WordSalad: The Poetry of Luke Prater

congregate, philosophise
negotiate; trip the tenuous compass of mores

eat, fuck, shit, sleep

reincarnate, empathise
dedicate; weep on white at pluperfect cruelty

eat, sleep, shit, sleep

music-make, romanticise
thus spake; plead ivory towers from gown and gavel

gather, eat, fuck, shit

painstake, synthesise
for art’s sake; frame from cauldrons of cortex conception

eat, fuck, shit, sleep

kill
kill
kill

vindicate, rationalise

run (on)

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A hard hand had her in the dirt,
twelve-year-old school skirt rent, awry;
fetor of blood and semen.

Clutching callow fruit to her breast,
insidiously inseminated; the race
programmed to propagate.

A destitute Mestiza grandmother
is taken in childbirth, slipping and keening
in a crimson flood, awash and away
after shock conception (bravely, a miracle).

Gaia barely blinked as
She spun on the callous breeze,
shivering the limbs of trees.

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Balanced within this
mounted mould of sinew and skin,

knowing – for the short stretch
I amble the earth -

I’d prefer to have, than have not,
yet with modesty and generosity;

absence of these would
sweat the scruples out of me.

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The aging, infirm, discarded
feel the cold biting their marrow
like leafless trees,
jagged, jutting into dirty skies.

She shuts out Her warmer cousin
with cyclical cruelty.

Lovers, dreamers, starwatchers, poets -
those who see beauty in everything –
blithely glory in The Fall as ascent
into Autumnal awe; rafts of reds, yellows,
burnt oranges and chestnut browns
swathe the ground.

The Fall descends into
drawn-out asphyxiation
for the ramshackle vagrant
hacking into double pneumonia.

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.

Flaxen ringlets, eyes
precariously close to powder-blue;
lithe flesh and edible complexion

pleasantly festooning a stretch of
summer grass, lazily embracing
a manifest juvenescence.

She will die.

Before that, she will witness, inexorably,
bodily attributes

fading, warping, sagging,

being bent earthwards by
gravity, age, emotion, vicissitudes.

She will be erased,
living out the rigmarole -

infinitesimal

unrelenting

moments,

until pallbearers are the last
to carry the burden of her shell.

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.

soft fall,
upturned hands;
luxuriate in let-go forget.

the relief trust brings
the falling leaf, held aloft
with an exhalation

of cobalt firmament;
ephemerality taken
with soft, upturned hands,

and held.

☆

Join us for Meeting the Bar: Crit and Craft at d’Verse Poets’ Pub where we are exploring the Craft of Poetry and the giving and receiving of Constructive Criticism. Bring a poem to link and pull a stool up to the bar.

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Eleven strings to arch my bow,
eleven rings in resting row;
totemic as a calving cow.
Polemic: I can’t use them now.

A cat-o’-nine-tails, had nine wives;
tense nine inch nails, I got nine lives.

On seven seasons’ greedy suns,
unheeded sev’ral warning guns.
Spent seven years in great Tibet -
and seven years in bale regret.

Five dances, spinning, and five chances
in circles spin, Five Rhythms dances.

Three phrases, through three stoic mazes,
prove places full freeways from stasis -
this room, this room, this fucking room;
hushed prayers to weave light into loom.

One person, one. No other people.
One wall, and brick; no chink, no peephole.

Spin spin the Earth, maintain its turning;
rotate this man, stretched flesh is burning.

☆

This piece I scrawled almost illegibly on a scrap of paper in a near-dark room in May 2004, when completely bedbound. I lay motionless in the dark for so long, my body went onto a 25-hour clock (a bizarre yet factual occurrence when one has no light), and went round it twice (waking up at 3am/at 5pm as my morning, and everything in between) I also became so thin with muscle wastage I literally looked like I was dying of anorexia. It wasn’t until 2008 that I typed it up, and since have tried about three times to rewrite it to a standard at least shareable with my poetry friends. I failed twice, and thought it was a good bit of personal catharsis charting some deep, dark space that would serve only as poetic journal entry. Finally, after forgetting about it for months, I saw it there in my archives and tried the meter trick: going through the entire piece making it metrically exact, which forces rewriting in many places and thinking very carefully about word-use. Here I have used iambic tetrameter (second half with an added unstressed syllable on the end). Whether it’s done the job is hard to judge for me, but the initial reactions have been positive.

(Image: The Seven Suns megalith, Ireland)

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Amy Winehouse (14 Sept 1983 – 23 July 2011) British R&B/Soul/Jazz singer

I sat with death at twenty-seven.

If death an absence of life, I was alleywayed alongside.
Lying, unafraid, catching a fox’s bark – that eerie
cry for carnal comfort – around the copse across the track.

I wasn’t to be taken back to Earth and Sky;
neither was the fox. Morning light split my face
and drove all nocturnes down.

Cobain’s split by double-barrel self-prescribed
for the deepdarksink; Jimi, Janis, Morrison’s
by uppers, downers and bangdownupside vomit.

Twenty-seven, twenty-seven, twenty-seven.

Read the news today (oh boy). Amy Winehouse, twenty-seven.
Rolling out and unfolding the appled silverback, announcing
online, with every ounce of gravity cyberspace allows -

‘I survived twenty-seven’.

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They shoot the breeze with big and small (but mainly small);
“It never came to any good”, self-satisfied.
As ever, then it was forgotten, ditched by all.

It might have been worth all that spit, they can’t recall,
though some wore truth and some wore coloured shades of lie;
they shoot the breeze with big and small (but mainly small).

Agreeable or inclement, to face a squall
as endings come, is irrefutable. Deny,
as ever; then it is forgotten, ditched by all.

A cynics ceremony, protocol of pall;
these senseless seething spirals gathered in goodbyes.
They shoot the breeze with big and small (but mainly small).

What to wear tonight? Might have to spree the mall.
That clothing, cotton worked by swarthy hands, untie
when time is done, and flesh forgotten, ditched by all.

Still breathing and still chattering, can’t face the fall;
emancipated higher selves will fin’lly fly.
They shot the breeze with big and small (but mainly small) -
forever, now they are forgotten, ditched by all.

☆

Villanelle rewrite of (mainly the small), which is in free verse and prose-poetry forms.

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