WordSalad: The Poetry of Luke Prater

Enunciation rarely finds true flight -
attention ties my gaffing tongue in knots.
When thoughts are wanted: strangles, it garrottes,
and in the end, I render them contrite.
Shy throat attacked, staunch stomach twisted tight,
words stagger forth and lurch about in clots;
a true line, syntax, once, becomes mere dots -
expressionless, but for the self-indict.

Excepting only voice when used in song,
when setting music to an earnest thought.
It’s effortless and eloquent to me;
appears to be the purest sound, a gong
in Buddhist monast’ry; oh, how less fraught
I feel when reaching out in harmony.

✩

Italian Petrarchan Sonnet – abbaabba cdecde - first penned back at College/Uni in 2000 and recently rewritten.

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The fetid stench – the fettered, seething, bustling;
unkind to kith, the pith stays isolated.
Biodegradability in rustling
black plastic sacks and body-bags, frustrated

by rank bloodlust and bloodiest of skirmish.
Obscene onscreen finagling pity-putty;
as night claims sketchy sundown, thighs lose firmish.
The flickered violence; dick-avid slutty

slysinks the skull and shapes a man’s demeanour.
The keener and the vulner’ble affected,
manhands are dirtier (and yet, they’re cleaner).
A penitentiary: no doubt elected,

but chance to move with Truth is mealy-meagre.
Vow oust the housed-in self that dampens eager.

✩

An experiment using feminine end-rhyme (stress/unstress to end the lines – eg ‘mea gre’/’ea ger’) in English Sonnet format (lines have their ten syllables of iambic pentameter, plus one unstressed on the end).

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Can’t hear the words ‘noli me tangere‘?
Don’t smile, don’t speak, don’t look, go on your way.
Don’t touch, don’t brush, don’t breathe, slope cowardly -
repulse, revile, repugnance; hateful fray.

Don’t care you swear of kinship, and you say
that people live as brethren; ugh. Not I.
It ain’t because your faggot mauve is fey;
it’s more because you’re human ham on rye.

Noli me tangere, I can’t deny
it tames my tempest, keeps the rabble back.
Most days – click-clack! click-clack! hell, let it fly;
don’t need a forty-five, I got a Mac.

Provide the porn n’ pills n’ piece-meal feed,
and in return – a fuckin’ first-class read.

☆

‘Noli me tangere’  (no-lee-mee-tang-jhu-ree) is Latin for ‘Touch me not’, supposedly said by Jesus to Mary Magdelene after Resurrection when she recognised him. Handily, it’s also in iambic meter. The above is an English Spenserian Sonnet, inspired by Bukowski on how far away he liked to be from ‘The Human Race’ -

[...] two inches is great, two miles is great, two thousand miles is beautiful.

Rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee

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Chimera (English Sonnet)

Like ancestors, she breathes the arid air
in climes of coarsest beauty, red the stone;
the blushing fractured earth is leafless-bare,
while he inhales dense greens and hills, alone.

Alarmingly exotic brown, her eyes
that look and want beyond their quandaries;
disarmingly erotic brown, her thighs
that restless, want beyond their boundaries.

Mouth drawing him, a siphoned fluid, hot
like some illicit truck petroleum,
he wonders if what she can taste is not
the hot, but water, seas of tedium.

That searing sphere he feels too near again,
her wicked sun. Chimera she’ll remain.

Chimera (free verse)

Like her ancestors
breathing arid desert air
climes of coarse beauty -
red rockpiles,
blushing, fractured earth -
as naturally as he inhales greens
and sad, time-weary stone
of rural England

Alarmingly erotic, disarmingly
exotic brown eyes
keep watching, watching
beyond vanishing point
beyond self-manifest horizons

Drawing him, siphoned fluid -
hot on her tongue
like illicit petroleum.
Breathe fire!
Or water to the taste?

Thousands of miles of it between,
enough to drown her wicked dustbowl sun;
still he heats like that searing sphere

when they meet, but
chimera she will remain.

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The ego of the Poet is a beast that growls for strokes;
quest for compliments excludes the all-important learning.
The ego of the Poet is, at best, a beast that chokes,
leaves the latent buds of Springtime in eternal yearning.

