If you are a tea drinker, chances are you have a favorite teacup or two. Here’s a poem about mine…

Teacup

I remember traveling
in his suitcase, white athletic
socks stuffed in my belly to keep
me from breaking, rocking ‘midst
clouds, and your hand’s first
touch bringing me to birth
on that wooden table,
and your lips.

Tomorrow night we’re having our poetry party at 9:30-10:30 pm EST. And we’re asking you to bring your tea cups (preferably filled with tea)— both virtually and literally. Which means (without spilling it on your keyboard!) we’d like you to drink the tea of your choice at the party, and tweet a photo of your favorite tea cup sometime during the proceedings.

We got the idea because our prompts will be taken from the book The Republic of Tea. And won’t it be fun to play show-and-tell while we write sweet tea poetry?

Poem reprinted from InsideOut: Poems. Photo of my favorite teacup, by Me.

At last Tuesday’s poetry jam on Twitter, all poetic prompts were from Robert Pinsky’s Death and the Powers. Fourteen of us gathered together on Twitter (and at the “well” at TweetSpeak Poetry) and rhapsodized about – robots, among other things.

Here are the first two of the poems devloped from the jam.

Robotics in Verse

By @lorrie58, @togetherforgood, @llbarkat, @goung9751, @mdgoodyear, @PoemsPrayers, @lauraboggess, @jezamama, @duane_scott, @CherylSmith999, @SandraHeskaKing,@LoveLifeLitGod, @mattpriour, and @RLPreacher; edited by gyoung9751.

Looks Like We’ve Got Robots

Looks like we’ve got robots.
Ooh, robots. Maybe I should get
my boys down here to help me out.
Ground control to robot.
Ground control to robot.

Robots dust cobwebs before the
party; eat the popcorn. I don’t
want to be a robot all automated,
controlled with a switch, dancing
metallic dances metallic sheen of
metal, whirring of gears, gears
grinding slowly into motion.
Maybe I can remember how to do
this thin.

Command me
like your favorite robot;
I might work for roses
if you dance.
But if you dance, would that
be a ritual performance for
command or a command
performance for a ritual?

Failure is not an Option

The teaspoon tray was assembled by
Command, the only thing it could do.
Command is struggling today.
Switching to manual override.

The system, the system has failed yet again.
Even if failure is not an option,
it is still a metallic echo, not a repeat, an echo.
thundering gray against blue metal.

The command is repeating itself.
Danger, Will Robinson.
Command has left us in
robotic arrears
I, Robot, said Asimov;
I, Isaac, said the robot.

When is data a dream; when do bits
become literature?
I was always a fan of Data on StarTrek
with his greenish skin and longing to
be human. Comprehension begins
when the echo ends.

How shall I show/that I am frightened?
Comprehend to grab with the hand,
flesh or metal or the echo, the order, the
other wires like flowers growing behind
my electronic sets. Comprehension is not
understanding; an echo is not a big bang

I do not understand;
I just do not understand.

You see your young daughter playing with her Barbie dolls in church while communion is being served, and the result is a poem. You read an article about a super-collider, and a poem results (for Mother’s Day, no less). You’re cutting your lawn that’s browning in the Texas heat, and a poem results.

Welcome to Barbies at Communion: and other poems. And welcome to Marcus Goodyear.

Marcus is the Senior Editor for Foundations for Laity Renewal, which was founded by the H.E. Butt Foundation to “renew society by renewing the church.” You find most of his editing and writing work at The High Calling, The High Calling Blogs and Christianity Today’s Faith in the Workplace. He also blogs at Good Word Editing.

And you find it in his poems.

I won’t be coy. I loved Barbies at Communion. It’s about the daily, ordinary things (the super-collifer notwithstanding), and it’s because Marcus sees the poetry in the daily, ordinary things.

So Marcus took some time to talk on the phone and through email, to answer some questions I had. And he graciously responded, providing more details and insights into his own work and poetry in general.

Read the interview, and then click here to the post on my blog for an opportunity to receive a free copy of Barbies at Communion.

I have to know about the origin of the super-collider poem. And what your wife thought of it as a Mother’s Day poem.

Oh yeah, the super-collider poem. I’ve always had an amateur’s fascination with science and quantum physics. (In high school I won the state science fair in Mathematics, oddly enough.) Anyway. These days, my interest in science is limited to Nova, science fiction, and science magazines. That poem was inspired in part by an article in Technology Review from MIT.

