Poem 18

I had to skip some poems-of-the-day.

At first, I fell a day or two behind

and as the days went on, I couldn't find

the best spot to get back into the fray.

I'm slowly learning how I need to pay

attention to the limits of my mind.

When faced with many options, I must bind

my progress to whatever comes my way.

I could have started back where I left off

or spent some effort getting up to speed.

I could have simply skipped the days I missed.

But now I have been pondering enough.

I figure it is time to do the deed

and pick a day at random from the list.

Poems 09, 10, 11, 12

Poem 09
You ought to grind away at
his powerful laboratory, let him pay
for being so secretive. Is he researching
winterday's twillight? Then run
each morning through

the grinder, chew every twig
of green spring in sequence.
In his view the establishment
of such opposites can only
be lost, or mislaid like an hour's sleep.



Poem 10
Du skal få en dag i mårå.
- Alf Prøysen

Yeah, they promise
a clean slate each time
tomrrow arrives, but mine
is clean right now, my words
still out of order, and midnight
just went by



Poem 11
Possible beginnings for my autobiographical novel

1) The protagonist gets up in the morning
or 2) he roams an allegory of his labyrinthic mind
looking for a newly discovered
book or 3) warns the governement of impending disaster
caused by that book

or perhaps he 4) finds himself trapped
in an underground classroom
by a beast with the head and digestive tract of a bull
or 5) has to explain to the reader
the difficulty of knowing where to begin



Poem 12
slightly out of
step, walking by

Poems 06, 07, 08

I'm still writing daily poems for this 30 day poetry challenge, but I'm on vacation and can't always find the time to publish them. Here are the poems from the last few days, and the one I wrote today.

Poem 06

In this particular poem you will notice

a hollowness, it being built

around a non-existing source

yet non-existence

is not its subject either. It might

if it had a subject

but it can't

Poem 07

A minority of tree-looking structures

are actually lampposts, strictly

held up by metal and design

their heads throw light

at a very specific section of street

unlike all other sections of street

to their eyes

you can rely on street

its textures wear down

at a measurable pace, so unlike

all the faces. What are they flickering

in and out of my light for anyway?

Poem 08

beyond

the looming world

the screech of false alarms

your heartbeat form a melody

of calm

Poem 05

You have evolved away from sweetness 

now, if anyone were to bite into you – and they
might – they would expect their face to curl

Poem 04

Hard of breath, confused
still you excercise your lungs.
From thin air grow words.

Poem 03

Laurus finnes knapt han, har ikke

kjøtt eller sener, blod

har kanskje sevje

er L. Nobilis, et laurbærblad

har aldri smakt en fiskerett

setter kanskje smak på en

(Today's poem is based on words from a random book, and that book happened to be Norwegian. In case you don't read Norwegian, it's about a bay leaf with some existential issues)

Poem 02

Mother, to write you a poem ought not
to feel so weird, after all you grew
my typing fingers and hugged me a lot
when I was small. I can't have grown too far
from that to touch you even with words.

Poem 01

It looks like I've accepted a 30 day poetry challenge because it could be healthy for my mind and sense of language, and because I'm working to improve an existing collection of poetry and could use the excercise. So I will make an effort to write one poem a day, although the rate of publication could turn putte be a bit slower. Still, it will create the illusion, for a while, that I'm updating this blog a lot.

Poem 01
Maybe things don't recur
at all, said the namer of things
repeatedly. Maybe even
things like words blend together
in the process of being
named for ever after