I’m posting the draft of this piece here so we can work in the comments on a group revision. Anyone want to start? Anyone? You can provide suggestions, discuss what seems to be working and what doesn’t seem to be working, or post a suggested revision.

* * *

i have a cop car i want to crush between my thighs. sirens scream from sheer delight and sway to dance beats that promise no more drunken nights spent stumbling off toward the mall. i have a badge that blinds civilians, reduces the buzz-cut military louts to slivered almond men, sweetly smelling the silk flowers at their table, when plates of robust boysenberries are emptied into my uniform like gunfire. i have a prisoner who sweats and giggles when I speed into thrusting my bullets into the barrel and pressing against the regrets of last December. the smell of a thousand corpses clings to my nose hair and tells me the graveyard is full of silent gunslingers, positioned in yellow fog, staring entranced through iron sights that stand all too still to be called anything other than the holiest of grails rewritten to flow with something other than this river. It carries swollen debris, spits cement shoes onto its muddy banks. Whose feet could carry such a load?

{Update: This piece is now a group revision, and anyone can jump in in the comments with suggested edits. Revise it, use some lines as a jumping off point for a new piece, whatever floats your boat.}

{Ret and Carolee and Jill and I are going to try a line by line. It might even turn out to be good. What am I saying? Of course it will be good. I’ll start here and we can continue up here or pick it up in the comments. Oh, and if anyone wants to throw down a line feel free. We’re open. — Nathan}

They pretend to remember afternoons of paper, the dusty office carpet
the sun burned each day as it arched from morning to evening, as if
it could scorch the air through mirrored windows. They wonder how
they’ll get back to the ground at the end of this day, or any day.
But it doesn’t scorch anything else, and they stare at their twin sibling.
Who is in the mirror? Pull the cheek, stretch the eyelid, who are you?
Are you pretending from your looking glass that we are two?
They’re collated color copies, folded and stapled. The conference table
will make the perfect gurney for the surgery. Lie down. So the shutters
are pulled, the scalpel is cleaned, the area of the gash is dulled with
a sense of futility. They have to hurry. Marketing needs the room at three.

{magnificent - don’t look to deb! - title needed here}

Birds calculate seasons wending to soft palates
savoring intricate dust shadows that swerve
apologetically away from northern evergreens.
How divided flocks move in spite of hunger,
how restricted airways steer without meaning
toward vast and truant winds, near ponds.

Other birds look up, look up from frosting ponds,
cluck their dry, bony tongues against hard palates.
The sounds seem like signals, mimicking meaning,
code amplified through their hollow bodies. They swerve
then dive. Alighting on the ground they mock hunger
like food stored eternally in the veins of evergreens.

Going home, they float over weeping evergreens
that gaze at reflected images silvered in ponds,
or, like the desert vulture’s eyes that hunger
for marrowed bones, guard meals meant for other palates.
Birds that they are, they swerve, or think they swerve
against bright azure skies clouded with meaning.

Crows to doves, wake each morning, fly with no thought to meaning
as the feeling grows. The sun peeks among evergreens.
Its bright eye wanders the tree tops, then swerves
to find green clusters of life round edges of ponds.
Hunger makes for an easy palate, and easy palates
are, like desert dwellers, fearful of all the hunger.

Morning crows shake bony words from their craw, hunger
the existence of yesterday. Like them, I’ve been meaning
to find enough to feed my long-starving palate,
find rare treats buried in the tips of evergreens.
I drink deep from the watery trough of herons’ ponds
then, headed for disaster, find I cannot swerve.

I look headlong into longing and hesitate. The swerve
needs to be now. Long before we accept and hunger
for shadows, before we set mouths to shallow ponds.
But this is all in my genes. Secretly, I’ve been meaning
to fashion wings, fuss and preen, fly through the evergreens
seeking kisses, taste, speaking with the world’s palates.

* * *

Here’s the poem we contributed to for Jill’s birthday. Now to revise.

Ideas?

We recently wrote an abecedarian over on this post, and now we’re going to revise it as a group.

