How Quickly Summer Grows Thin Once Full

Pregnant with summer, the tang of pollenic winds curl my hair skyward.  I follow your peculiar melody on the lilting evening as it falls.  I only recall the cadence when you speak, never quite the words.  You’re an illusion of open book with eyes inscrutable.  

Aren’t the simplest questions the most profound?  One must take a sortie with Deep Self to fish around in truth’s waters. Where are you going?  What shape is your dream?  Why do you love what you love?  

_{^{© N Nazir 2023}}

Written for Shay’s Word Garden, where we are given inspiration with the novel 13 Rue Therese by Elena Maria Shapiro. Words used: pregnant, summer, tang, peculiar, melody.

If You Know What’s Good for You

_{^{© John Towner, Unsplash}}

The season brings a delirium of time
shifty as quicksand, but I’m too far adrift to
fathom it.  It’s just so damned hard to get
into these dreary daily doings, so I’m drunk

on a procrastination of coffee.  I don’t
want to unravel, unanchored, just want to be
a charming plaything, winsome, not martyred
as house elf, one of those unseen slaves

who ensure the spick-span purification of
sparkling quarters, a place that swallows time
with its early phantoms.  Only when asleep I get
to better chase the perfect escape, a drunk

devouring wolf sleep, rogue and sham.  I stay
bed-long into Sunday morning, an earned drunk
aftermath of a night’s unspooling of limbs on
the comfort and cooling of sheets, the taste of wine

iron scent in my hair, my long-abandoned virtue
lost somewhere, a hyena of chores circling my poetry
but for now, I’ll deliquesce, vegetate, do whatever.

^{_{© N Nazir 2023}}

Written for Shay’s Word Garden, where we are given inspiration with a word list from the surreal poetry of Rimbaud.  Words used: season, delirium, charming, plaything, phantoms, asleep, wolf, sham, hyena.

Written also for WWW at the Skeptic’s Kaddish, where the poet of the week (Angela Wilson) challenges us to write a golden shovel poem, a form that entails us to incorporate a line or section of a known poem as the final word in each line (similar to an acrostic).  I’ve never done one before so I was keen to have a go.  I included a section of Baudelaire’s well-known poem Get Drunk.

“…Time to get drunk!
Don’t be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!”

*You can read the full Baudelaire poem here.

*Of course, my poem is not true.  Though such a Saturday night is familiar to me, it’s been a while.  Last night, I had a nice cup of cocoa and was all tucked up in bed at a perfectly reasonable time 🙂

Little Ceremonies

^{_{© Jael Rodriguez}}

We eat dust cake moon 
with our tea 
sipped in the silence 
of a sunny afternoon. 
Key ingredients:

a claiming of space
no gibbering, no masks
a gong resounding 
into the noon and beyond
as confetti of thoughts

dissolve, euphonious.
Here we sit 
I and fellow lunatic
at fully waxed table 
while tea leaves steeped 

in memories of the future
are herbivorously drunk 
in between bites
of body of moon
cake-dust-sweet.

_{^{© N Nazir 2023}}

Written for Shay’s Word Garden, where we are given inspiration with poet George Hitchcock (words used: gibbering, mask(s), gong, confetti).

Written for Sammi Scribbles Weekend Writing Prompt: Key, 71 words

No, I Don’t Believe We’ve Met Before

We are bound by ribbon, gently so, but I feel the tug when I wander too far and would be rid of it and your Kerouac nonsense. Hedonism blows great smoke rings but doesn’t pay bills. Everyone’s a forgotten genius, why are you special? We all had a dream crushed under cowskin boots at one time or other, so what? Dreams are plenty, all great things are borne of dreams. So chase a new one. Some heady mix of possible and improbable and metaphysical and unthinkable. Gritted teeth and too much realness disguised as theatre. Society laps up the illusion cause it’s so pretty. Don’t we love the psyche unravelling when it looks pretty? What about the bad, what about the ugly?

And then there are smells, oh, so many smells. Not always peachy girl-sweet Pear’s soap smells, but metallic blood smells, earthy animal smells, rotten fruit smells. What are you going to do about the smells, damn it? The traces left in history’s streets and Victorian by-gonism. The drunken louts, men’s territorial markings. Viennese streets wear it all. Sometimes everything looks the same backwards and forwards. The sumptuous and macabre residing as neighbours in the annals of time and spiral staircases. The photo-negatives of what was, what still is.

And now I’ve wandered too far again and the ribbon has pulled me back. I came from this place, went to that one, found myself other than sought to scrabble out again. Out into the light. The bleaching blinding light.

Give me a shard of glass to cut the cord, so delicate but so finely wrought. Give me a midday sun, a phoenix wing beating thing, burning clean my tea-coloured skin. Give me a newness of moon and long-forgotten ashes, crumbling in the wilding wind.

^{_{© N Nazir 2023}}

Written for Shay’s Word Garden, where Shay brings us inspiration with a word list from the works of poet and musician, Janis Ian. Words used: ribbon, Kerouac, smoke, genius, boots, mix, society, soap. The word list is still up for anyone who wishes to take part.

Written also for Poets and Storytellers United, where Magaly inspires us to write a piece based on a book we’re reading, or have read, or love. I always have my nose in any number of books at any one time, so am currently reading a combination of poetry, supernatural horror, mystical and arthouse, by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Ben Okri, Stephen King and Mohsin Hamid, all of whom I recommend.

Written also for The Sunday Muse, image as shown.

I Wish I Was a Morning Person

When all seemed well, I stepped out.  The sunrise a bleach streak of exalted non-yellow.  ‘Twas not a normal Sunday.  I, gauche femme, frostbitten, fingerless mitten.  When the mind is loquacious.  Then pauses to drench.  Quiet jives.  Time is a slipstream.  Rendered lucid in the giddy light.  Karma’s overgrown hair blowing into spring.  A familial scattering.  And here I land – pop! – in a gasp of winter sun.  Homeland.  In motion.  But. Waiting for a bus.  Clashing colours.  Empty stomach.  Sleep-deprived.  And always, always just a little bit late.  

_{^{© N Nazir 2023}}

Written for Shay’s Word Garden where Shay brings us inspiration with William Wordsworth (words used: yellow, lucid, overgrown).

Written also for Sammi Scribbles Weekend Writing Prompt: loquacious, 88 words.