The Marathon journey is in its fourth year. Just Enjoy Yourself is the current incarnation. Let’s do it!

On July 10 the Marathon took place at home in the midst of a tropical storm (so the weather people say). Lots and lots of rain.

But I am safe inside with my workroom and my audience created by me just to cheer me on…

I did a few poems today, not many. I had to go to my library book pickup appointment and I had several other tasks to get done, so I let the Marathon be a little shorter today than usual. Here are some examples of my work today.

The theme music is action and drama, and the colors are lurid, in this part of my life.

1.

Ten minutes after midnight
I approach the tumbledown house
in humid dark. The razor-sharp echo
of a barking dog magnified by distance
he hears me but he is too far away to hear me
he will not catch me and bite off my hand
terrifies and reassures. A candle flickers
and flares in an upstairs window
The curtain is alight now. Distressing but
Not my problem. Creeping across the grass
I flinch at another crash of thunder
take a tighter hold on my purse. Now the terrace railing.
I climb and drop. I dislike the feel of the lichened concrete
on my hands. No time to search for a tissue
to wipe them clean. A scent of moldering roses –
a whole florist shop-full of rotten sweet petals perishing –
follows me from the ruined garden. I wish I could hold my nose.
A white moth flutters around my head. Annoyed
I brush it away and drop my purse. The window above me
shatters from the heat of the flames. Glass rains down.
I finger-comb it in sparkles from my hair. Where is my purse?
I curse, not for the first time tonight, and –

Settling into the pillows
I lick my finger and turn the page.
The bedside lamp will be on
for some hours yet.

She appeared, she emerged. I just wrote it down.

3.
She picks up fashionable
with both hands
wrings it out
pins it on the line and dares it to wrinkle
She takes attitude and walks it on her leash
She mastered bored and haughty
in the cradle
She does dramatic
from the center of her bones
radiating out through her skin
into the air into the sky the rain
across the craters on the moon
into the indigo

Plenty of people want to copy her
but she is young she is ancient
she is out of time in all kinds of ways
Knowing her is an addiction
no one wants to acknowledge
even as it exhausts and desiccates.
There is no map.
And all she does is laugh.

Things can be different. It all depends how you do it.

4.
the body in ironed pajamas
sleeping upstairs in the tidy room
Tonight its down-to-earth mind
slips out the dream window
into the warm dense
resonance
of what will not be remembered tomorrow

 

I hope everyone is well and in good spirits. Thank you for reading!