The titles were given at the beginning of the challenge. Most people, to my dismay, found only light verse inspired by the titles. I’m not good at developing challenges.

Muhammad Ali Entered My Dream Just to Say Hello

Or maybe to shake my hand, or to shake
his hand, I can’t remember now. Sleep

bunched up at the end like a sheet,
and we could slide down it to the knots

dangling in the limby trees. He came in,
said he’d come in again, said

to wait for that entrance breath all caught up
and act surprised. It’s you. Yes, it’s me.

I am who I have been. And his hands shook
and mine shook, and we shook hands again?

I woke with a sore wrist, shook it
out like the laundry. Now he leaves me alone.

***

I Have Been to the Mountain

An online form asks for the highest
point you’ve ever stood, higher than
the dangerous tippy top of the ladder

you shouldn’t have leant on the other
ladder you shouldn’t have leant on old
siding and ignoring the do not stand

and you wonder why it’s a step
if you can’t stand on it, not made of knives
or cellophane. But what’s the highest

point in the country, the world, the highest
point you’ve braced your toes against
and reached out with a paintbrush toward

the soft splatter of a cloud just get that last
faint smudge of color hidden beneath
a new coat, your shirt with its last

faint splatter of spaghetti sauce or sweat
hidden beneath a new coat riding up a size
too small. What is the point?

***

Patent #10293954465

It means open. The cardiologists
run wires from groin to heart and make a note
that the LAD is patent, the lad lay
drowsy and patient and soft in Merck’s
time-released arms. They dig

up buried treasure in our veins, the way
our bodies scar builds a map for each
new drug and here, this one will make
you live, this one will make you thin,
this one will kill you, we won’t notice

anything. A pencil across the blank
sheet underneath shows everything
you ever wrote. They have the notebook.
We won’t notice anything at all.

The Tambourine Against Your Leg

Your eyes are always drawn to the girl–
not the men with their button-down arms

buttoned-down to their curvaceous guitars–
but the girl with her head thrown back so

the music rises out of her throat like a sword
and her hands beat a rhythm on her thighs or

sometimes aglitter with a tambourine and so
magnetic you expect your fillings, your glasses,

your car, all the iron that makes your blood rich
and red, to gather up and leave you gasping,
take a long plane ride to find her gone.

I just don’t know what to say.

You’ll appreciate this little gem:

I was in a discussion on a message board about functioning alcoholics. It made me realize that I don’t really talk about my childhood with my dad very often.

In a way, I had the “ideal” alcoholic dad. He had the money (at least after my early childhood) so that his drinking never endangered us financially. He was a kind, gentle, man so there was no violence of any sort. He was very loving, decent, smart, considerate, all of the things that make a great dad.

And at the same time, he was unpredictable and strange. He’d get home and I wouldn’t know if he would be sober. Would he be happy? Would he be furious? Would he be angry that no one started dinner or angry that someone started a dinner he didn’t want? Would he go straight up to bed? Would he give everyone the silent treatment or would he bounce around like a puppy?

I always knew he loved me. I always knew where my next meal was coming from and that I had a car and parents who were together and everything enviable. I just had to change my personality every day to fit whatever it was he wanted that day, and I had to tread very carefully all the time to avoid setting him off.

It’s funny to remember it now, and know how much I have been shaped by him, but at the same time I just accept it as what happened. Life happened. Alcoholism happened. Stuff happens.

Struck

He used to stroke my hair. How can a word
that feels so gentle starve my father’s brain?
And what new pill can make him whole again,
will peel paralysis from fists, or slurred
invectives from his clumsy lips? He strikes
a match, still. Holds a pipe to suck. And when
his mouth can’t clamp itself around the stem
he clucks and dribbles smoke, a leaking dike
with only palsied thumbs for help, and dutch courage.

Toast

I might as well get him another drink
and hope he finds a worm. I think his joints
must creak in thirst, so like the cedar joists
that lift this house from mud. If anything
were to be gained by fighting him on this
I’d pour the liquor on the hosta’s leaves
and watch it drown, and watch my father plead
like Mary Magdalene for one last sip.

Or I could learn to drink it all myself.
Small sacrifice. My liver should hold true
for twenty years. Hell knows my father’s health
has lasted longer than he could expect;
and if I trace his steps, at sixty-two,
someone can drink me down from my neglect.

Because the winner of December’s challenge abdicated her throne, I got tapped to set the challenge for January.

Some of you might remember that Gabriel and I challenged ourselves in 2008’s NaNoWriMo to write poems matching up with 30 titles we had devised. January’s challenge is to write a poem for at least one of these six leftover titles:

1. “I Have Been to the Mountain”
2. “Patent #10293954465”
3. “Muhammad Ali Entered My Dream Just to Say Hello”
4. “On Standing Too Close to an Impressionist Painting and Having it Turn to Dots”
5. “Karl Marx, Clean Your Room!”
6. “Daisy Cutter”

The November challenge was to write a poem updating a mythological character:

Laocoön

And serpents caduceus his calf to the chairleg.
He slumps over lattes, is handing out condoms,
gives in to the cries of hey Trojan man, Trojan

from fuckers. The foil packets spin from his fingers,
the magnums straight into the hands of the rudest,
in hopes, maybe vain, that they’ll have to trade down.

December’s challenge was to write poems dealing with the circus. I know all about the circus, so I wrote two. A little shortie:

Pants

Trucks stripe the road with salt, stretching up
a hill like grey trousers on a stilt-legged clown.

And a longer one that I knew would be immediately recognizable as mine. It was:

Wigged

And the last one out of the circus has to lock up everything.–Adam Duritz

Nothing’s funny in a clown car with only one
in it, tooling aimlessly around in the dust. No pants

are big enough to take up all this space, no ballooning
hair makes the audience gasp as it comes out

and keeps on coming, one red curl after another.
Trapezes squeak when no one’s on them, shift

and settle and shift in the rising heat. I could dangle
from my toes, from the yard-long toes of these shoes

high above the world and bask like a bird
could bask if its feet were nailed to the perch, upside down.

And the car would look tinier from there. And the world
would look as small and hollow as my nose.