My wife liked it, I think. It’s not really romantic, but it is kind of fun. Mother’s Day isn’t about romance, anyway. Besides. She’s used to me writing weird poems for her. One Valentine’s Day, I wrote her a sonnet about gecko toes and the van der waals force. Another time, I wrote her one about zombies. Thankfully, she tolerates my weirdness.

Where did you find a love for poetry? It’s not a “typical” (I almost said “normal”) thing these days.

About 10 years ago I was teaching high school English by day and attending grad school at night. I remember struggling through Keats’ poem “Lamia” over my lunch break one day. I had to write a two-page paper about this poem for class that evening, and I couldn’t figure out what it was about. I couldn’t find the answer

Then something just clicked. The poem didn’t have an answer. It was just an elaborate word game (about a snake woman). I still like Keats to this day, though I prefer other poems of his like the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” His letters are cool, too.

How did you come to write poetry?

I had to teach students to read it. To make that more fun, I perversely decided that the students should try to write some too. It was really a tricky way to get them thinking about rhetorical techniques.

Through all of the crazy assignments–from the Ekphrasis poem to the N+7 poems to the traditional haikus–I had a policy that I would never assign something that I couldn’t do myself. Most of the time, this meant that I completed all of the assignments that I asked my students to complete. Sometimes, I would let them grade me. It was very scary. High school students don’t lie.

Tell us again about reading Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” on Brooklyn Bridge. New York is a radically different place – at least physically – than it was in Whitman’s day. Does the poem still resonate?

I love that poem. The city has grown, of course, but it still has the same heart. It still has the same complexity. Whitman’s poem anticipates change, and embraces it. In that poem–and people should just go read it out loud to themselves–he talks about being alive in New York. That still applies.

He talks about New York being filled with people. That still applies. And the river flowing around Manhattan. That still flows.

He says, I lived here. I walked here. I rode a ferry over these waters. I swam in them. All of the changes that have happened since Whitman’s New York are superficial when compared to the one constant. People are still resolutely human.

Someday, I hope to go back to Brooklyn Bridge and read the poem aloud again while people walk by and cars drive underneath me and the boats sail underneath them. I love that poem.

The title poem for Barbies at Communion is about your daughter playing with her dolls during a church service. How did you make the connection from that to the poem? What was the spark (assuming there was one)?

For me a poem is somewhere between image and argument and story and metaphor. Sometimes I have trouble letting go of an image that has bothered me–like the image of communion with those naked dolls. As a father, I felt anxiety about my daughter in that instance. Was it okay for her to be a kid during communion? Was it okay for the naked dolls to be, well, naked? Did it bother anyone else around us? Should it bother me as much as it did?

All of that anxiety needed an outlet. The poem doesn’t really answer the problem except to embrace my daughter’s innocence. She doesn’t care about propriety because she doesn’t understand what it means to be naked. Neither did Eve before the fall. And what is Communion except a chance to reconnect with God, to find our own innocence again through the grace and sacrifice of Jesus?

So the spark, in a literal sense, was the event itself. There were Barbies at communion on Sunday, and I didn’t know what to do with them. The poem helped me think it through.

The poems in Barbies are about the stuff of everyday life – children playing, mowing the grass (even if it’s dead), stuff stored in the attic. This isn’t the poetry of academia, which seems to dominate (some might say stifle) contemporary poetry. What is it about the everyday that appeals to you?

It’s where I live! I need my life to have meaning today, not next year, not 10 years from now, not in retrospect while I’m breathing my last. If I can’t find God in the ordinary places of life, either I’m not looking hard enough or he’s not nearly as approachable as I need him to be.

This is a paradox too. God appears in all the ordinary places, burning bushes, naked Barbies, plumbing disasters. But when he does, those places become holy. Moses had to take his shoes off. That’s one reason why the formal-ness of poetry seems fitting to these images. Poetry is very formal. It’s a way of taking my shoes off and showing respect to God when I catch glimpses of him.

I wouldn’t come down too hard on Academia. They do good work. They have a lot of pressures. They need publication credits. They need to fill their journals with names that will make them look impressive. Like any profession, it’s a community of its own, with rules and relationships and networking. As someone writing poetry outside of Academia, I can feel like I’m not part of that community, but that’s really just a call to suck it up and send out more work (which I don’t do often enough because I don’t like rejection).

What I personally find so appealing about the poems of Barbies is the concrete language. Tell us a bit about your writing background – and when was it you decided you were a writer? And what’s your education background?

