everything feeds process

Members of the Revolutionary Working Party Know

that revolutions take time. More than one hundred
and thirty years later, they are still working
towards our American revolution. Not the one
with parrot colored coats, tea dark seas, and gunpowder
but the one where we define ourselves daily
as Americans. These revolutionary workers work hard,
cataloging all our choices, recording the half-turns
and quarter-turns we make together. They see
us growing in stop motion, exponentially expanding
into thousands of cities, towns, and streets. They know
what it really means. What they didn’t expect was the splinter
groups, the men and women who grew weary of change
at the molecular level. First came the Reconciliation
Working Party, shaking hands and signing wordy agreements
with each other. They couldn’t fathom a revolution
without compromise. Then came the Rule Working
Party, who wanted a tidy and orderly event. How can there be
change, they asked, without structure? How will we know
what we’re building and destroying? They were tolerable,
but those mole-eyed academics in the Research
Working Party, they ruined it all. Cloistered
in libraries and pontificating in hushed tones, they only
wanted to learn about revolutions and never engaged
in any. After that, the Revolutionary Working Party
was driven down the path of division.
each day, new splinter groups detached
from the main body, breaking away into ever smaller
caucuses. The Regional Working Party, divided
of course into regions. The Roads Working Party, falling
into ditches. The Rural Working Party, suspicious
of the Regular Working Party. The Refugee
Working Party, isolated and unknown. These days,
it’s impossible to find the true revolutions
among all the interlocking factions, the moments
when we turn to find a new part of ourselves
hidden beneath all of our rhetoric and work.

***

2 down, 28 to go.

Today’s prompt came courtesy of  Therese Broderick. The instructions were to use the Acronym Attic to find an acronym for RWP other than Read Write Poem and to use that as a launching point into a poem.

When I reviewed all of the 31 options, I started to notice all of the conflicting “working parties.” The more I thought about it, the more I imagined an ideological fight among all the different working parties. I don’t think I’m trying to be particularly political in the above poem. Instead, I wanted to take the idea of ideological warring into an absurd explosion of differences. I think I may continue to work on it, but for now, it’s good enough for a first draft.

On Pacific Coast Highway

I swerve in and out of stalled traffic, my Indian
barely kicking out of first. I weave through the median,

pointing my front tire between the yellow dashes, counting
them one-two-three to measure my distance. On  mornings

like these, I think of my dad teaching me to ride
his m-bike, as he called it, trying to make me believe

he was cool. I never thought he was cool, never gave him
the honor. He was the one holding me back, telling me

don’t go farther than Cornhusker Highway or 84th. He was
the one forcing me to work on the bike all day Saturdays,

laughing at me when I dodged streams of dirty oil, when I
couldn’t loosen lug-nuts. Just like  a woman, he’d chuckle

even though I was barely tall enough to reach the kickstand.
We passed each other wrenches and grease rags and swallowed

all we should have said to each other. On days like this,
when the sun bakes the asphalt and I can hear the roar

of the surf rather than the rustle of wheat and cornstalks, I always
imagine him riding beside me. I say to him, finally:

I am worthy of these wheels you left me, of this freedom
I inherited. I will be grateful for this day you gave to me.

***

1 down, 29 to go.

This poem was inspired by the first NaPoWriMo prompt over at Read Write Poem. Member (and prompt writer) Donna Vorreyer suggested that we shuffle our iPod and use the first 5 song titles as the basis for our poems. I loved the randomness of the prompt and how this pushed me to write in persona. I’ll explain more, but  first my song titles (with artists and albums) were:

• Worthy – Ani DiFranco – Not a Pretty Girl
• Don’t Go Further – Koko Taylor – Old School
• M-Bike – PJ Harvey – 4-Track Demos
• I Will Be Grateful for This Day – Bright Eyes – Noise Floor: Rarities 1998-2005
• Just Like a Woman – Calexico & Charlotte Gainsbourg- I’m Not There (Soundtrack)

The funny thing about this list is that all of the songs were very “poetry” sounding. In that, I am lucky. I could have just as easily drawn 5 very unpoetical titles.  Then, there was “M-Bike.” I had forgotten this song completely, so I looked up the lyrics and learned that Ms. Harvey was writing about a motorcycle. From there, I realized that I had to work around this phrase first.  So, I started to imagine who would be riding a motorcycle, where this person would be riding it, and what he or she might have been thinking. The rest of the song titles only informed my story, once I realized that I was writing about a Nebraska transplant riding the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica.

So that’s the process for this poem. I must say, it’s wonderful to start NaPoWriMo in the middle of vacation, when I have all day to ruminate on the poem.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to sustain this energy when work comes creeping back in.