A violin recital
given while standing
on a lily pad

Nude bicyclists ride
through the neighborhood
painted like trees, cheetahs
and gods nobody recognizes

Have you ever considered
hanging yourself
from hooks in Times Square?

At night, I tape broadsides
all over the windows
so moonlight will bleed
through the pages

I heard he sewed his name
into the incision
as he closed the patient up

* * *
Process Notes

I was reading a post about Boyer Rickel on John Gallaher’s blog yesterday and felt moved to attempt something along the lines of the form Rickel has been writing in, which John describes in his post.

Rickel’s poems are five lines long. Each line is a sentence that relates to the poem’s title. However, the lines themselves are broken and discontinuous, containing gaps and ellipses. The poem above, my first attempt at playing with this form, doesn’t use the sentence as the line, and even though there are spaces and shifts in my piece, I think there’s less of that than in Rickel’s poems.

What I was trying to do, principally, was focus on how each stanza related to, and flowed from, the title and allow for some space between the stanzas, so the reader could imagine more than one narrator or one narrator speaking over some unspecified period of time. I am interested in exploring Rickel’s approach to help me push past the obvious connections between the title and what comes to mind, instead finding my way to more subtle or unexpected associations. I plan to work with this form every day for a while as part of my writing practice.