April 9, 2023 – The passionate learner

Can I call it a love story? The one where you broke my heart into pieces.
He shall burst into flames, for crashing like a meteor wounding my faith in love.
My faith in him faded like the clouds disappearing from a dark moonless sky,
The Moon no longer being espied as if lost in the haze of your vile fumes.
I have delved into the chaotic chasm between us,
searching for what true love is, only to taste disappointment.
Is it my profound fervor for obsession or am I delusional?
He who acted like the London Boy written by Taylor Swift;
not only flawed his identity, yet also faked his sweet disposition.
I was the lonely bearer of all the grief, ridiculed every committed man
until I find ‘the one’, certain of the fact- him and I could never be us,
though, had the privilege of being written in a novel or a song lyric.

Two virtual characters falling in forbidden love- a catastrophe,
one drifted by passion, the other silently absent in the picture.

~Navaparna

Day 9 of Na/GloPoWriMo 2023.

Prompt 9 source: https://www.napowrimo.net/poets-start-your-engines /
Today, sonnets are probably most commonly associated with Shakespeare (who wrote more than 150, and felt very little compunction about messing around with the form, at least to the extent of regularly saying “who cares” to strict iambs). But poets’ attention to the form hasn’t waned in the 400 years or so since the Bard walked the fields around Stratford-upon-Avon and tramped the stage-boards of Merrie Old England. Take a look at this little selection of contemporary sonnets by Dennis Johnson, Alice Notley, Robert Hass, and Jill Alexander Essbaum. You’ll notice that while all of these poems play in some way on the theme of love, they are tonally extremely different – as is the kind or quality of love that they discuss. Some rhyme, some don’t. They mostly stick to around 14 lines but They’re also not at all shy about incorporating contemporary references (the Rolling Stones, telephones, etc).

Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own sonnet. Incorporate tradition as much or as little as you like – while keeping in general to the theme of “love.”

I was out of my mind, confused how to start off with a sonnet, eventually I let my tangled thoughts run across the way it likes and certainly I was unsure as to what exactly am I proceeding to write about but then I found a contrasting effect between two mismatched lovers at odds and the story of a heartbreak took the way out. I am actually glad the story line reflected my past relationships and it portrayed the more one tries to cling onto the other obsessively, the more they get hurt and for the other one, it doesn’t even matter to them when they are so evidently not pouring enough love, simply using it for their advantage. I hope this poem literally depicts the picture of the two lovers, one broken by the other and obviously written by Taylor Swift!! I wrote it in a way Taylor would have chosen the boy in her song and probably using her kind of language in showing the boy’s character in my poem, little lyrical, little passive, not sounding brutal but little bit of kind and compulsive.

Windows full of watercolors, glowing in the dark
when the world sleeps, silence penetrates like a mischievous thief.
owls can watch you at night,
bats hear your tiniest whisper,
bears who can smell your dirty feet,
venus flytrap is rooting to feel your presence,
anaconda hopes to have pleasure eating you alive.
Be aware, tonight you are meeting a predator,
who can taste your breath and smell your whisper.
He can be in any form, be aware while you walk in the dark.
The predator who owns his empire, the hell-
the fallen angel who rules the mortals.
I’m talking about the king, Lucifer, yes.
When silence bumped into dark, the watercolors melt.
Each time a mortal dies, bleeding seamlessly flows in black
unable to recognise, death carries perpetual mystery
says the pessimistic devil, a trainwreck himself.

~Navaparna

Day 8 of Na/GloPoWriMo 2023.

Prompt 8 source: https://www.napowrimo.net/poets-start-your-engines/
Here’s for our daily (optional) prompt. This is another oldie-but-goodie. I remember being assigned to use it in a college poetry class, and loving the result. It really pushes you to use specific details, and to work on “conducting” the poem as it grows, instead of trying to force the poem to be one thing or another in particular. The prompt is called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. And here are the twenty little projects themselves — the challenge is to use them all in one poem:

Begin the poem with a metaphor.
Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
Use a phrase from a language other than English.
Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

It was challenging yet it kept me intrigued. Really trying the best way possible but it takes a lot of time. I went half way through, might complete by tonight.