Faces

This poem is dedicated to my dear friend Ryan Levin. These verses describe the mutual silliness of our tendency of making funny faces at each other.

Faces

His face will smile, wide-eyed saucers

Like mine. With raised silly eyebrows--

Gesundheit! More hiccups come as

We mimic each other's faces.

The Ryan--Char's mirror image!

I tried my best to stick to the following pattern: / x' / x' / 'x / 'x /, two "unstressed stressed" feet followed by two "stressed unstressed" feet, an actual mirror image! Spicin' up the tetrameter. How cool is that?

Cheers,

Char

Feminine Rhyming Couplet with Variations

Another Engl 131 Assignment! We basically had to write a descriptive couplet in iambic form, but with a caesura after the second foot of the first verse, a trochaic substitution in the third foot of the first verse and another one in the first foot of the second verse. The rhyme scheme is A A. Each verse contains 11 syllables, the last one is unaccented, thus the name of the exercise: feminine rhyming couplet with variations. Nice deviation from the standard line in iambic pentameter. Pattern is as follows:

/ x ´ / x ´ , / ´ x / x ´ / x ´ / x

/ ´ x / x ´ / x ´ / x ´ / x ´ / x

We had to choose one subject from our list of "Walmart nonsense words," so I -- naturally -- picked "hammer." Once again, we weren't allowed to use metaphors. Simple plain rhetoric. One word: mindf*ck. I hope you enjoy.

Hammer

The modern head: steel for efficient bounces.

Standard can weigh from ten to twenty ounces.

Cheers,

Charmander Char

Drifter

DON'T open that window!
Hours searching for the right words
for my mental show & tell--and it's here!
A THOUGHT hit my mind--now it's mine.

DON'T open that window!
The in utero snapshots of my seed
will burst OUT of my soul,
leave the room,
crawl out the window,
seep back into the world.

Windows closed, my pen drifts, to find
peace in the dreams I crochet with paper.

There's me--drifting
drifting under a cumulus sky,
Interstate flooded with my stepping-stone trucks.

I play hopscotch on the freight trucks
with catlike surreptitiousness;
I claim my nighttime alley roof
in broad daylight.

I drift as I dunk the spectators' thoughts
into the ice water of my imagination.
I feel. The scorching heat
heat of the day adheres to my skin,
kissed away by the healing wind.
My cured feet, naked, they wander
above the star-studded asphalt.

Fin

You may open the window now.

~
Cheers,
Char

Engl 348 (Iambic Pentameter)

I like the way our Teacher looked like drapes.
Her shoulders--wrapped by floral prints and leaves--
they seemed to me, were rods that held up yards
of flowers that cascaded to her feet.

Last Ballet Class (Iambic Pentameter)

And I remember when Poseidon died--
a day before my grandpa killed himself--
as I was twirling on the tip of my
new Sanshas. Fall from a passé, I cried.