by Adam Palumbo
-after Bhanu Kapil
First, give yourself a good hard smack across the face. Repeat. Drink a glass of cognac in the bathtub. Do not get out until you rid yourself of the stink of poems.
Build for yourself a workshop. In an abandoned fishhouse, if need be, or a windowless basement room or the passenger seat of your car. Use your thumb as a pen and the wind as your parchment. Keep every word alive.
Something is missing. Find it.
If you have the chance, go to the nearest mountaintop on a clear night in mid-August. Observe with all due patience the Perseids—this is heaven's poetry.
Gather around you those things that will feed your orphan mind: a quarter minted in 1968, your grandfather's leather belt, a brontosaurus fashioned out of tinfoil. Explore the old and the prodigal, all manners of creation. It comes like a dance, the same steps taken with a new partner.
Don't go asking anyone else to do it for you. Write it.
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This is, I think, the weakest of the prose poem sequence. Especially when you consider I'm still not sure how to write a poem myself, I shouldn't be giving out this kind of advice.
If this is the weakest, I'll have to check out the others. "Something is missing. Find it." Fantastic advice!*
I love this, the contrasting advice from the truly astonishing Perseids to the tin foil Brontasaurus. These personal contrasts in are lives are the food for our art. If you are writing a sequence you can put them all in one place in the group Serial Hot Flashes. Fave*