The Ballad of Stinky Jean

You smell like feet for a moment,

But I’ll be sweet for a moment.

And I just won’t tell you

Because I think that it’s polite.

.

You must have cheese stuffed in your ears

Or skunk juice dripping from your tears

Because I just can’t stand

The smell that is around you.

.

I’ll burn some sage for an hour.

I’ll ask if you want to take a shower.

But even if you ask,

I just won’t tell the truth.

.

Do you see the pain in my lying eyes?

Does my averted nose take you by surprise?

Did you ever think

That I would do something to hurt you?

.

You smell like feet for a moment,

But I’ll be sweet for a moment.

And I just won’t tell you

Because I think that it’s polite.

And He Called Himself G

She had seen the slow drip of smile

That didn’t quite match his face.

There was just too much something

In the nothing she saw in his eyes.

And she didn’t know why,

.

But she knew.

If anyone could be

A single use disposable douche,

He would be.

Hanging in Hattiesburg

The slow drip of the frost melting

From the sun’s multiple car window reflective.

Two men on their front porch mourning

the apartment parking lot view respective.

The bones of a Tuesday morning

Taking turns on a half-drunk bottle perspective.

What is Writing?–Prose Poetry

Writing is a mysterious thing that doesn’t happen all at once, and it seldom happen in the right order. Writing is a process of digging through your knowledge and life experience in an attempt to discover what it is you actually believe. In fact, writers often don’t even know how they think about their subject until they have finished writing about it. And most writing happens when you are rushing out the door in the morning, driving home from class at the end of a long day, or washing your hair in the shower. So always keep a notebook nearby to jot down your genius ideas before they evaporate back into dust they came from.

My flarf poem is up at Spillwords.com

My poem, “Patella is Latin for Kneecap,” has been published on Spillwords.com. If you would like to read it, click here: https://spillwords.com/patella-is-latin-for-kneecap/

Good News

One of my flarf poems titled “Patella is Latin for Kneecap” has been accepted for publishing at Spillwords.com. They said they will contact me again in about a month to give me the date when my poem will be published.

I am Mechanism

I laid my head

On the ceramic floor tile or existence.

I am mechanism.

The flavor and the heartburn

Of disappearance.

***

This is a poem I wrote in April 2017 when everything I wrote was completely terrible. Somehow this poem came out comparatively good. At the time I had started experimenting with avantgarde poetry, but I had not yet figured out what makes a good avantgarde poem. I think much of my problem was that I didn’t know what made a good poem of any sort. Now, I have had much more practice at regular poems and crazy ones alike, and I feel like I have a better handle on how to write a poem and how to appreciate one.

If you want to, you can see the original post of this poem here: https://therichardbraxton.wordpress.com/2017/04/13/april-poem-13-napowrimo/

And if you want to compare it to the more terrible poems I wrote in April of 2017, you can do that here: https://therichardbraxton.wordpress.com/2017/04/page/2/

How to Vocabulary Responsibly

Nictitate: The type of word you use when you want people to break out the dictionary and then be mad you didn’t just say ‘blink.’

I Think it Was the Asphalt

Who’s fault? My fault?? And why do you gotta call me an ass?!

You know, maybe, it was yo’ ass fault.

Soul-crusher Boss-jerks—Keening practice

Generally, people-selves who pursue    Pure word-smasher degrees

love to find the clock-power to think    Through the word-quilts we read.

Often don’t spend think-juice searching   Soul-crushers word-smashers can work

Leaving word-smashers in the wind     Working for soul-crusher boss-jerks.

.

People-selves=us or we

Word-smasher=English Literature degree or English Literature major

Clock-power=time

Word-quilt=book

Think-juice=brain power

Soul-crusher=job

Boss-jerk=employer

***

Keening is the practice of combining two words to create a poetic replacement for a noun. It is a very old practice dating back to Anglo-Saxon poetry and possibly even before that. A good example is from the epic, Beowulf: instead of writing ‘ocean’ the poem uses the word ‘whale-road.’ But even though it is an ancient practice, people still do it today, but the most widespread use of keening is in vulgar insults where instead of using a person’s name, you might use a word such as dick-head, ass-face, or douche-nozzle. If you want to learn more about keening or any other poetry term, you can check out the Glossary of Poetic Terms at Poetry Foundation here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms?letter=K

Beowulf also used a form of poetry where lines were separated by cesuras that were marked by alliteration. I added the extra spaces between the alliterated words as a way to mark the cesuras a little better because this is not something we expect in our poetry anymore. I did use rhyme at the end of the lines although Beowulf and other early examples of English poetry did not use rhyme.