Monthly Poetry Challenge - September 2007

[manipulatrix]

......

 

[UnderYourSpell]

I've started something but don't know if I dare .. well it's a bit ummm errr personal!

 

[manipulatrix]

.....

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Wwll don't blame me if I don't do prose right don't know what I am doing here

 

[RhymeFairy]

I'm in ...

 

[Tzara]

Oh, dare!

And it's not just the voyeur in me! ... but it is that, too!

Voyeur doesn't seem quite right somehow, and lecteur doesn't sound perverse enough. What the heck does one call that behavior, anyway?

I'll try and give this a shot, in any case. Prose poem, hmm? That'll be different.

 

[RhymeFairy]

Voyeur doesn't seem quite right somehow, and lecteur doesn't sound perverse enough. What the heck does one call that behavior, anyway?

I'll try and give this a shot, in any case. Prose poem, hmm? That'll be different.

lookin' up prose poetry ....

 

[manipulatrix]

......

 

[UnderYourSpell]

OK I have read those and think I will start it again but will someone go first to show me how it's done !

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Blushing and probably not done right but .. here goes

Strategically placed pillows show me what pleasures lie in store, three upon the bed for me one for your knees upon the floor. Waylaid by nipples erect and proud, now wet and tingling I sigh aloud. Then placed and with questing fingers opened, tongue seeking that exquisite pleasure spot .. twelve o'clock high takes me over the top. Joined as the waves crash to the shore, your storm to my lightning hear the thunder roar.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

Okay I'm begging advance forgiveness because I've never done a monthly poetry challenge before (I'm new here, you know, and I don't really know all the stuff or anything) but what I want to ask is how much flexibility is there in these challenges?

Here's why I ask: It has been against my religion for years to write pieces that contain the word "love", particularly in the title. It's a challenge I've set myself. But man, I want to play in this challenge, cause prose poetry, that concept, when it was introduced to me as a youngster, gave me my first real true visceral literary orgasm ever, when I was about 13, and cause, well, there are a lot of other things too.

So am I a total loser if I shift the title, even a little? Even a single consonant?

Just checkin'.

with all newbie humility,
bijou

 

[manipulatrix]

......

 

[manipulatrix]

.....

 

[unpredictablebijou]

bijou - It's my challenge, so I'm going to impose my beliefs here... and my belief is that rules are meant to be broken. Change whatever you like to make it work for you, my dahlink!

You totally rawk, but I knew that. I'm in. And this is a hell of a month for me to try to add a poetry challenge to the current madness, but y'all have me completely addicted now, so here we go.

xo
bj

 

[UnderYourSpell]

under, Very nice! I especially liked this line: "twelve o'clock high takes me over the top"

I am informed that all us ladies have a place as of the clock that is ummm the best ... mine happens to be twelve o' clock high lol <blushes and creeps away>

 

[manipulatrix]

first attempt... it's not quite...

.....

 

[foehn2]

When I last loved you — well I’ll tell you in a minute. I was probably trying not to, that’s almost certain. I was probably trying to remember Her numbers one through fifteen, and trying not to think about how you didn’t like being twelve. It may be that you had recently been talking to me on the telephone. You may have made me laugh, and I may have said something that made you laugh, and your voice may have reminded me of water, the languid, mellifluous licking of the lakeside rocks, under the live oak trees, where we made magical love one afternoon.

But see, I never loved thirteen, or fourteen, or fifteen. I never quite succeeded at putting more months on my cold calendar of companionships. The seasons seemed long enough, there seemed to be room, but the nights were always too crowded with emptiness, revealing the gaping hollow you left in my existence, always, at just that point, always, when my mind flung open its doors to sleep, reality free to wander in again.

Would you believe it? I remember one of the times I last loved you, I bought you a half dozen hundred dollar dresses, showed them to your amazed girlish eyes, and heaved you onto the bed, dressing you with everything I had left. Would you believe me, if I told you how many times since then I have done the exact same thing? No, you’d have no memory of those occasions; they were my moments only, when my soul consented to be a thief.

I swore I’d forget the smell and taste of you, I swore I’d put you away like a childhood sketch, no feelings one way or another, a curiosity in past tense. And yet a week ago, I held your hand against my chest. Something about loving you always made me feel right, even when everything else was wrong.

One of the very last times I loved you, we were talking by telephone. You were out on the field, waiting for the referee to show, so the game could begin. The boys were loud in the distance, warming up, kicking the ball back and forth. I could hear our boy’s voice in the mix. That was just moments ago!

Oh, and the last time I loved you, I was typing a question mark. See?

