look like?"

[7]
"You can't have time if you never make time."

[8]
"Can I get a shot of Jesus over here?"