I was a foreign exchange student to Germany during high school, but I didn’t speak German. Pretty strange decision. I’m a talkative person, though, so I had all these words building up inside with no way to share them. That’s really when I started writing.

When I got back to the US, I took an Independent Study Mentorship under Max Lucado. He was the minister at my church, and he wasn’t quite the publishing force that he became. The youth minister ended up working with me most of the time, but it was transformational for me to have someone like Max say, “Yeah, you’re a writer.”

Now, do you really want to know where I went to school? I earned a BA in English from Texas A&M University and an MA in English from UTSA.

How did you come to Foundations for Laity Renewal?

It’s all in who you know. They were looking for an editor, so they contacted Max’s personal editor. She has been a long friend of my family and my wife’s family. She thought of me and gave me a call on President’s Day 2005. I don’t normally remember dates like that, but this one stuck. At the time, I was looking to move to a new school, change things up a bit in my job so I wouldn’t get stale. It seemed natural to cast the net a little wider and send an application to Laity Renewal. A few months later, we moved to Kerrville where Laity Renewal is headquartered.

Tell us a bit about what it is and what it does.

This sounds cheeky, but we really are all about laity renewal. That’s our primary philosophy–renewing individuals, so they can be agents of renewal in their families and workplaces, so those small groups can be agents of renewal in their communities.

We work toward this philosophical goal through various programs–youth camp, family camp, free camps, Laity Lodge retreat center, and of course the High Calling of Our Daily Work radio program and TheHighCalling.org (which includes HighCallingBlogs.com).

And how did poetry come to be one of the features at the High Calling Blogs?

Blame L.L. Barkat. She called me up one day and said, “I want to try this poetry thing.” I was a little nervous about it, and remember saying, “Nobody cares about poetry.” It’s all part of this self-loathing problem I have. But L.L. can be very convincing. She got me to agree to a test period, and it’s been very helpful in building community.

In some ways, poetry has been historically important to Laity Renewal. When you come out to Laity Lodge in the Fall, Glynn, you’ll see poetry everywhere, hidden on bathroom tiles, on stones in the fountain, on placards in the garden, carved into beams in the ceiling. Poetry is really part of the architecture of the place.

So – what’s next? Another book of poetry? Or other things you’re working on?

I just keep writing poems and stories. I’ve got ideas for another novel. I’m querying some secular agents. And I’m working with you and L. L. on the game at TweetSpeakPoetry.com. I have a lot of high hopes for that project.

It was through poet and writer Lesley Moon that I connected with Shaun Masterton. He is a Scot with two passions – poetry and American football. He publishes poems and talks about football at his blog, shaunmasterton.com. I’ve liked the poetry he publishes on his blog, and so I decided to take a look at the two books of poems he’s published, The Written Word (2006) and Imagination (2010). (He’s also published e-books on html tags and tables and web design, so that tells you what kind of work he does.)

The Written Word is a a group of selected poems written between 1997 and 2006. Many of them are about family, and his strong feelings for his family (and someone he’s in love with) and a kind of protectiveness characterize the poems, especially those from 1997 through 2001. Collectively, they are the work of a young poet who is beginning to find his way and his voice.

From 2002 onward, the poems change but many of them are still about love. “Smell of the Wild,” for example, is about a visit to a love that is more expedition than journey, and it ends in an unexpected question:

Swimming through the river
Rising above the surface
Stepping foot on the land
Running through the forest
Passing the wildlife as I go
Climbing up the tree
Stopping for a breath
Looking for a view
Picking my direction
Grabbing the vine
Swinging from tree to tree
Landing on my feet
Springting over the land
Arriving at the airport
Hitchhiking on a plae
Waiting to land
Foot touches the surface
As my legs take off again
Running through the roads
Arriving at your house
Knocking on your door
My love answers me
I ask the question
Do you like the smell of my deodorant?

For Imagination, published this year, Masterton is demonstrating a maturing in his writing. There is less about family and love (although love is still there) and more about life and experience.He’s lived more, and it shows in his poems. Consider “Darkness within me,” which has a smiliar rhythm to “Smell of the Wild” but is less a step-by-step description and more of an impressionistic approach:

Thrusting forward into the darkness
With animal like precision

Welcoming the night with open arms
Wanting it to devour me in one bite

The freedom in the night
First me like a woolen glove

Worries of my cloned life
Left behind in the light of day

Hunting for a predator in my domain
Looking to stop the burning within

Senses pick up a lonely soul
Strike down with such furious rage

Leaving behind blood and bones
The werewolf within me howls.

