Saturday, September 27, 2008

The Future Is

The future is
sky blue and burnt sienna crayola
jagged and wild
on a piece of yellow construction paper,
a jetpack hero
strafing x’s into the eyes
of the past.

The future is
checking its watch again,
waiting on a lover
to come back home,
flipping the channels
on a thousand early morning dramas
as she sniffs the flowers
on the nightstand.

The future is
the next ragged breath
and the whispered prayer,
the next holy sound
on the hospital monitor
as he holds her hand
through the night
and waits for a smile.

--

That's what they gave me: "The Future Is". Carte blanche except for the title. This was another of our poems from the Red Chair Affair, and possibly one of the more interesting ones. We worked our booth at the pre-show mingle in the lobby, and looking back I wish we'd had more time. I think people were just getting drunk enough to approach us by the time they were calling them in to the theatre, so about a third of our poems were rushed out in the last 20 minutes. Ah well. I just want everybody to know that the downer atmosphere surrounding this poem can be attributed to the fact that I was missing a performance by the Blue Man Group in order to get it done. Could hear them from out in the lobby and everything.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Why We Adore Cindy

When it comes to beauty, sight only takes you so far
our eyes, though they can scan millions of wavelengths
perceive the slightest trace of a smile
see even in darkness
they still close when the light gets too bright
which is why they just don’t get her

The way angels strum a harp without moving
and tickle clouds with a heartbeat
flying through the heavens unaware of gravity

It’s harder for a fish to swim than this brown-eyed girl to move you
as though their gills are filled with jelly and every scale a broken rudder
her laugh, her grace, her genius tells a story
that none of the five senses can alone
cobble together to form the definition of beautiful

But even we don’t understand this
a puzzle of a woman that’s complete when left unsolved
like breathing the scent of a rose
and wondering what’s brushing our nose

--

Welcome back to another installation of the Poetry Vending Machine! This is Paul. Have a seat. A quick recap: earlier this month The Red Chair Project held their annual Red Chair Event, a sort of sampler platter of the arts things you can expect to see in the next year. As a treat to the hoity toity VIPs, some vending machiners were asked to come by and write poems for them, free of charge, during their drink and mingle session. And so we did. It was a surprisingly slow session, considering that the poems were free and that all someone had to do was fill out a slip of paper and they get a poem. Alas, the poems we did write turned out pretty well. Well, sort of.

This is the first one I wrote. Next year at Fringe I would like to put some sort of instruction on the slip saying something to the effect of "We do not know you or your family, your mistresses, your dogs, your unborn children, you mailmen - please talk to us about something universal that your loved one likes and have us write about that. Because if we try and write about them we could be dead wrong (and plain ol' boring)." So I tried to write about this wonderful woman named Cindy (and tried hard not to think of an ex by that name), given only the clues of angels, brown-eyed girl, and beautiful. Next time someone asks me to write about a loved one I'll describe how awesome it is to fuck the shit out of them and see what happens.