Day 9 -- Noir

Who can write noir in spring?  Oh well.

Private Investigation

It’s late at night or early in the morning

the way it always is with these stories,

on the way to the crummy apartment

the bar, the all-night diner, where you

will find a beauty in red, nervous, with a wad of cash

and a problem. You can fix it, you lie,

take the dough and follow her to the penthouse.

She pours expensive liquor into an expensive tumbler,

shakes down her platinum curls and you know you are

in trouble and you know it’s the kind of trouble

you like. This is your movie. You’re making it

all up. You’re showing the gun, making it

go off before the last page; your love a red herring,

we figure it out, at the end.

Day 8 -- Ottava Rima

Eight Lines for the Eighth Day

Do planets get political at night

and side with stars and nebulae or us?

They don’t. And you? You say you do alright,

but days when memory stalls you acquiesce

and cry, the garden’s gone. All change and blight

remind you how we tried, then failed our best.

With age you feel the tidal pull in all,

this body, puny, wrapped in shining caul.

(Okay...I know it's not the most cheerful stanza, but it's all I've got in me tonight.)

Day 7 - Declarative Statements Followed by a Single Question

Who Says?

Pigeons curry favors from children eating gelato in the piazza.

Old flower sellers grow bioluminescent at dusk.

Orchestras strike up the Internationale at once in every time zone.

So correct your cafe espresso with a little grappa and get going.

 

Whirwhirwhirwhirclick, goes the machinery of dream.

 

Loudspeakers all tinny, and it’s Bowie with all the young dudes.

A platoon on the platform, they choreograph an astral projection.

 

They make a production out of it.

That was exciting.

Where are you going now?

Day 6 -- A Valediction

Considering the Most Recent Loss of a Hat

Farewell jaunty cap and your kindred,

all those berets and fedoras adrift, forgotten

in the cafes and train seats of the world.

Farewell all you guitar picks and magazines

I meant to read, favorite pens and penknives,

earrings, earring backs and stopped watches,

now the flotsam and detritus of a gleaming planet.

And you, my lost darlings, my loves, what of you?

What of you?

Day 5 -- Cinquain

Meanies

Nightlights

keep the meanies

cornered; back off bulbs say,

no monsters under this here bed,

sleep.

Day 4 -- Iain M. Banks Spaceship Name Tribute

So...for more about Banks and the prompt, see the names for the sci-fi writer's spaceships here:
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/03/the_spaceship_poetry_of_iain_m_banks/

We were supposed to use a Banksesque spaceship name for the title of a poem. My ship is called:

Distracted By Shiny Objects

Minutes to go and there, out the window, light shifts down flicks itself 
into her goldilocks, and you're done for, done in by the flash
in your pants and her perfect teeth, the sapphire stud in her nose 
the well-muscled shoulder, how her hand holds that taco
and the juice, there, at the corner of Lip and Heaven, down the chin 
where you aim to go left til Shiny, heading for Divine.

Day 3 Sea Chanty

So today's prompt was to write a sea chanty, but since I don't live near the sea and rarely visit, I wrote about something a little more handy.

Creek Song 

Someone should write a song about creeks. Someone should write a song about rocks and lichen and moss and pine and pin oak. Someone should write a song about how the water only hints of itself when you’re on the path near it, but not really near it, how you can’t appreciate the bigness of creek sound until you are right on top of it and then the sound is on top of you. And that’s how it is when you come to a creek in the woods, in late spring, coaxed in till it’s all creek, all the time, after that sweaty hike and granola and beef jerky and canteen when you loosen your expensive hiking boots, peel off your socks, roll up your jeans, and stand shin deep in the rocky, pressing cold with the new frogs and that slip of sky, and the one you love calls to you from the bank and you can’t hear nuthin but creek song on top of you.