My second poem for Thursday September 14 2023 MY POEMS Jill

[jill stockinger]

My Poems

 

are weedy wordy things growing inside me.

They have stinging tentacles, invasive feelers

and eyes on stalks that wave distractedly

at moving bits and jumbled pieces sliding and

colliding in my fizzling brain which I call thinking.

They send out frantic alarms, crazy shouts that

pierce my ears, and screams of manic happiness

mixed in with sad cries that fade like seagulls

flapping mournfully away from me over wet,

wild waves. They hum syllables from hymns

in languages lost long ago, then jump to tinny

show tunes and songs I cannot bear to hear

that they insist should raise my courage

when they see I'm weak and faltering,

and they burble nonsense in whispers

meant to soothe and buoy me but all it does

is completely and totally depress and annoy me.

I am habitually off-balance, pitiably dazed and

dizzy and confused, and I keep falling, painfully

spreadeagled, onto garish-colored, bouncing

balls that bang and spin and tilt and whirl,

and laughing hideously, they push me off!

yelling in chilling falsetto, Splat! and Take that!

I shake uncontrollably inside these massive seismic

disturbances, a pinball caught in a vortex of forces

that are crushing me—and then suddenly,

everything coheres into a speeding, blazing rocket

that roars and explodes chaotically and nearly

obliterates the once-clean, once lovely, once-empty

soft white page that erupts in an inferno of billowing,

cascading, horribly devastating, fiercely raging words.

So I ask you, “How can I take delight in that?”

                                   --Jill Stockinger

[Sobha Kollipara]

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 13, 2023, at 1:24 AM, jill stockinger <jills...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Helen Cooper]

Dear Jill,

This is tumultuous and brain twisting in the best sense.  I wasn't sure if I liked the last line but the more I read your poem the more I appreciated the abrupt and strangely calming question, “How can I take delight in that?” And yet, we do feel a strange delight when the lovely soft white paper, full of scribbles and crossings-out, finally reveals the bones and flesh of a poem that says what we are trying to express.

The final question makes the writer in me stop and consider, nod in agreement and then feel exhausted delight.

Helen

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[kim knighton]

Oh, this is perfect!