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BARE: Uncensored Poetry
Project 30/30 Day #15:
And time stood stil …
Hands dance back and forth
And the cow jumped over the moon.
Deep breathe in,
hold, hold, hold
Release.
Bounce, bounce, bounce,
The minute endlessly repeats.
Scurrying here and there
Workers toil away, unseen and unknown.
The cat in the cradle
Fed and pampered
Purrs.
It’s always nighttime somewhere.
Where the minute hand bounces
And repeats.
Endlessly.
Red lights flicker, no magic in sight
Cheap smelling bodies
Clad in artless rags
Contort: the ballet of survival.
The silver spoon ran off with the Moon
And time stood still.
Someone smiles, someone laughs
Children thread needles full of hope
Stitch by stitch, they inch
Toward an early death.
Unconscious kings, dancing queens
Live in the repeating minute.
Languidly oblivious to
Little boy blue and
Buttercup
So they eat and sleep
Rinse and repeat.
*Drawing on Cats in the Cradle by Harry Chapin
WHAT IS BARE: UNCENSORED POETRY AND THE 30/30 Project?
In February 2024, I wrote and published a poem daily with Tupelo Press, a not-for-profit publisher in the United States of America. The sting in the tail was that the published piece had to be an unedited first draft.
By peeling back the curtains on how poetry is created, barriers were removed, highlighting the iterative nature of the process. By publishing drafts that are, at best, sketches of what a final piece might be like, readers and writers are encouraged to…
