WordSalad: The Poetry of Luke Prater

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Heavy edit and repost of awful poetry I wrote circa 2008. I hope it has some of the right vitamins in this time.

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Brass monkeys - baboons with baked potatoes

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What the hell are brass monkeys?

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Passing her, lain on the lawn of the Big
House, comfortably unclothed legs stroked by
the Midsummer sun; an efflorescent twenty-four.

Recalled the conversation
with his sister:

- She’s very serious;
likes a lot of alone time.

- So do I.

He stopped.

Raising a chestnut-swathed head,
spry eyes asked if it was for hello, or
to lech after basking flesh.

Addled by ambivalence, he walked.

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I’m finished carving girls from stone,
creating women, crave to touch,
from blocks of marble – figures such

when animate, I’m not alone;
but stone is cold, and I grow old -
call on the gods to make this koan

true woman-flesh to warm my clutch.
I’m finished carving girls from stone.

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Second of my newly-invented form, the Octain. Details on structure/rhyme-scheme etc. can be found underneath my first Octain, Breathe. Anyone wanna give it a try?

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Slipped from Sixers (triolet version)

The room was small, old chairs stood hulking staunch;
the table bare, and barely used at all,
career in writing strangely failed relaunch.
The room was small, old chairs stood hulking staunch.
His stomach slipped from sixers to a paunch;
this blurred, misheard, feigned “yes”; eyes off the ball.
The room was small, old chairs stood hulking staunch;
the table bare, and barely used at all.

Slipped from Sixers (rondel version)

The room was small, old chairs stood hulking staunch;
the table bare, and barely used at all,
reclining into carpet ‘gainst the wall.
The room was small, old chairs stood hulking staunch.

His stomach slipped from sixers to a paunch,
this blurred, misheard, feigned “yes”; eyes off the ball.
The room was small, old chairs stood hulking staunch;
the table bare, and barely used at all.

Career in writing strangely failed relaunch,
perpetually face-first in stymied squall,
damn climbing down to critics takes some gall -
exhale the stigma, shun the dreamt-up taunts.
The room was small, old chairs stood hulking staunch;
the table bare, and barely used at all.

☆

I’ve been wanting to write a triolet for some while now, and discovered that it is in fact a shorter version of the 13-line (or 14-line) form, the rondel. The triolet has the first 8 lines only (with a minor difference in the rhyme-scheme at line three). As you’ll see there is plenty of repetition with two busy refrains and only two end-rhymes; the longer version (rondel) gives more lines that aren’t simply repetitions of the refrains, so potentially the piece has more scope/depth. Here are the structures/rhyme schemes; they are both easy, ideal for someone starting out with poetry stricter in form -

Meter (in both): any; all lines a can scan differently. I went for iambic pentameter, but that is by no means a necessity.

(Capital As and Bs are repeated refrain lines)

Triolet:

A-B-a-A-a-b-A-B

Rondel:

A-B-b-A | a-b-A-B | a-b-b-a-A-(B) – optional repetition of B refrain to close (as I did, making it a ‘rondel prime’ or ‘French sonnet’)

I wonder which version you prefer?

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She passes him and looks away distant,
his asking eyes denied, brushed off and lost.
The pavement’s hard and cold, a man-made fist
and fights his shuffling feet through thinning frost.

Another passes quick, want swells and dies;
with sighs, a cab is pulled from Tarmac path.
Outside he’s smiling suns; within he cries -
They cannot know a thing beneath my laugh.

The night is lost in blurring lines of white,
and stuck to sticky faking leather seat,
he ponders on the crawling stream of lights,
hands held to window, stroking at the sheet.

The driver’s eyes they glint and show the moon;
he takes his fare and winks – I’ll see you soon.

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I wrote this Shakespearean/English sonnet in my First Year at University (1998/99). It’s one of the few pieces I penned back then that I can still look at without cringing. Now it’s had an edit, I think it’s scrubbed up quite well.

Shakespearean Sonnet structure as follows:

Fourteen lines comprising three quatrains and a rhyming couplet, ten syllables per line in iambic pentameter,  and a Volta/turn (resolution or change in tone) coming with the closing couplet. Rhyme-scheme: a-b-a-b / c-d-c-d / e-f-e-f / g-g

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