Big diction beats the pen or sword, and balls you got, I’m sure.
Heftier, though, is your head – need hats in larger sizes?
Don’t give a shit, man, if you writ a hundred sonnets pure,

that you break all rules of Lit, or won a thousand prizes.
The girls all love a Poet, yeah, you know it’s the allure.
Dish you serve proves vomitous, at last she realises -

it’s of no substance; motives were suspicious from the start.
Still you tout your Facebook Page, your chapbook, what a faceful.
The ego-beast, your captor, forces fool’s pride in your Art -
Must compete! Damn Facebook-rage! Another hack disgraceful.

(Stress Matrix Sonnet No. 3)

☆

The third in my own form Stress Matrix Sonnet/Stress Checkerboard Sonnet. Form Details can be found beneath my first, Forks and Spades.

I should be clear here that I’m using the term ‘ego’ in the most common sense (overly high opinion of oneself), and not the psychological/psychoanalytical one (the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious, and is responsible for reality testingand a sense of personal identity), nor the philosophical (a conscious thinking subject). Definitions from The New Oxford American Dictionary.

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His sleep was stirred before the burgeoning of dawning sun.
Regularly, years, despite vicissitudes, in bunk-bed
he wouldn’t stay – before the barrack’s early morning run
coughing, smoking, first of many. Found it cleared a tired head.

This gentle Northern lad defied the constant warning signs,
hacking at him, packets daily, deaf to implication.
Was not his place to question why, but wary of field-mines;

solace lay in morning’s dawning peace, a mute elation
accompanied by nicotine and tar, inclined, supine.
Old and well-thumbed copy of The Prophet travelled with him;

confronted by mass-rape and genocide, sick civil war,
continents dark seas away, with NATO forces keeping.

The inhumanity he witnessed slunk into his core -
blackened lungs gave up to cancer; Prophet never left him.

(Stress Matrix Sonnet No. 2)

☆

Second in my own sonnet form, Stress Matrix Sonnet (also known as Stress Checkerboard Sonnet). Details on it can be found beneath the first, Forks and Spades. This piece is another version of my previous post, The Soldier and the Prophet (which is in free verse ballad format).

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I’m standing with a handful of white pills; the road-sign glares.
Fuck the fork is knifing me, but spades I need for freedom;
this pit, knee-deep with blood and shit, and drug-induced night-scares.
Managing to claw out, cleanse, trade spades for forks and demons:

Do you reach up, or stay half-stuck? (My conscience hard as brick) -
needing pills and dins on pins, you wanna keep that going?
A half-existence meted out online, box-bound, brain-sick?

Welcome back the sun, the smell of life, the people showing
their faces, children tying laces, buskers jamming licks.
Market day, a happy fray – a safe foray, not knowing

what’s up ahead. ‘Extempore’ is in the keynote speech.
Feeling free is getting easier, on this condition:

eschew the drugs, and choose the road you see the traffic reach;
moving on, sing just for one, a renaissance rendition.

☆

This is the Sonnet version of my form Stress Matrix Dectet/Stress Checkerboard Stanza -

14 lines, 14 syllables per line – aBaB cDc DcD eF eF

where lowercase are iambic heptameter (7 beats/stresses per line), and uppercase trochaic heptameter. This yields a perfect ‘checkerboard’ of stressed and unstressed syllables (14 x 14, equalling 196 syllables).

Depending on where the Volta arrives (the ‘turn’ – resolution, or at least, change in tone, crucial aspect to a sonnet), there are 3 different stanza layouts (the rhyme-scheme stays the same). My turn quite obviously arrives with the last two lines, as is traditional in English Sonnets, hence the layout with a couplet to end on.

If the turn comes after the first eight lines, as it does in Italian Sonnets, the layout is
aBa BcDcD cDe FeF.

If it comes after line ten (unique!), then it’s aBaB cDc DcD eFeF (same as English but ending on a quatrain rather than the two couplets).

Who’s up for writing one? :)

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Last Flush (Multilingual Refrain)

Engorging, slick, devour her skin
in credit, carriage, blacksack bin.
We spit the dregs of her last flush -
O Lord, be merciful to us.

The itching started, trees were ripped,
mass-drilling and her min’rals stripped.
One grimreap day will see us done -
O Kýrie, eléison.

Industrialise, copulate,
tip landfill, overpopulate.
Her waters break; she’ll take whoever -
O Nkósi, o yibá nencéba.

In gouging, sick, shit in her skin -
Seigneur, ayez pitié de nous.

