I felt raw-boned & rusted
Dragging my hands in pockets full of scared

Pockets full of scared &
Walking a road rutted with wanting to get out

I was wanting to get out
That red dirt prison, that green-treed mess

A mess of green trees & gospel singing
Kept me sane

Sanity keeps quiet, holds my wants for safe-keeping
Safety’s in my bones, raw want is my home.

*****

Napowrimo Day 26 prompt: “Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that uses repetition. You can repeat a word, or phrase. You can even repeat an image, perhaps slightly changing or enlarging it from stanza to stanza, to alter its meaning.”

I recently had the opportunity to interview poet Jericho Brown, the creator of the Duplex. I’ve been wanting to attempt one so, I did so today. I believe it should be 14 lines, I could only coax out 10. Although, Jericho says this about the Duplex in a Rumpus interview,
“I sort of had been thinking about gutting a sonnet. We go fourteen lines to get to what will be in that fourteenth line, a repeated line. I kept thinking, “Why can’t I just skip all the lines in between? What would that make?” In my head I kept thinking that it would make a ghazal. A ghazal is couplets that seem disparate because there’s something in between them that is not said. Do you see what I mean?”

So, I skipped some lines in between. 😊