🧐 🤔… Art!

The prompt Braden set: what is art to me?
This one was a real challenger
As hard as climbing a tall mango tree
Easier when I was younger
Now I’m scared I’ll lose my balance

We need to define and categorise
It’s what makes us humans- human
One of the things in a long list of traits
Dismaying many young students
Species, genus, order, phylum

We classify everything, helps us think quickly
But what is art? And what is it to me?
Action movies aren’t art apparently
And there’s a difference between genre and literary
I find as much beauty and truth in Naruto (shounen anime) as Bergman’s ‘Seventh Seal’

I guess, for me, art is about communication
I am touched when I see something that transcends nature
Meaning, a depiction that we are more than just beasts,
imprisoned by our animalistic urges:
Eat, drink, procreate, dominate

Playing
With structure
And
Conceptions
Is fun
And fun
Is good
I can
Feel it
Hence, ‘art’?
I don’t know
I’m
perpetually
Confused
By that
Blank canvas
With a
Taped
Banana
🍌
(Or is it taped to a wall? I’m too lazy to look it up now)

Rawr!!!

Sup 😎

In this week’s W3 challenge hosted on The Skeptic’s Kaddish, Suzette, the poet of the week, has asked us to Write: A) a haiku, OR: B) a tanka on the theme of “a favorite way to relax / unwind”. I like to unwind by playing my guitar, usually just noodling around, but that would not make a nice haiku. So, I’ve found my new favourite way to unwind… Shouting in a thunderstorm

Monsoon thunderstorm
My roars find their resonance
Ends with calm drizzle

(My old doctor has stopped practising… But good news!!! I went to a new one, who is really good. She’s considering reducing my Lamotrigine, after I told her it was making me dopey. She explained to me that I would never be able to get off my medication, though I was hoping that I could. I have never experienced extreme mania… I’ve reached around 8 on the 10 point scale. I swing more to the depressed side of the scale… She has asked me to chart my moods on a calendar, which I don’t know how to do. I don’t know how I’m feeling most of the time. 🤔😮‍💨)

Animal Abuse on Noah’s Ark

On this week’s W3 challenge hosted on the Skeptic’s Kaddish, David, the poet of the week, has asked us to write a poem of at least 6 lines which is heavy in assonance/consonance or both. This is my second try.

Irked by the leaky Ark
Shem felt it was a shame
He had to spend his week
Plugging up the holes. Yucky
sticky gum made him all itchy
( It ) oozed all over the new wood
Later, he saw the fruit of his labour
And smiled… but he also smelled…
Then a twist! There was a problem with the ballast
New troubles, but he needed a solution now
He ordered an elephant to come and sit down
Its trunk even made a good pump
The poor animal’s treatment was criminal
It caught a cold, and sneezed. Old Shem couldn’t
Dodge the spray

[The ‘gum’ here is pine resin, or whatever ancient equivalent used to stick the new pieces of wood over the leaks]

Such a Lonely Pantoum

The cosmos dances on my palm
The Universe sparks into being
Galaxies spinning,  slow and calm
For him I can hear three bells ring

The Universe sparks into being
The story of a lonely man
For him I can hear three bells ring
I had much greater ambition

The story of a lonely man
They said I needed hard labour
I had much greater ambition
Though there was peace I could savour

They said I needed hard labour
The king threw me to his blacksmiths
Though there was peace I could savour
They couldn’t purify my myths

The king threw me to his blacksmiths
They hammered me for three decades
They couldn’t purify my myths
I was jailed by the Ace of Spades

They hammered me for three decades
I’m all squashed and bent out of shape
I was jailed by the Ace of Spades
But I’ve found a way to escape

I’m all squashed and bent out of shape
I’m abandoned in a black hole
But I’ve found a way to escape
A primal cry comes from my soul

I’m abandoned in a black hole
Galaxies spinning, slow and calm
A primal cry comes from my soul
The cosmos dances on my palm

(This week’s POW, Punam, for the W3 challenge hosted by David on the Skeptic’s Kaddish, she has asked us to write a pantoum on the theme of abandonment. I wrote this backwards… seemed easier.)

I Reap What I Sow

My solitude has made me sick
There’s no one to lay my heart on
It’s always been I, me, and my
Would be nice to share this journey
But when I fall asleep… oh my!
The strange folk I meet in my dreams
If only I had that same will
During the day when I wander
To meet people and bond like this
Asleep I thrive, awake — desolate
But moonlight can’t help me grow my field

Sick on my journey
my dreams will wander
this desolate field –Matsuo Basho

旅に病んで　夢は枯野を　かけ廻るTabi ni yande/ Yume wa kareno wo/ Kakemeguru

For The Skeptic’s Kaddish

Ange’s prompt guidelines

1. Select a haiku written by someone other yourself;
2. Construct a “Golden Shovel” poem from that haiku.

Golden Shovel?

A golden shovel is a poetic form in which the last word of each line forms a second, pre-existing poem (or section thereof), to which the poet is paying homage.

Dancing with Shadows

For dverse

Use the line, ‘she’d had it sliced away leaving a scar,’ in a piece of prose 144 words long.

There was a time when everything seemed clear. A time when she remembered. She could still vaguely see some things. There was a cuckoo clock that was always five minutes early, a grey sofa with sunken cushions, a black and white television that played every episode of Perry Mason religiously, and a man with shadows swirling around him. That memory was all she had left of him, but she’d had it sliced away leaving a scar. Sometimes the scar would itch, when the weather changed. Sometimes it would bleed and the man would drown in a pool of her blood, his shadows screaming like that painting by Edvard Munch. Her nightmares tried to make her remember, but she refused. She knew her scar would heal one day. A rare smile bloomed on her face. Till that day came she would dance with the shadows.