 

[champagne1982]

When I Loved You Last
There can never be a last as long as I love you. You will keep me from the end, with you there is no final curtain. This scene will play as long as I love you, there will never be a last. As long as I love you, we may as well set the stage for that pretty moment that can never be a last. I swear, as long as I love there will always be a you and that will keep me acting right up to that never ending.
When I loved you last.

 

[manipulatrix]

......

 

[The_Fool]

When last I loved you

I saw you today. At least I saw your smile. It was on another girl, but it was your smile nonetheless. I remember your smile, but I forget your name. Forgive me for that, as I remember your passion, your way of moaning through your kisses, but your name escapes me. Or maybe you never told me. It was unimportant at the time, anyway. We were too lost in the moment. Or in what we were drinking in the moment. Maybe in the debauchery of the moment as we seeking that tingle that says we are alive. We were living in the moment, but we only had the one moment and then we were no more. I never saw you again. Until today. Or at least I saw your smile.

 

[Tzara]

When I Loved You Last

it was an unusually chilly day in late spring. I had a headache from too many and too varied drinks the night before, so you stirred some honey and lemon into my tea, as I didn't want anything to eat. You ate some toast yourself. Dry.

"Your lips are sweet," you said and smiled. Your hair smelled, oddly, of cinnamon, from the soap or your shampoo, although it never had before. Perhaps that was the scent of leaving, called up from happier times—a perceptual trick of memory to ease my feelings.

In bed, your body was as welcoming as ever, although your bags were packed and set near the door. Perhaps because I was preoccupied, it took your patient lips and tongue much time before I could enter you, and then I was clumsy and ended much too quickly. I wanted to try again but you said, "It's alright. Besides, I need to catch my train."

My brain still holds a photograph of you, turned slightly away, pulling on your jeans—how you pulled them up over your long, taut thighs, over the swell of your wonderful hips, how your breasts looked, the furrow of your spine. On the drive to the station, we talked about the program you were entering, when your first break would come, when you'd visit. I left you thinking we would meet in four months, not thirty years, not like this.

As you had been Catholic, I cross myself—I hope that's right—and lightly brush the coffin with a fingertip.

 

[foehn2]

I'm loving these! More more more...

*nods* with applause for each submission...

 

[hmmnmm]

Okay, I've always been split between attraction and caution with these 'challenges' and today attraction wins. Someone (gg?) somewhere said these things cause a freeze-up or a block or something. I feel the same way. Nevertheless... .


An airstream fans into branches at the front door, finds the open screen, the narrow bells on the front porch sway just enough to reach my ear, yet a rumbling truck rolls up the street, fades away, the bells return, and a distant sparrow song harmonizes. But she sucks in a breath, digs in the heels of her feet, rustles and disarrays the lately laundered sheet; her thighs clamp shut my ears, the chimes and the sparrow song hushed again, and a low hum of her own, her familiar rhythm quickens tempo, I feel the stream run down my two fingers whose feelers search deep between, taste her, smell her, feel her where my lips pucker and suckle and my tongue darts its quick flicks; feel it offer itself, beg, grow, shed its last shred, its hood thrown off; feel fingernails suddenly in my hair, her vocal shift to higher pitch, the notes plucked and pulled and strung from behind cellar curtains. I remember this love scene as though it was yesterday.

 

[FifthFlower]

When I Loved You Last

​

We tell stories sometimes for only special people to hear, and these need not be our lovers or spouses, who may be trusted less to tolerate or care what they hear. Jim and Tina, two graduate students, brought together by a French course, had stories they needed to tell someone who would thoughtfully listen. These two had never kissed. They rarely even touched each other, and yet they exchanged during this first semester enough stories to be mentally intimate.

They would practice speaking French dialogs together because they were required to do so, and because they liked each other. Today, they just spoke English.

​

Tina let Jim speak first, sensing he was disturbed, and he told her how his girlfriend, last weekend, went to see an old high school friend of hers passing through Chicago after some years of absence. Gail warned him, concerned how he might take what she had to say, that men usually like to have sex with her. He said, after considering what a reasonable response might be to such a statement, that he did not want her to have sex with her old friend, but all she said was, “I don’t know what will happen.”

Gail and her former friend went to a party. As she suspected, afterward they went to his hotel room, where they took advantage of the opportunity privacy offered. Her friend told her the next morning that he was actually in a stable relationship with a girl back at Stanford and what they did last night would not likely happen again. He hoped she would understand. She wondered, “Why didn’t he tell me that before?” On her way back to her university, she reassured herself with thoughts like, “At least I have Jim.”