There is also tenderness in these poems, such as that for comforting a friend dealing with loss in “Paint a Smile,” one I paticuarly like for its realistic protrayal of comfort and its limits:

Cheek soaked sadness
Little tears tip toe down

Breathless sigh of sorrow
Heaving breaths of wonder

Misery hugs a close friend
Wrap a scarf arm around

Whisper words of comfort
Little squeeze of reassurance

Tissue away their tears
Let them know you’re there

Jester them with a bad joke
Paint a smile on friend lips

Masterton’s writing is growing and maturing, showing strength and depth. He writes “action” poems, poems that tell stories actively and purposefully – with a touch of tenderness about them as well.

Below are five additional poems developed from last Thursdy’s poetry jam on Twitter.

On the Butterfly’s Blue Wing 2

By @llbarkat, @mdgoodyear, @mxings, @SandraHeskaKing, @PoemsPrayers, @lorrie58, @LoveLifeLitGod, @gyoung9751, @memoriaarts, and @thegypsymama; edited by @gyoung9751.

A Rose Grows in an Ancient Wall

A rose grows in an ancient wall,
or maybe better surrounded by
21st century Snow Whites.
We can’t want for dwarves
plucking she loves me,
she loves me not
seven times seven.
Not one rose, not
one Snow White rose
plucks surety for me about
you.

There is life on the thorn if
you look close enough, thorn
pricked bleeding weeping seeing
she loves me he loves me not
seven times seven
or maybe the rose in its whiteness
loves me or maybe the night
or not asking he loves me,
he loves me not,
her garden will be bare,
a carpet of white.

Or stop walking, turn
around and around until
the world spins
seven times seven
and you
fall to one side, giddy, loopy,
sick,
shattered surety in the textured
fall as pink to gray to black.
I am sure, now, I know nothing
about roses; not one has lived.

You pluck truth from me
petal by petal
until I am left blushing
daisy bright cheeks
and not much else.
Pay my price; blush;
the roses/in the ancient walls
fear not exile.
What is ancient, but this cracked
concrete wall, stretching
with the seasons.

And then the wall laments a freedom not
known. Let’s go together, glide back,
lose ourselves in the wall of you and me.

Does This Music Love Me, Too?

And this music.
Does it love me too?
This harp, this fountain, this apple?
All are priests.
In the beginning, there was
a word and all these followed after,
flowing before me.

Or did you go to the back door
for the dogs, your whistle a quick
high pitch that draws them in?
A moment of recognition
before it flits away.
I, still calling names, am lost
in the wail of me and of thee.

Olive Shrubs, Olive Branches

Jasmine scented, our mail came,
the tendrils bound in blood,
wound tight round the post.
All blood is a Persian gift from God,
and olive shrubs and
brown postal boxes.
Let’s go as blood
brothers, to the olive shrubs;
let’s watch a tender night;
let’s be free
a lover and her poet.

What is loyal? What is free?
Poetry has no priest.
They have no we; we
have no they.
Nothing is ever free
for asking; everything has
a price enormously high.
You are loyal, you are free;
I see you in the olive shrubs,
calling yourself a poet.

No olive branch to
be found.
Find the olive branch
in me; pay my price.
It is light, almost free.
There is a price to your
blush and
I will pay it.

Old Wooden Words

Old wooden words sail on the sea,
still hoping for another moment
to glide back.
Kind is a word I have heard,
the only free word given away
without thought, before thinking,
released.
The only wrong words are no words
at all. Explain how separate is not
broken; I know, but tell me anyway,
kindly.
We are the opposite of Becket’s anxiety,
over flowing fools, two paths branching
and kindly drifting apart.
We speak of wrongs
together, break silence,
separate ourselves
into one love.

The Tryst of the Willow

Weave the willow into a tryst,
you the slender branch,
I the weeping leaves.
‘Tis said, “Speak the truth in love;”
sometimes to hear in love will do.

I hear in love the willow weeping;
I speak the truth of love to you.
A dangerous silence is shared
between us, waiting for water
and menus.

The willow says
smile, share almonds
instead of tears.
The weeping willow weeps for love,
for want of love, for love’s wants.

Love hews down the willow tree and
makes of it a fire.
What is more dangerous
asks the willow:
you, or poetry?

