thrift

so i've been formally misled, exposed my faulty poems, these pseudo-haynaku, no wonder they feel so constrained, but i found them fun to play with. The series is called Thrift. A six-letter word meaning austere economy. And there are more; i may as well memorialize them here with tom and ray magliozzi manically conducting their automotive hi-jinx in the next room.

rooms
bare, full
pen and ink.

cloth
loom-root
oak and elf

tread
warp, woof
god and dog

glyph
mark, etch
the ink pen

RIFLE
KILL MORE
ETC AND ETC

haunt
dirt-wolf
get him off...

books
edit self
ems and ens

comic
page joke
gut nor gun

had enough??? tough. i can't go on i'll go on and on...

write
more epic
ode and pun

great
life trip
and how now!

blues
hand, palm
eye and ear

brief
idea-clue --
now it's not!

oozes
life from
arm and leg

music
when tree
has its day

ok so these mini-narratives have a kind of compulsivity to them; as i read them aloud-to-myself in the transcription process. in daily speech and writing i find myself counting the letters of the words i use in search of usable thrift-ku lines to file away for later. Thirst, that's five letters, how about that. like robert lowell cranking out several sonnets a day in his lizzie and harriet phase, but not as "accomplished;" clumsy (a word i love, find endearing), approximate, searching, like northrop frye (i first wrote norbert wiener) on doggerel: a not-fully actualized reaching for mature verse, poetry slightly refined from its block-of-marble phase.