Black Swan

I saw the new Natalie Portman movie last night, Black Swan. It's a beautiful film full of drama and suspense. One review called it a "psycho-sexual thriller" and I couldn't agree more with that description. Portman is certain to get an Academy nod for her portrayal of a neurotic ballerina like we've never seen before. The film is dark and twisted, grotesque and perfect at the same time.

The following poem was inspired by the film. I imagined what would have happened if the protagonist, Nina, had not gotten the role of the Swan Queen in Swan Lake at all. I figured her madness would have overtaken her anyway, even though it would have made for a much less poignant story.


The Cast List

It was a veritable lunar eclipse--
The white moon hidden by the dark stain of night--
as the pieces of her confidence shattered into bits
like mirror shards on the ground,
reflecting in broken pixels the looks of
“I’m so sorry” and “What a disappointment”
and “That must feel awful”
Yes, you are.
And it was.
And it does.

The Republican

The man, they said he was insane,
Threw himself into the Seine
Lamenting the horrors he could not undo
And the punishments that were undue.

All his life he'd been a whipping-post
For the cause of liberty
His head, it filled with cracking sounds--
The whip of oppression
The snapping of the corners of the flag
The cannons, whose power grew, and
The canons, now obsolete

He had married, merry, once--
A patriot named Egalitte
(And wasn't that fitting?)
But for the love of the tricolor's thick red stripe,
He lost his own.

Never again stood he idly by
All the fighting he internalized
Through the beatless hearts of slain tyrants
Egalitte he immortalized.

He was old, now,
Egalitte still so young
Awaited him in heaven--or hell--
The single picture he had of her
Green leaves tucked in her hair
Mocked his cowardly life
From yellow sunrise to yellow set.

"Allons, enfants de la patrie"
Her lusty voice filled his chest
The weight of the song
Extended the wait 'til the day he'd take
His life
His rest
His breath
His death
His end

The Seine swirled.
The wind whirled.
His heaves hurled over the bridge's edge.
His sobs stabbed the light of day.

Egalitte broke the river's surface first
Green leaves softened
His body followed heavily
One more Revolution's casualty.

Two Poems about Schoolchildren

I have been thinking a lot about school lately, in that nostalgic end-of-mandatory-education sort of way. As graduation approaches, my mind grows more and more poetic. Two poems have sprung from these thoughts. I hope you appreciate them, dear readers. Also, I haven't got titles for them, so any suggestions will be very helpful!

Poem #1

The prophetic ringing
Of a dingy old school-bell
Sends long brown braids swinging
As they file down the hall.

Amidst flurried pearls and loafers
And chinos topped with argyle
They coyly reject offers
From the boys who wink and smile.

They glide across the parquet floor
At the ball for debutantes-
Their fathers' lectures are such a bore
And their mothers are nonchalant.

But behind carefully lined lids
Of deep blue sparkling eyes
Something is ill and amiss-
It tells of a coming demise.

One day, cornflower preppies wilt
In the spotlight of the scene
And though their lives are wholly gilt
It's hard to live a dream.

Poem #2

The lengthy scratches of thirty pencils grating
Against white paper with blue lines
Evokes a memory of days spent waiting
For summer, long in coming-

And of students taking up arms in their minds
Against the clock, a foe unsurmountable.
The deaths of snarling dragons on tridents' gleaming tines
Swirl in the imagination as seconds fade away.

The smell of rubber eraser-shavings
Throws a mental switchboard's breaker
Back to times when a few hours of daylight lasting
Repaid a year of dull submission.

Now we have lost the wand'ring spirits
We had when we were children
When joy, a dime could buy it,
Was ever our only aim.

A Poem Called Trees

The following poem was inspired by a couple of pages out of one of my favorite poetry anthologies, FEG (Ridiculous Poems for Intelligent Children) and from a conversation with my stepfather.

Have you ever had the chance to see
Three-hundred and sixty degrees of pine trees?
Can you describe it?

Alone in the forest
The boughs reaching all around
Above and below and
Right at you.

And in an instant
Those beautiful trees transform into something sinister
And you're expecting the appearance of the
Big
Bad
Wolf

You can't make an escape
Because you still have the sun's reflection off green needles in your eyes
And in that bleary miasma
You melt.

Favorites

I have a confession to make. I once thought, and perhaps still think Emily Dickinson's "If You Were Coming in the Fall" was my favorite love poem of all time. It's beautiful in its simplicity and the imagery is vivid. It also has a wonderfully musical meter that makes it incredibly pleasing to hear. But it is not the sort of poem that an intellectual should list as their favorite. It's somewhat juvenile stylistically and the symbolism therein is either very obvious or nonexistent. Understanding it didn't take a lot of effort. I don't sound more intelligent for being able to decipher what it means. Essentially, my love of this poem is as if I thought Taylor Swift's lyrics were better than Of Montreal's.

