Back at the Bamboo Room

Congratulations to everyone who worked on the Bamboo Room sestina. We completed 6 stanzas. Personally, I’ve enjoyed the process and the result:

They met at the Bamboo Room;
there's no bamboo there, but plenty
of privacy, in the booth there
where smoky jazz tinged the air a translucent blue.
A guy could get lost in the dark
while fumbling for a last-chance breath,

her grass skirt rustling like when the wind breathes
as the guy gasps for air, give me room, room
to move, space to roam. She looks back, her eyes dark,
wide, an open field with plenty,
like a vast sea of ionic cobalt blue.
"These colors kill me," he says. She says, "There, there"--

and takes a drag from her cigarette. Their
lips meet. He savors the rum and the smoke on her breath,
recalling last-night's dream, somehow crystalized and blue.
"The color's different," she says, "in my room.
There's wine and sad music and plenty
to do." Her pink orchid lei smells like dark

blossoms opening, like night flames for Jeanne d'Arc
and he's burning, they're spinning, they're
adrift in blue oceans; mad, mad. But plenty
of heat. Fevered moans erupt in gasps of rhythmic breath;
for every bride, a groom, and every room

inside their bodies sings with music Coltrane blew.

He shakes his head, steals her cigarette, and says, "We blew
hard, baby, like a storm, like thunder crashing through the dark
like soul pirates," in his eyes betrayal of rheum.
Still blazing, she licks away his tear, melding their
...their what? Silence, then. Then only their breaths,
and the subtle whisper from the bass. That's plenty

of cool to heat two hearts, plenty
of fire, enough to singe the cold, white moon. Blue
are the scales he knows, blue the width and breadth
of his sadness, his knowing that this is the last time, that dark
notes will blue this melody, and their
song become an endless ache once they leave this room.

***********************

Do we want to leave it as is or write a final 3-line stanza? Does it feel finished? Thoughts on a title?

Back in the Bamboo Room.....

Just a reminder that everyone's invited to contribute to the

ClevelandPoetics collaborative sestina. It's grown into a torrid tale of boozy love and lust. Where will this romance end? Are "he" and "she" headed to the bedroom? To a little house in Garfield Heights with a white picket fence? It's up to you all. The more voices the merrier.

Anyone Wanna Play?

This is a test.
This is only a test..............Unless you guys come through with a great poem, in which case I will take full credit for knowing that this would work.

So here’s the deal. We’re going to see if there are enough of us here to write a collaborative sestina. For those who don’t know sestinas, they consist of 6 6-line stanzas, plus a final 3-line stanza. The last words of the first 6 lines are repeated in a particular pattern in the following stanzas. This is the pattern of last words (with each number representing a word):

Stanza 1: 123456
Stanza 2: 615243
Stanza 3: 364125
Stanza 4: 532614
Stanza 5: 451362
Stanza 6: 246531

Final stanza: first line contains 1 and 2, second line contains 3 and 4, third line contains 5 and 6


Yes, there are variations, but let’s try this one. No worries about line length or meter.

Please contribute only one line per stanza. If there aren’t enough of us to finish the poem, then I guess the world will end.

If you add a line in the first stanza, please remember that the last word must be repeated in each of the following stanzas. Yes, I know you’ll be tempted to end a line with the word "sclerotomy," but don’t.

That said, it’s just fine to play with forms of words, homophones, hyphenated words, etc. at the ends of lines.

Please cut and paste the previous lines into the comment when you add a new line. That way, we can easily read the entire poem as it comes together.

I’ll get the sestina started with a first line:

They met at the Bamboo Room