For Tourmaline .’s Halloween Challenge, “ghost,” I changed the eyes on one of my ghost filters and got out the creepy children figurines. Then I thought it might be fun to try some shots from outside in to capture some ghosts on the furniture, so I hung some lights in the window and went out on the porch. Then the happy accidents began.

I am usually irritated by all the bright lights my neighbors burn all night. The light pollution blocks out most of the starlight in an area that should be a great place for stargazing. However, this morning before dawn, those lights across the lake created a perfect palette for ghosts and their oddly right-side-up (or upside-down) reflections on the still, glassy water.

OctPoWriMo

Today’s prompt “theater” goes well with the 2018 prompt which was “If I Were You.” It was the last prompt I responded to in 2018 and I wrote a blitz poem. There are a few lines from that blitz that I like and relate to today’s prompts:

Afraid to discover/Discover yourself/Discover you were wrong

Deceive your believer/Deceive with a smile/Smile through the pain/Smile while the heart breaks/Breaks barriers

Love ripped away in a day/Love in a paper heart

Consider your options/Consider how I feel
Feel the love/Feel for another

In the 2018 prompt, she talked about feeling the need to get things off your chest, and times you wish people would see things from your point of view, but “If I Were You” has very different connotations to me. And combined with today’s prompt “theater,” it could be about an actor’s process, trying to actually become someone else.

An Actor At Heart

This theater, repeat defeater, creeps
into everything, thespian terminator
of tastier chemistry, detonates the latch
that was holding me back, biting my tongue
biding my time to tame forgiveness wild
behind the clear fragile pane in its frame

And now, used as a mirror, a lover, afraid
to discover, discover myself in you, through you,
seen by you, discover I was wrong all along
that you deceive your believer, that I am
the believer deceived, deceived by a smile, the smile you
smile through, through the pain, through the
stuck loop-brain, mirrored smile as my heart breaks
finally breaking through the faux-mirror barrier,
the reflective shards splatter then scatter,
tatters of face laced lateral flattery lacks
fact staged as false safety now lost

And now, stage left alive while I writhe sleepless
again, rage kept aside childhood nights
of boogeymen, and man monsters in the closet
I posit I had no options frozen in loss
I tossed to any comfort familiar, known
clung to as home, though full of ghosts
haunted, roaming unwanted by most, I
became host to a diaspora of spirits

And now, I consider my options, plethora
of options to consider, one of those considerations
could be how you feel, how I would feel
if I were you, empathic fanatic actor
collector of others, crawl into your skin
shoes and eyes, see your lies and whys,
the trauma that creates drama in response
to the symmetry of leaves in trees

Studying the Beat Poets & My Exploration of Sonic Surrender

This week, week 6 of ModPo, we’re studying the beat poets. The section starts by reading and discussing Howl by Allen Ginsberg. As I read it I remembered a tape a friend gave me of Steven “Jesse” Bernstein. I heard the music behind Steven as he spoke his poems while reading Howl. I hadn’t noticed how close their rhythms are before.

Then I read some of “Old Angel Midnight” by Kerouac and watched Anne Waldman perform “Rogue State” and started to wonder about my concept of sonic surrender vs. “babble flow” vs. nonsense. I like the sound collecting I’ve been doing and connections I’ve been finding, but I’m not completely surrendering to only the sound of the words. I’m not even repeating words and phrases very much. I’m stuck in a constraint of creating meaning, wanting to create shared understanding, and I think I like that better than babbling sounds.

Last night I watched the movie Howl for the first time. It wasn’t what I expected. I liked how they included a dramatization of the obscenity trial against the publisher. But mostly it was a beautifully animated reading of the poem. One of the important things I took away from the film was Ginsberg’s belief that a poet had to bring the voice they use to talk to their friends to their poetry.

Writober

This Week’s Story

Logline: An arrogant gossip hears noises coming from his shower. Exploring the drain isn’t enough, after cutting a whole through the floor, he finds that his problems run much deeper.

I’m having fun taking my time with this draft. Sharing my progress here is great accountability to keep me working on it. Today another fun idea came while I was writing. Here’s an excerpt:

I loosened my tie and pulled it over my head. I had the clever idea of lowering the tie down there, like a colorful silk claw-lure. After letting it dangle limply for a few minutes, I gave it a few quick jerks to make it dance, grab attention, but no takers. When I pulled it out it was splotched with black ooze. Ruined. Stupid.

Maria L. Berg 2021

Happy Reading and Writing!