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/10463

Now, I may have a new favorite love poem. It is T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Eliot is the more intelligent choice, and I do think his poetry has more depth than Dickinson's. It still has the beautiful flow, vivid imagery, and simplicity that I liked in "If You Were Coming in the Fall", but it's the grown-up version. I read or hear "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and instead of the warm fuzzy feeling I get from Emily Dickinson's poetry, I get a feeling of a deep stillness, a wisdom that I seldom find in myself. This poem is a love story for adults, for realists, for those who have loved and those who have lost, and for those who are still searching. It's a poem that embodies longing, a motif I've touched on in previous posts. It sees beauty in the everyday sadness of the last glowing embers of a passion. It sees that love is ironic sometimes and that nothing, as unique as it feels to you, is ever really as new to the world as it is to you. In essence, this isn't a love poem at all, not in the traditional sense. Regardless, it's beautiful and perhaps you, dear reader, should take a look.

http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

Blackout!

Hello again, dear readers! I want to begin by informing you all how much I appreciate your support. This project started out as a sort of online diary- I figured no one would ever read it. But this has not been the case thanks to you! Big hugs. Also, if you're trying to comment on my posts and it isn't working, send me an email at lindseybrigitte@gmail.com. I know the comment system hasn't been working for a while...as a matter of fact, if you've left a comment AT ALL, go ahead and email me...I haven't gotten any of them. I want to know what you think about my writing!

Enough logistics. Back to writing and such.

I held a workshop for the literary magazine members on Tuesday that was a great success! It was inspired by the poetry of Austin Kleon. Basically, Kleon takes pages out of newspapers, selects the words he likes, and colors the rest in with Sharpie, such that only the poem shows through. Here's his website if you're interested: http://www.austinkleon.com/

My Austin-Kleon-style newspaper blackout poem went as follows:


Crazy people              think               there's actually     a precedent
        For the         drop in gas prices
                                                               hopefully, it won't take
                                     another 40 years       to
                             get         change we can all believe in


There were a great many good poems produced at the workshop, all of them better than mine. But it was a fun experience, and I think I helped to get the LitMag's creative juices flowing. You see, there seems to have been a contagious strand of writer's block going around, and I wanted to do something to help. Thus the balckout poem workshop. The point behind newspaper blackout poetry isn't just to make cool poem art out of cheap stuff. It's to show that there is poetry everywhere, you just have to know where and how to look for it. Even the Business section of USA Today can be artistic. (That's where my poem came from!)

Poem-type Thing

Word Exercises

Cat stares out the window at a
Cool Guy walking with a
Woman, down the street.
Are they in love?
A rose grows nearby-
A flower, looking at the various
Fauna.
Does it know Latin?
Can it comprehend Greek?
Like the architecture of the city that curls around.
Build! Build! Bigger-
Brick by brick, the contractors turn the world into
Mud brown, no longer blue and green.

Cool Guy tomorrow
Doesn’t notice the sun.
Cher plays in his ears,
Pop strains blurring the world.
A bottle lies on the street. Leaves it.
A fly lands on his finger. Brushes it off.
Airplanes float in
The sky, unnoticed-
Dark clouds drift by, unseen.
As the weather changes, bolts of
Lightning pierce the atmosphere, bright
Gold in their glory, leaving
Silver streaks before his eyes

Silver
Like the hair of aging Society Women
They know the truth.
Innocence is purity.
So sad it is for the jaded crowds that
Loneliness always equals
Emptiness.
An equation that adds up to
Lives not full of the substantial.
And for this, our future is unclear-
Almost like glass, when broken
We’ve shattered.

Haiku (The Further Adventures of the Rat)

Why does mankind hate?

I am but a low rat, yet

I do not hate men.

Letter to You

This is a letter to you. You will likely never read it, but that's all right. I just know I had to write it. First, I love you. I am very glad you're alive. You can be mad at me forever and I will never regret helping to save your life. You know, I prayed to a God I'm not even sure I believe in for you. I did everything I knew to do, and it must have worked, because here you are. I wrote a poem for you, love.

Step back from that ledge, my dear-

Can't you see we need you here?

In a world that's full of hurt and pain,

Can't you see we're all the same?

You never really can escape,

No matter what dark road you take.

So stay here and join the dance

I'm only asking that you give it a chance.

Alas, alack, you're still not free-

But I'm relieved that you're still here with me.

This life is how it was meant to be,

And if you stay, I know you'll see

That a day of love is worth a year of pain

And life is something you can't regain

But if you choose to yourself reclaim

I'll be with you, one and the same.