However, when she returned, Jim challenged her. He had reviewed through his mind all weekend what Gail told him and convinced himself logically that Gail must have had sex with her old friend. Sensing his anger, she refused to say that she did, or did not, but reminded him that she told him up front what could happen and now he just needs to trust his intuition and get over this. She made it clear that she did not intend to hurt him with anything she did. Besides, she could do nothing about it anymore. This only confused him. He needed to hear ideas directly without the risk of error in drawing consequences from obvious hints. He then started imagining that she actually did not have sex with anyone, exploring out-loud rational models of her innocence toward him. In frustration, she admitted that, yes, they did have sex in the hotel room. He then tried to reason that she really did not want to have sex. It must have been an accident. “I brought the condoms myself,” put an end to that logic. His critical thinking was on the edge of brushing away the foundation of truth in his mind, and she was not helping. He gave up the illusion of her innocence, and his own precarious position, when she said, “And he didn’t even use the condoms. I should probably go to the clinic, just to make sure I didn’t get something from him, before we sleep together again.”

“Gail had sex with someone else last weekend,” Jim said.

Tina was surprised that a man would reveal something like this. No man had ever bonded so closely with her before. With sincere indignation, she loudly trashed Gail as a ball-busting bitch.

​

It took some moments for both them to recover from the reality of Jim’s information, but Tina also had something to say. She told Jim that she ran into her former boyfriend, Bill, of two boyfriends ago. They talked, and she invited Bill back to her apartment. When he kissed her, she scolded, “I thought you had a girlfriend?” He admitted that he did, said he was sorry, and took the beer she offered. He also said, changing the subject to get off the defensive, “We’ll be getting together at Sebastian’s tomorrow night for drinks, and maybe dancing. You’re welcome to stop by.” She nodded indifferently, and then put on some music. “Do you remember this?” she asked, and he remembered it being music she used to dance to for him in the past. “Yes,” he said, “of course,” and watched her hips move. This left him confused, but when she kept her clothes on, long past the point where she would have started unbuttoning her blouse, he thought she was just teasing that she would tease him. There was also ambivalence within Tina’s mind about what she was planning to do, but just before the song ended, she dropped her blouse, unzipped her jeans, paused to make him wonder if she would dare continue, and then removed her bra. She walked over to him, facing him with sheer panties two feet from his eyes. The music ended. It was now Bill’s turn for indecision as his eyes admired her lips and his hands slid along her thighs and under her panties. He felt a foreboding that the choice he was about to make would have consequences far into the future, and yet, it was an almost pre-determined fact, based on the previous little choices he had made throughout his life, what he would finally choose to do--He removed her panties, led her to the bed, and made love to her. After they finished, Tina insisted sternly, that this was definitely the very last time she would ever let him do that to her again.

“I need it, too!” she said to Jim, just in case he raised a moral objection.

Tina’s story continued. She met up with Bill and his girlfriend at Sebastian’s and had some drinks with them. Of course, Bill’s girlfriend did not know what happened the previous night, since Bill would never willing tell her, and Tina enjoyed watching her, in her ignorance, bubbly and friendly, hugging Bill, saying he was the best man in the world and all the other nonsense a woman in her precarious position would say to stabilize reality. Tina became good friends with her while Bill kept quiet hoping the worse would not occur. They joked together, and Tina made her feel safe enough to exchange intimate information about Bill, like how he picked his nose or the ridiculous places he would leave his underwear. When Tina left, she felt good about herself, and made no further scene, to Bill’s relief.

​

Tina looked at Jim’s eyes staring down the mall. He had let his mouth grow stiff in thought. She wished it were he rather than Bill she had teased a few nights ago, but Jim had already rejected her. Two months ago, she hinted that they might make a good couple. He told her, “The way we have sex is with all the things we tell each other.” He was letting her down easy. She knew that.

It occurred to Tina, watching Jim daydream in whatever rational dimension men go into when the critical brain encounters the cutting edge of reality, that maybe what she just told him was not proper, considering what he went through last week. However, the two events were not the same. She was not, in any way, like his girlfriend. She would never have cheated on him in that cold fashion with someone she would likely never see again. So maybe he feels a little weird right now. Men should be strong enough to handle that. Besides, he looks so sexy when you get him thinking.

 

[swallowedscream]

When I Loved You Last

When I Loved You Last

I go through my day doing all the right things, speaking my broken-record words. "Yes, Sir. Anything else today, Sir? Your change, Sir." Smiling my pleasant, empty Hee Haw smile. But they don't know all the while I think not of them and their cellophane-wrapped goodies. I think of butterfly wings and arched backs. I think of my whispered name shivering in the dark. I think of how you can share taste in a kiss, of how the last kiss I tasted, tasted of me. I think of first and last impressions. And of the last impressions you left on me. A matched set, five on each hip. All day, I think of when I loved you last and it gets me through. I can't wait to love you again.