 Here are the final four poems from our poetry jam in honor of Barbies at Communion: and other poems by Marcus Goodyear.

The Barbie Poems 6

By @mdgoodyear, @papagoodyear, @llbarkat, @memoriaarts, @arestlessheart, @lauraboggess, @cascheller, @mattpriour, @PoemsPrayers, @KathleenOverby, @togetherforgood, @gyoung9751, @mmerubies, @jamesrls, @doallas, @Dancinbutterfly, @moondustwriter, @mxings, @Jezamama, @MarisaLopezzz, and @TchrEric; cameo appearances by @hiscrivener and @duane_scott; edited by @gyoung9751

Barbie and Her Pink Bible

I like pink
in petunias
dahlias, roses—
not so much
clinging to my body
in silks, linens, cottons.

I like pink too.
Not because
of Barbie but despite her,
to spite her,
my imperfect non-plastic self,
sporting her signature color.

Barbie would like my
2 pink Bibles
the best. I would be
her favorite.
Yet I thought Barbie preferred the
RSV — or was that the SUV?

Thou shalt not covet thy Barbie’s
King James ass.
Could Barbie one day be
the antichrist? Would the
antichrist wear pink? Or 666
on her high heeled shoe?

Barbie’s Medical Issues

In her 50s now, Barbie discovered
Arthritis. I would buy RA Barbie
with her crooked hands and
bad knees and pink bottles of NSAIDS;
I could relate to that.
Barbie had multiple personalities,
I guess. She did things every girl
wanted to do when she grew up.
Barbie is so ADHD. She cannot stick
to a single career. It is all pretend,
all real, all weird — us and them, she
and I, and him and her — trying on
this and that.

The Complexities of Barbie

Growing up, only boys in the
Neighborhood, brother and I,
learned more from the girls
with Barbie in their pockets
than we should know; poor boys
learning from pocket stuff.

Complex, these dolls
that make us dream
and give us roles to play
when we are young,
to grow old and receive
our scorn.

Barbie, like computers today,
could perhaps only be
as stupid as the
ones who formed her. Are we
embarrassed by our youth
once we know what is possible?

Maybe someday we will solve the
great mystery of Barbie. I wonder
what America would be like if she
had never existed. She is who you
want her to be; she is who I wanted to be,
to be rather than to appear.

Was Barbie a Poet? Two Views

Barbie could not spread the
fingers on her hands to grip a
pen – to type – to write. I do not
want to be her. Perfection.
Boredom.

Barbie never once wrote me a poem.
What made me think she ever loved
me? Yet I hear my daughter learning
love in her room, whispering sweet
nothings between bits of plastic.

Why do we fear the day when all
children learn this fabulous truth of
what lies under these clothes – bare
beauty, nothing to scare, only caress.
it is then that we have to admit the
truth of children growing up,
fabulous or not.

She drinks green tea, eats
hand-milled-floured scones, and
dreams of her youth at communion,
head first…in a coffee cup, giving voice
to something more beautiful than she
in a voice her own. We all learn through
other faces, other voices.

She did write.
She did pray.
She did love.
When we were young
we heard it all.

Last week, we announced a “We’re Giving Away Barbies” contest — leave a comment and a name would be selected at random to receive a copy of Marcus Goodyear’s Barbies at Communion: and other poems.

We had 21 comments. I put slips of paper numbered 1 through 21 in a bag, and pulled out #10. And that’s Erin Kilmer at Together for Good.

Congratulations, Erin – and a “Barbies” will soon be on its way.

Also, we promised to feature one entry both here and at HighCallingBlogs. As Fate (or the Barbies?) would have it, Erin’s poem was chosen for feature before her name was pulled from the hat. Erin, this day is all yours.

Construction Zone

She came home today
from the doctor’s office
with a Barbie sticker on her
fat baby belly.

It took me by surprise–
after these years of boys I have
grown accustomed to
dump trucks and race cars.

And all I could think
is how different this
whole girl thing is–
what with the dolls and the

tutus and the pink pink pink
on everything. No one calls
a little boy “Daddy’s little bumblebee”
or “sweet baby butterfly.”

And I don’t even want to imagine
the differences there will be someday–
when she has entered and then left
the Barbie stage.

But today I’m simply left with the thought,
as I pull the sticker off her onesie,
that I’d be more comfortable with Barbie
if she were driving a dump truck.

