NaPoWriMo - National Poetry Writing Month. I have pledged to take part in this and write "something" every day, even if it's only a fragment, a phrase to start from or an unintelligible stream of consciousness.

Day 1 has proved somewhat "uneventful"! I had been anticipating the freedom to go "completely wild" and abandon all sense of poetic constraint, however what has come today is not so very outlandish. What has alarmed me more is the need I seem to have to tidy my work, to package it up and make sense of it. I can see that to leave things as "nonsense" or fragmented is going to prove the real challenge, not the material. Still, it IS only Day 1!! :))

Please don't feel obliged to keep up with the comments. I am bound to post every day for a month, if I stick with the programme, but shall not be able to spend a corresponding amount of time reviewing others' work, sadly, though I will be here as much as I can. But thank you all for your participation in this as and when. I hope together we can break some new ground. K xx

the Artist is present
sitting before you, hands clasped
between her knees or leaning
forward, legs spread wide.

A challenge. You are invited, just
as you are, to sit across the table
as long as you like, engaging her
silent stare. Perhaps she’s not there?

Fill her space. Inhale her breath.
Feel the imperfected torment
unseen beneath her blouse.

Upstairs, couples in frieze-form
are naked. Or run to each other
over and over; colliding, bouncing
off again. Arms braced to their sides.

Elsewhere back-to-back, their
luxuriant lengths of black, wavy hair
knot them Siamese.

Up-close, monochrome vids show
A Scream: male into a female’s face;
she into his. Then their sustained kiss –
deep, deeper, deeper still.

A woman curls loosely around
a skeleton, tender as spoons.
Her eyes are bruising, her unknown
thoughts crumble the bones.

Fields of peasant girls, women,
wild in ponderous rain, drop
to their knees, lift heavy skirts
and present bare genitals
to sky’s fellatio tears.

The Artist is here, present.
So, too, the genderless-uniformed
guards not paid to ask or think
but to stop you speaking a word
to her, prevent you touching
something.




based on Marina Abramovic’s retrospective interactive performance art
currently at MoMA, New York