ManicDDaily

(Sorry- this heart in chains--"trapped" but perhaps not quite what the poem envisions.)

Here’s kind of an interesting exercise for those interested in the ways in which form shapes content.  The first is a draft poem in “free” verse;  the second is a triolet (a form recently highlighted by Gay Cannon and Samuel Peralta in dVerse Poets Pub “form for all”) which I wrote the next morning.   Oddly, I am also linking this post to “Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads”, for their prompt about love and affection, since the poems deal with their backwash.

Trapped Heart 

And then you come to a time
when you are willing to excise a limb.
You are consciously an animal,
caught; cutting–hand, foot,
arm–seems the only cut loose.
You gnaw, increasingly
panicked, you saw,
increasingly frantic, not
for freedom but survival,
for you know,
even as you slice, that it’s
your heart that’s trapped,
your heart that is beating you
so hard, so insistently. 

And here’s the triolet:

After Lashing Out 

Then comes a time when you’d cut off a limb–
when you’re an animal, entrapped and sore,
when, in the come of time, you’d cut off a limb,
if you believed your severed paw could trim
the clock hand’s spring; if you believed a whim
of excision could take you back before
that time, when what you became cut off a limb–
you were an animal, entrapped and sore.

(As always, all rights reserved.  And as always please please please check out my books Comic novel,NOSE DIVE,  book of poetry, GOING ON SOMEWHERE, or children’s counting book 1 MISSISSIPPI. )