Welcome to the Dollhouse

This piece is my first attempt at being  a poetics pirate! I’m trying my hand a unique form called Plunderverse. It’s an “Expressive Subjects” prompt that I’ve been meaning to try for a while. The idea is that you take a poem or a piece of writing you like, and you take out bits and pieces from it and make a variation of the original.

In my case, I’m not even using a poem. Instead, as I was listening to the audiobook of the book Beautiful Boy (a father’s memoir of living with his son’s drug addiction), I took notes on words and passages that I liked, and made something new.

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Both homes seem illusory.
Teenagers complain, integrate their lives badly, a flaw in their character

A flaw in their lives.

Books, quiet, low-grade melancholia
Two weeks to cram in surfing

Re-enactments & the vanishing act. Wait for the shuttle,
trailing minors with magic markers.

Open cardigan. Suitcase of your things. Warbling lyrics through the airplane.

Scary eyes, woo-woo chorus, percussion, cacophony, pounding.

Howling

Test drive the minivan for your growing family
Less trampled beaches
Rolling in the waves
Seaweed crust
Waiting for the next wave to crash down

On the way home, ceaseless back-and-forth
Worldly, sagacious child but with emotional chasms.
Meagre consolation.

Welcome to the dollhouse.

Stories

Building storeys
lines of text, layers
of sedimentary rock
of sentences building an edifice
of a tower of babel, skyscrapers built on air

sand castles of stone

Stories are set in stone
until they grow wings
and shatter the sculpture block

We tell ourselves stories
to make sense of the chaos
around us, within us
to throw meaning against the wall

We store parts of ourselves in our stories,
like squirrels store nuts in their cheeks
and forget where they buried them

stored inside a vessel,
an amphora of oil
secure for millennia
in Socrates’ grave

keepsake in a sealed jar,
a boat built inside with delicate
precision
set adrift on ocean waves

seagulls have stories
they keep to themselves
swooping to peek through
smudged glass

Refracted stories
ride infrared waves beyond vision
distort memories
light up recesses and buried treasure
cover like a down duvet
goose flesh across your arms as you hear a story
[refracted]
hitting its mark on the tender spots you pretend don’t hurt

Picture frames
expensive and heavy mounted on walls
to showcase that you’re worthy
of oak

Framed like pictures snapped on iPhones
filtered for effect
Clarendon & Juno
to manicure our moments



stories built up in sediment