Poetry Tips: The Wee Hours

Lately I’ve been waking up in the wee hours of the morning thanks to a variety of events including nightmares, pets, barking dogs, loud neighbors, etc. It inspired me to get up, stretch, and type out a few poetic tirades on the interruptions. This week, write about your own experience with the wee hours of the morning—do you sleep right through them and therefore the goings-on outside are a mystery? Are you an early riser who enjoys the first peak at dawn? Either way, there’s a whole world moving while most of us are still sleeping.

Good luck to all who try it, please stop by next week…

Rattle Open Submissions

Rattle is open year-round and often has tribute issues if you take a look at their web-site, see the link below. Otherwise, you may send up to six poems, your contact information must appear on each page, and you may e-mail them to submissionsATrattleDOTcom.
http://www.rattle.com/submissions.htm

Good luck to all who submit, please drop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177976
“The Appalachian Book of the Dead” by Charles Wright

http://www.juked.com/2010/07/deadpeople.asp
“I’m Not Here to Look at Dead People,” by Arlene Ang

Thanks for clicking in, please stop in tomorrow for more Open Submissions

Jim Murdoch's This Is Not About What You Think

Jim Murdoch is a novelist and poet whose latest collection of poems, This Is Not About What You Think, begs you to take a closer look at not only his own poems but all poems. Published by fvbooks.com in July, this collection will allow your own thoughts and experiences to flow through his words so that while the collection may not tell a complete story it will allow you to build your own through reading. Below I am happy to share a few poems:

Advice to Children

People will fail you.
It's a fact of life —
they'll let you down.

But not always.
And that's the worst of it —
sometimes they don't.

But most times it's hard to tell.

I think this poem tells it like it is, don’t you? The people you think you can count on fail to and the people you don’t think you can count on turn out to be dependable. Isn’t that the way life is?



Father Figure

This is the floor beside my bed
where I kneel to talk to God.
If I press my ear to the floor.
I can hear Him talk to Mum.
About me. It is always me.

I know what God looks like.
He looks just like my dad.
I heard him tell my mum:
"In this house I am God."
I heard that through the floor.

Now I only pretend to pray
because I don't want my dad
to really hear the things I think.
Now he's not sure I'm so bad.
I don't want him to know I am.

I just want my dad to love me.

I can picture a child writing this poem and it definitely tugs at the heartstrings. It is something I think a majority of us can relate to, feeling that a parent is larger than life, larger than God, and the feeling of wanting to please that parent more than God.



True Love II

My father had a heart transplant.
Years ago, before I was born,
doctors took
out his broken heart

and gave him a machine instead.
The strange thing about this machine
was it was
powered by sadness.

Of course he was always just Dad,
but, when I discovered the truth,
at first I
hated the sadness

then I became thankful for it
because as long as I could see
him be sad
he would be with me.

And so I made it my job to
make him the saddest dad in the
whole wide world.
What else could I do?

This is another poem that lends itself to a child’s perspective. Love, sadness, and thoughtfulness are intertwined in the complicated relationship of parents to children. However, this poem can also expand outward to a myriad of relationships between people, relationships fueled by dysfunction or sadness fueled by mutual tragedies. In a way, this poem could be a children’s book given the right illustrator, and that is what I picture with this poem.


If you enjoyed this short sample, you can read more poems at:
http://www.jimmurdoch.co.uk/think_excerpt.html


To purchase a copy of This Is Not About What You Think for yourself for 5.99 Pounds from the UK, visit the Fandango Virtual site at:
http://www.fvbooks.com/jmurdoch/jmurdoch4.htm


To learn more about Jim Murdoch and his writing, visit his The Truth About Lies blog at:
http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com/


Thanks always for reading, please click in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…

Tiny Words

Find Haiku and micropoetry daily at this delightful and eye-pleasing blog by checking out the link below:

http://tinywords.com/

Thanks for dropping in, please stop by tomorrow for another featured poet…