We had our poetry jam on Twitter last night, and this time we did a kind of “event” around Marcus Goodyear’s newly published collection, Barbies at Communion: and other poems. So, yes, it was a Barbie-themed party, and it was wild.

For the last three poetry jams, we’ve been featuring a new “tool” or Twitter application developed by Matt Priour. You can see it at the main TweetSpeak URL. You log in under your Twitter account, and then post in the designated box. Poetry jam prompts appear in the box above the tweeting box.

Electronically, what happens is this: you log in, you enter a tweet and hit the tweet button, and then the application sends the tweet to the Twitter data base (a kind of “registration process”) and then back out again to the posted tweets list. It can take up to 10 seconds to complete the process. While you’re waiting, other tweets are appearing, you respond with a new one – and, as you might imagine, the pace can get frantic and you can easily lose your way.

But you don’t have to use the tool (we call it TweetSpeak Party); you can use Twitter, HootSuite, TweetDeck or any other similar application, and your tweets are included as long as you include the #tsptry hashtag with your tweets.

I used TweetSpeak Party exclusively last night. And while the 10-second delay could be perplexing, with poetic contributions streaming in and from all directions, I found myself focusing on a few and then following and responding to those. A few participants had trouble with the tool, and then trying to keep track of everything with other applications like HootSuite or TweetDeck. I was also watching the tweets via TweetDeck, and found a few that weren’t showing up in the TweetSpeak Party posting box (although they all did show up in the data base Matt created to collect all of the tweets – 1,080 tweets strong). And a few had some technical trouble with either TweetSpeak Party or their regular Twitter application.

Matt’s been working on a new application, one that can be independent of Twitter or other applications and happen within the framework of TweetSpeak Poetry itself. We’ll keep you up-to-date on progress.

Now the hard part starts – the editing of the tweets into poems. The process itself deserves its own blog post, but what essentially happens is this: I read through all of the tweets as a group several times. I then highlight what are obviously related tweets. Those are copied and pasted into a Word document, then worked over to fit them with each other in what can range from 15 to 35 poems. This usually happens over a period of about a week.

For the Barbie poems, I’ll have an introduction, which will include the usual pre-party online discussion and a couple of links provided by the poet/author himself to inspire the participants. Although I’m not sure how inspirational Barbie Enchiladas actually are.

Related:

Kindle and print versions of Barbies at Communion are available via Amazon. You can also order a print copy signed by the author via Paypal, linked from the book’s web page.

Want to party with the poems all the time? Take a button, if you like…

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/098455310X?ie=UTF8&tag=seedinston-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=098455310X" target="_blank"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3311/4625856644_04a0c4a7b8_m.jpg" width="180" alt="barbies button" /></a>

One day, Marcus Goodyear was sitting at Communion; his daughter was playing with Barbies while the bread passed. That moment turned into the marvelous poem “Barbies at Communion.”

Did Marcus ever think this simple moment would eventually find its way to a book cover, indeed a whole book of terrific poetry? Yet, here we are.

At Tweetspeak, we’re so pleased that the poetry of many ordinary moments— turned clever, beautiful and often philosophical— are now available in print. So pleased, in fact, that we’re going to give away a signed copy of Marcus’s debut poetry book Barbies at Communion.

We’re also asking you to write about the Barbies in your life and link to our Giveaway post. Stories, memories, weird pictures, fun poems… anything goes. Just drop your link here, and we’ll link back to you. You might even get featured at Tweetspeak or HighCallingBlogs. Let the fun begin!

To enter the giveaway, comment on this post anytime between now and 11 pm EST on Thursday, June 3.

YOUR POSTS:
nAncY’s pink
LL’s Pretend Your Blog is a Barbie
Maureen’s See Me Let Me Be Me Barbies
Erin’s Construction Zone
Glynn’s Song Has Not Been Heard
Bradley’s The Bad Business of Being Barbie
Kelly’s Little Girls and Their Dreams: a Post About Barbies
Cassandra’s Pink
Heather’s Dear Barbie
Laura’s For the Toy Box
Katdish’s Special Barbies
Billy’s Father, Daughter, Barbie and Ken
Melissa’s don’t ask
Cheryl’s Barbies, Poetry, and Community
Karl’s Must-Read Barbies
Charity’s Barbies at Communion
LL’s Communion
Nichole’s Memorial Day at the Mall
Stephie’s She Wanted a Barbie
Eve’s Barbie and Me
A Simple Country Girl’s From the Mouth of Barbie
Monica’s Things in Common
Erica’s Reflections on Barbie, her frumpy aunt, and Sunshine eyeballs

The final eight poems from last week’s poetry jam on Twitter are below.

