Here's a fun one >> Berio - Thema: Ommagio a Joyce

There are whistles and heat
and the dryer spinning.
Boys, loose from their cloven feet,
remember
to be merciful. No mother
forgives them.
There is half-light
and a half-step.

The republic of gloves?
A knot of appropriate sweat?

Miles of doubt have been left
on doorsteps.
Peek between the venetian blinds
and you'll see it.

How fleshy the moon is,
its testicles, its pianos,
its exaltation.
It smokes at the hip

against a backdrop of banana trees
spilled up
from a page that will,
at some later date, wander

in the company of pigs and sheep.
A good fit
but filled with amnesia
and a wasted life
in the tropics.

Copyright © 2006 Faye Kicknosway
All rights reserved
from Hawai'i Review
via Verse Daily®

Now it done happened again. Jeff Tweedy, front man for Wilco, has up and published hisself a little chapbook. Honestly. I like what I've read so far. In fact, I wouldn't mind getting this one as a gift. The poems that are on the publisher's site read like song lyrics. These days of severe writer's block have left me desperate. Now I'm thinking that poems that are basically song lyrics can't be all bad. Right?

Ardor

No wonder ardour couldn't survive
the bullying linguistic fist of the Hero
of the Battle of San Juan Hill,
robust and lusty Theodore Roosevelt,
who also managed, upon becoming
the youngest and most virile President
of a young and expanding country,
to eliminate the u from the scents
of arbour, the necessities of labour
and neighbour, the cacophony of clangour,
the heat of rancour.
O Teddy, burly
bespectacled one, monumentally chiseled
into the granite of the mountainside above
the Badlands, see how the world has grown
harder to command than any Commander-
in-Chief could have imagined a century ago:
no Presidential declaration can alter the facts
of spelling — though it still can delete faces
that leave us with a last short o on their lips.

Roy Jacobstein
The Threepenny Review
Fall 2005
(via Poetry Daily)

[. . .] Sevenlings by RODDY LUMSDEN

The sevenling is a poem of seven lines inspired by the form of this much translated short verse by Anna Akhmatova (1889 - 1966).

He loved three things alone:
White peacocks, evensong,
Old maps of America.

He hated children crying,
And raspberry jam with his tea,
And womanish hysteria.

... And he married me.
tr. D M Thomas From Selected Poems (Penguin)

The rules of the sevenling are thus:

The first three lines should contain an element of three - three connected or contrasting statements, or a list of three details, names or possibilities. This can take up all of the three lines or be contained anywhere within them. Then, lines four to six should similarly contain an element of three, connected directly or indirectly or not at all. The seventh line should act as a narrative summary or punchline or as an unusual juxtaposition. There are no set metrical rules, but being such as short form, some rhythm, metre or rhyme is desirable. To give the form a recognisable shape, it should be set out in two stanzas of three lines, with a solitary seventh, last line. Titles are not required. A sevenling should be titled Sevenling followed by the first few words in parentheses The tone of the sevenling should be mysterious, offbeat or disturbing, giving a feeling that only part of the story is being told. The poem should have a certain ambience which invites guesswork from the reader.
_________________________________________________

Two Sevenlings by Roddy Lumsden

A filthy West End night, the windows wide.
Now she's been gone a month and missed a week
and ached for all day long. Her sister waits:

she flips the Magic 8 Ball, walks in circles,
spreads mushy peas on cold, unbuttered toast
in the kitchenette. The record stops. She shouts,

put on some songs by four black guys in suits.

All those buzzsaw years I ran the show,
all those kids who asked me for advice,
The Architect, the Miraclist, The Man.

The starlets kick-line, that was my concoction,
the sailor boys, the peacock feather spotlights;
till one night in a blackout, I let slip

what it is I say to all the girls. [. . .]