The following (totally awesome) poems are the result of a "recycled poetry" exercise that I'm in love with right now. Read more about it here. Special shout out to Annie in Khanom for providing the dictionary pages, which turned out to be perfect for this activity, and gave me the push I was looking for to try something new. - Tipple -* Tipple means to drink liquor, I learned from this page. Tipple on.
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This week in our Thai class with Kru Ice (shout out!) the Mathus girls had to write stories using the Thai we have learned so far. Below is my story, Mongan Khong Arabelle or Arabelle's Dragon. Keep in mind my creativity was limited by my limited (but growing) language skills, but I'm still pretty impressed with it! Thai on top and English translation below. Cheers!
This story, or start to a story, really was a result of an exercise called Who, What, Where, Why, When. We wrote for 10 minutes based off the following prompt. You can read more about the exercise here. Who - A sloth What - He wants to learn how to talk Why - Because he wants to play the guitar Where - Cat Heaven When - the 1920's ... Knock, knock, knock.
Moss arrived at the pearly gates - which were inexplicably dripping in yarn and reeked of tuna. They swung open in front of him slowly, dramatically. And from behind them shuffled three worn mice in service clothes - the first holding out a bowl of milk, the second a collar of gold, and the third a freshly dead fish. The sloth, in a confused daze, scratched the fur on his head and stepped inside. He was hungry. And tired. Dying was a lot of excitement for an animal like Moss, whose days consisted mainly of sleeping in trees and sleeping in other trees. It was only after licking the last of the fish juice from his claws that he saw them: cats. Billions of cat, as far as his tired eyes could see. Fancy ones and fat ones; playful ones and angry ones; the ones with fur matted to open wounds and the stench of the streets still on them. There must be some mistake. Not a single sloth among them. And the screeching of these critters was unbearable nonsense. His limbs were tired and his heart afraid. Where would he find a companion who could understand his relentless need for relaxation and tall trees? How would he ever fall peacefully asleep? And then he heard it, somewhere beyond the low, rusty purrs and the ear-breaking love calls - music. Softly at first, and he tapped his paw to the soulful beat. This is a poem from the writing prompt: write about unicorns ... When you give a unicorn a trumpet
Don't expect it to be polite. For their horns were made for poking And they're tasteless in the night. You may tell him: Man, It's only made for music. He'll say: I don't have hands so Don't you tell me how to use it. In a restaurant, in candlelight, He'll make you drop your knife. In your bedroom masked in shadow He will traumatize your wife. A unicorn at any other time Is a magical sight. But when you see one with a trumpet It's best to wonder on and say goodnight. It sounded harsher than she meant it to. It shattered silence. It shook the plates shelved against gray walls in the dining room when she walked in. "And I've done it again." Round hips and big thighs beat back and forth as she pounded across the tiled floor. It was powerful, her vicious energy, and it burst like magic from every muscle and every bone. "I'm home, I'm home." She said it to an empty house. Deserted, piling up dust for three years. Empty places smell of days long gone, left in dirty masses on old floors. This place reeked of it.
There had been as many good days as their had been bad, for most of the time, at first. But the thought of any of those times stung now just the same. A mirage of childhood tarnished by reality in these very walls, and it stinks of that too. That is the stink that makes your stomach hurt and your heart ache all in one. This work of art is a result of our grab bag activity. Basically, you write down the first 10 random words that come to your head and then select a genre from our grab bag. This time, I drew the 4-panel comic. For more genre ideas and links to other examples, click here. My words for this particular activity were:
anchovy elevator relinquish transit binary crapshoot fornicate electric grasp neutron Fair faces of fallen foe
Stare, stationary, stealth in shadow. Bare breasts and backs, briskly broken On openings ornate with oaken oracles. Land lucidly beside lives that linger Atop anatomically abominable ancestry. Great, ghastly gestures, grained with grief Push positive people purposefully past Their tired, tied tongues, twisted thrice. Choking, crying, calling out, "Catastrophe!" Kings of killing kicked by kindred kangaroos. In this exercise, we started with the first 10 words that came to us. Once we had those, we decided to write a poem using these words. My words were: precocious, wrong, butterfingers, elegant, reindeer, bumpkiss, freely, intertwined, and contraband.
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AuthorChicago-born citizen of the globe, rich in the things that really matter. Let's get weird. Categories
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