collaboration and collage

Here is a poem composed by my fine students in my Intermediate Poetry Workshop 52-5200 sec. 01 class this Spring semester at Columbia College, Chicago. I made two copies of all the poems they turned in for workshop and gave them scissors to cut out all the lines that they found interesting. We put all the lines inside a hat and went around letting each poet pick ten lines. They composed each ten line stanza and wha-laa!


DATED TOMATO CARTON SLIT

By Dan Dwyer, Benjamin Stafford Hall III, Marlon Esguerra, (wants to remain anonymous), Nolan Chessman, Candice V. Cole, and Christopher Albright

I’m listening to Shoegazer and toiling in foreign tongues
I can’t comprehend
Bus loads sounds like shit sounds
Staring at the lines of cranes, he sights Ché reading Goethe
“it’s Spring. I want to shove his customs down my throat.”
We quickly became tired of wrenching our bodies to the half beats
of broken sounds
The fidget of benevolence and the door broke open
Soup-steam pheromones fill sinuses
We rushed to the chill of April’s morning blanket
Look out for the donut police, she beams
Her face was a rock chimney

This product makes its own gravy
Drunken tumbleweed threatens, heaves next to me
Straight woman in protagonist roles over pages and pages of
unscripted modern love poetry
and they were later alerted
I’ve got a hard on for God
We’re all condemned to be free
House of windows and eyes and the
Backless sea foam green summer dress. “That’s the one I like.”
You owe Chris five cigarettes, Alissa
Much like a work of art

I might be here when we share this
Mayan Kulkulkan
Echoed me awake nights
And makes its effortless entrance into her dated tomato carton slit
They’d get a letter from the government
“they were bah . . . loons. Bahhhlooons. Bahhhlooons,”
I blushed like a cautious Japanese girl
Had I become the fodder between the sheets—
Auburn sweat in their eyes

Now we’re back to dying with 1950’s style
Between pints of Monday night special
No faces. Just coats
With eyes that never stop changing color
That way opened (bridging the gap)
From across the sea/or to have ascended from
How genius of you acoustically to get into my cabin
The occasional scarf winking in the wind
Whoever hears it recovers/their time of good fortune
The doors break open

You were my tree, but you rust
Our prosthetic fashions will be noticed
(morning wood holding in life-force)
lady Detroit’s silhouettes hiss, razor tipped—
a system of dance, eyes front and weaving
you be travelin’ circles today, humph?
Into red. See of course I do
Stabbed in the night at the edge
Exactly what she knows I can feel—
Hate-breed free mid-American yard
Of the circus cathedral and blow kisses
Against the taste of night

The city was a hologram without him
A stray soldier cackles to a whisper
Telling them they were suckas
And the occasional scarf winking at you in
the bludgeoning wind
Out from this soapbox life partner wearing this third coast
of please take me with you
spoon-feeding Zapatista delusions of the up rise
the big ‘ol Fuck the Man
a young woman/running down Michigan Avenue
her face was a rock chimney
she was busy putting the world back in each socket
because the rain falls tiny

holy heartbeats swarm loose pockets of air resound
trickling water on parched soul
drawing pictures of innovative hairstyles with one
finger in the sweat
a dreamscape, A hospital gate where
“A boy is born in hard time Mississippi
she said I was well-made and classy
sitting down to write the great American mystery novel
we found him in the fire place
that the insect kingdom had flooded the Nile
“Yellow, like a bird or like/a kitchen”
you sleep with the window/open and the porch light on
time spun me around without any shoes