Poems of Complication 4

By @mdgoodyear, @llbarkat, @PoemsPrayers, @mxings, @togetherforgood, @cascheller, @mmerubies, @MonicaSharman, @DancinButterfly, @thegypsymama, @TchrEric and @KathleenOverby. Not to mention @shrinkingcamel. Edited by @glynn_poet.

Tattooed Tears

My tears are tattooed to me; I wear
them well, flex for all to see my
mother’s passing. I am sitting by
the shut gate, and you are in there
somewhere. Come out and play with me.

Cushion your grief with lavender; the
scent of it weighs purple in the garden,
drifts your loss over the stones.
This is play, the sound of you breathing
beyond the wall.

Or tucked, yes, in one’s garden beneath
earth, bricks and stone. stones don’t leave;
they filter tears running a river.
I hear you breathing beyond the wall.
(I hear you breathing beyond the wall.)

Word Feast

I am a glutton for good words. I gobble
them and would hoard for later but there
are rarely leftovers .

What I love about eating words is there is
always more to eat, and I cannot become
fat with poetry.

Good words smell of lavender. Good truths
taste of bitter ale and make a hectic path for
a runaway heart, fat with love.

Poetry is good for the heart, much like
South African wine. I treat my homesickness
with both.

I didn’t know you were from South Africa.
It is my home, my compass, my true South.
I am gypsy.

Not poet but form, the gypsy’s life is in the street.
Gypsies sell poetry to the highest bidder, shill tales
of foreign lands for food.

He cannot hear, seeking food from gypsies
who’ve taken his senses, in return for honey
mead or ale to sip in secret.

Call me troubadour and I will happily sing for you
the love song of my motherland, homesick for
the street of dreams.

Which Poet Was It?

Shoot. Who said that? Keats. No. Someone else.
The lavender has stolen my mind.
No, Keats! It was Keats.
Who eulogized him? Shelly. Shelley?
Percy, tells us the secrets of this night,
secrets stuffed in pockets and bags,
between my toes and my teeth.
I will taste the truths between your teeth,
but the ones in your toes are all yours.
You may be poor; I am poorer, never having
guessed the poet.
It was Keats.
No, Lowell. But I know not the form.

What is an Ode?

Odes. Odes? What is an ode?
I once wrote a poem about an urn,
non-Grecian, but was it an ode?
I do not know.
I know this non-Grecian urn of
which you speak. They said it was
gold, but the gold is a myth.
Leaden lies need space.
Space, punctuate me with your
Breath that would be enough
and more.

One That Almost Rhymes

Will you write a pretty ode for me,
take it and give it by the sea?
Do we write for those we cannot see?
In a swell of words, we’re lost at sea.
Is it not Ode? Why do you tease me?
If you please sir, write an ode to me.
Speak your thoughts; write them all over me.
It’s Ode, it’s Ode. I wait the finis.
For truth, my prompt is stuck in the sea,.
beautiful life boat stuck in the sea.
Your cushion will float an awkward boat
In the event of catastrophe.

Walking in Beauty

I have always wanted to walk in beauty,
like the night. I walk in the night, but what
beauty there might be cannot be seen.
is it so for thee?
And I went, seeking food, seeking sight,
seeking youth, seeking night,
completely turned around, surrounded
by trees and the dark,
finding only colors of cloud blue and black,
bruised with blood red.
We are but poor players, strutting our
colors for the egos of others.

Lost Rosary Beads

With this surge of words, these traveling words
to make music and lyrics, I mourn the three beads
of the rosary poem lost. Yet romantics show up in
the most common places, or the strangest;
you never can tell.

Political Socio-Economics

Others can reach, they can and do, the political and
societal implications of capitalism and landfills and
bulk shopping. Not one blotch is ever overlooked.
It is easier to be poor than it is to be middle class,
some days. Poor is a state of mind; just look at the rich.

My friend said, today, that money doesn’t matter.
What matters is strength. Am I strong enough to let
this wash over me?
Here are my shoes. Walk a mile in the ones that gave
me blisters .

A friend gave me mint lotion to rub behind my ears
today, like God had kissed me there. It might work
for blisters, too. If it does, then gobbets of penitents
will find their way.
What did I say? Which untruth do you speak of?