Here’s how group revision works: Anyone and everyone can chime in in the comments for this post — core collaborative members and guest writers as well as our friends and supporters. Pretty much any and all comments are welcome.

Somehow, as a group, the many poets who helped build the poem will revise it based on the feedback received. That should be interesting. I suppose we’ll hash all that out in the comments as well.

I know one thing right off the bat: This baby needs a title. And also, we have some capitalization inconsistencies with our first words of new lines. How do we want to handle that? — Dana

* * *

{INSERT AMAZING TITLE HERE}

Angry shadows smoulder in the
brush, smoke faces, branches like crossbones
cut through to hollow bone,

drop a lighted match on sun-parched leaves,
eclipse the fire their skins once ate.
Filament carries heat from the core.

Gestating embers incubate infernos,
heat and hatred rise and escape,
if escaping is what it is, and the

jealous stars ignite. They spark nightly
kiosks that advertise their whereabouts.
Laughter begins beneath the embers,

madness fueled by the myrtle wind,
Narcissistic rage blazed crimson,
Oblivious orchids, bloomed and withered

Pulsating life, breathed and died
Querulous cries visited in night
rustling the wood’s scarlet death in the sun.

Shadows spring from crevasses
to shade the world from its
upside down morality. But it’s still a broken

vein, a rivulet of torched enchantment
wending its way along the earth’s meridians.
X-axes shoulder the burden of life

Young weight’s added to old, simmering over
zephyrs. Each answers anger with stark song.

Several Poetry Collaborative members and guest writers recently completed a draft of a not-yet-titled poem, the result of our second guest writer chainpoem exercise. We got everyone’s input on how to proceed with revising the piece, and the majority wanted to do it as a group revision here on The Poetry Collaborative.

So, the draft is below. Everyone who contributed a line can feel free to jump in with comments, questions, suggested revisions, and the like. Just be nice, since nice is always a good thing. And, even if you weren’t part of the piece, you can jump in and give your two cents as well.

Maybe in the end we’ll come up with a new version of the piece. Even if we don’t, it’s good practice to talk about poems — what makes them work, how they can be improved, what they make us feel, what possibilities we see in them.

To see the draft as it played out and to find out who contributed lines, check out this post and its comments: Call for writing guests #2: another chainpoem.

Here’s the draft of the poem:

we met on a bare mattress, sheets piled at the top for pillows,
heat running down the windows like sweat,
abandoned clothes the clues to who we were
before we were skin-slick with wanting,
backs arched over the edge of somewhere
thoughts — all molten — lavaing downwards
while the odors rose: sperm, groin-musk,
clashed passion electric,
our bodies suspended in liquid light
then collapsed, igneous, solid
sqittle-coins pared palid in the pooled moon’s sight
Our limp limbs, crossed, write the signature of chance.

Here’s a draft poem that Carolee and I wrote and are serving up here for a group revision. As usual, we will openly and lovingly listen to any and all feedback. We might not incorporate all the changes, but we sure love to hear them all.

You can find the working draft, and the comments we left as we wrote the piece, right over here.

* * *

bathsheba admonishes her lover using the collective ‘we’

The king, while walking on the roof of his house, saw Bathsheba, who was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, taking a bath. He immediately desired her. David then committed adultery with her and she conceived.
— Wikipedia

Lose that smirk, Dave.
Give nothing you sequester.
The last orphan, disguised as
hushed cries, never gaped,
groped or even winced.

Enough stifling to make us burn
burn burn for our women:
those retrofitted beauties
recovered, redressed and swollen.

Beguile none of us, Dave.
Tend your own rows.
Splayed limbs still grow unruly,
grueling their pantomime.

Surly, distempered they lash
themselves, inconsequential,
remember no infractions,
disinterment.

Come back Dave, we shrill
before conceding everything
except this damn complicity-
laden fondness for anguish.

How difficult we’ve made
intimacy. How bruised affection
plums our wanting. Here, still,
entwined and lonely, we cling.