For a moment in our recent TweetSpeak Twitter poetry jam, it appeared that @sethhaines might divert the flow of words into a ramble about a two-foot-long earthworm. But the poets resisted, barely, and all we left was an earthworm memory.

The next six poems from our Twitter poetry jam are below. The prompts all came from The Novelist by @llbarkat, which is going to be the book for our next book club discussion starting Nov. 28.

Of Shells, Fireworks, and Novellas 2

By @Doallas, @BrighterSideBlg, @sethhaines, @matthewkreider, @llbarkat, @lwlindquist, @ericswalberg, @gyoung9751, @chrisyokel, @GBrodhurstDavis, @jen_rose, @SoniaJoie, @weesparrowleae, @littlebirdmarie, @jrobertswi, @ifyouseeagun, and @YahiaLababidi. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Your skin, purple

Your skin, purple with words.
The sky, the sky: purple
memories, flooding your mind.
Linger me, smoke me, word me, winter me.
You stand and face death, smiling
because he does not know your secret,
my secret: stand, love.
Your secret, my secret: Death’s face,
the snake, he smiles back but doesn’t know.
Corrosion steals my purple memories,
my patterns.

The idea was found

The idea was found
in smoke filled rooms
of memories, your words
curling up and out
like incense, smoking
sandalwood and sensuality,
and I inhale deep.
The clouds are wispy and sweet;
the sky, the sky rust red, rust light,
rust falling to the ground in flakes
from a single touch.
The biggest problem was
finding a cloud-reader,
a sky-writer,
an earth-mover.
Yes, that was the problem.
Who could read?
We needed someone to read.

Words float on the water

Words float on the water,
and on water, the smoke
is clouds, tip-toeing;
the words curling like
memories, smoked.
No one could read faded
words, worn like tombstones.
Love among the ruins,
no doubt.
We listened without breathing.
We listened in a single bed,
a bed of flowers, and autumn leaves.
The ruins of love, of words,
are sweet.

The earthworm

Yesterday, no lie, I saw
an earthworm near two feet
long, thick as a pencil;
the earthworm curled,
a circular pencil
unearthed from treetops; yes,
if anyone could find it,
innocence could.
The worm finds a home
and leaves treetops
to walk across, treetops
to string across.
The perfect leaves nudge
death to snakes,
and worms. I prefer death
by snake, then he’d carry me
along an ivory-rust wake
for earth to soak in
like spilled ink.

And on the pillow cases

And on the pillow cases, ink,
spilled ink spreading across
the pillow cases, and words
spreading across the paper,
curling across the concrete
parking lot, as if it could
cross the grand desert without
finding earth-words’ ending,
tiny grains of words ending
in earth sand fired to desert

A single touch, simple,
traced as in spilled ink
across the earth. And on
the desert glass, more ink.
And across the desert:
Spilled ink there too.
Can you see it amidst
the dunes? Always more ink,
always trying to cover
and conceal just how fragile
glass can be.

It was too simple

It was too simple; he should
have known that. Nothing is
black or white, right, wrong,
but all shattered pieces,
broken.
It was too simple.
He should have known that.
She liked a little lace,
a purple camisole,
a poem with her tea.

If you enjoyed these poems, read the first set of poems from our Twitter poetry jam.

Photograph by mindwhisperings. Sourced via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of Dancing Priest and the forthcoming A Light Shining.

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