Unhinge (Greek Refrain)

Engorging, slick, devour her skin
in credit, carriage, blacksack bin.
One grimreap day will see us done -
O Kýrie, eléison.

The itching started, trees were ripped,
mass-drilling and her min’rals stripped.
Atomic power: blunt shotgun -
O Kýrie, eléison.

Industrialise, copulate,
tip landfill, overpopulate.
Tectonic plates unhinge the sun -
O Kýrie, eléison.

In gouging, sick, shit in her skin -
O Kýrie, eléison.

Last Flush (English Refrain)

Engorging, slick, devour her skin
in credit, carriage, blacksack bin.
We spit the dregs of her last flush -
O Lord, be merciful to us.

The itching started, trees were ripped,
mass-drilling and her min’rals stripped.
Atomic power, blunderbuss -
O Lord, be merciful to us.

Industrialise, copulate,
tip landfill, overpopulate.
Economy: collapsing truss -
O Lord, be merciful to us.

In gouging, sick, shit in her skin -
O Lord, be merciful to us.

☆

Kyrielle Sonnet – AabB ccdD eefF AG – bit of a deviation from the norm as I have used four languages for the refrain, so they don’t rhyme/repeat aurally (but mean the same). Also I have an extra syllable on the ends of lines 11 & 12. Normally looks more like this -

AabB ccbB ddbB AB (My second and third follow this pattern/structure).

Sonnet version of Kyrielle, traditionally a Troubadour song/poem in iambic tetrameter/octosyllabic quatrains or couplets with refrain ending every stanza (in the old days the refrain was always something like ‘O Lord, be merciful to us’ but it can be anything). In the sonnet version the first line is also the penultimate, followed by the refrain (like two refrains back-to-back that don’t rhyme).

The ‘Lord have mercy (upon us)’ refrain is in three languages in addition to English:

O Kýrie, eléison – Greek (found in many old Liturgies, and hence the name of the form)

O Nkosi, o yiba nenceba – Xhosa (Sth Africa), and used in SA Black Gospel

Seigneur, ayez pitié de nous – French… where the form originated

In three versions, as you see. Which do you prefer (as a matter of interest)?

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The cattle farmed where once was leafage,
force-fed with drugs unfit for us,
supplying world’s worst burger beefage
by farmers in disguised disgust.

Nutrition nadir should be outlawed,
to spare the trees the rasping chainsaw;
to spare the cattle cheap mince fate;
to close the flooding fast-food gate.

In wilful ignorance we swallow,
in sucking down scared meat with Coke.
Obese, they bloat in oily soak,

in lack of self-esteem they wallow.
Let kids carouse Fat Neverland,
at Ronald’s clowning, cloying hand.

☆

OK, so here’s a rewrite of the difficultly-metered, experimental villanelle Fat Neverland (next post), in completely different form – Pushkin’s Onegin Stanza (Pushkin Sonnet). I wonder which version you prefer?

Rhyme-scheme:

A-b-A-b
C-C-d-d
E-f-f
E-g-g

where lowercase letters represent iambic tetrameter, and capital letters iambic tetrameter + unstressed syllable on the end (giving those lines a ‘feminine’ rhyme). The mix makes this the most musical of all the sonnets. Thanks to poet friend José Rizal M. Reyes for introducing me to this wonderful form. I’m lovin’ it.

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.

See as I banquet, dining with the King,
and esoteric Arts taught me, the Mage.
Up dancing with the Queen, hear voices ring,
we cheek-to-cheek upon a festooned stage.

Oh, sing me silly with the minstrels! Mirth,
yes jesting lowbrow banter with the Fool.
Rough-hewn, we raise our flagons like a serf,
unsteady, glorious, on wooden stool.

Down in the kitchen mixing with the cooks,
and taking time to serve the slaves’ old bench.
I won’t be stopped from shooting furtive looks,
that sexual glance to chance the scull’ry wench.

Yet sudden: horribly, I seem unfit;
there’s no rejoining Court where I should sit.

☆

Written in 2005 as a ‘modern’ Shakespearean Sonnet with short lines (no iambic pentameter), and looser rhyme-scheme, now expanded to full Shakespearean Sonnet. The bones of this written when very unwell indeed, totally bed-bound. The descent through a Medieval Court hierarchy and the resulting inability to rejoin my Sovereign is a metaphor for what happened to my life. I lay in bed for a very, very long time. Anyone wanting to see the original ‘modern’ version, click here.

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