# 1: On target as a poem and as a life-impacting experience that I have shared.

In a minimal context, few words served to bring soaring memory-vistas. It progressed naturally from opening to conclusion. It also was proof positive that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

# 2: What a cat! So grand and implacable. You appear in three-dimensions as his "owner" as well.

So these are couplets? I am unschooled in classic poetic form as in most everything else. I very much liked "Generations." I like this form with its hardy limitations that somehow condone utter freedom. Not being a cat person (and yes, apparently there are such) I was less compelled by "Tiger." Had it been set in on the parched savannah and had the felines been of the less domesticated variety it might have resonated more soundly. As with all forms of creative expression, so very subjective is the experience.

Hope to see more. To learn more.

have no idea what one might call this flow of words. there are times when impressions leave me dizzy, breathless and the only means of relief is to spill them onto a page as if wine from a jug. is there a name for such a form?

geraniums

k.a. brennan

there is a third-story windowbox overflowing with pinky-orange geraniums on an unremarkable block in the scruffy neighborhood where i live and it always cheers me to pass by and see that flag of color flying from above and i imagine a gentle, lonely old woman with waves of very white hair and bright blue eyes, eyes much younger than her years, who owns lovely old pieces of fine mahogany furniture and has many tiny photographs of kin arranged carefully in polished silver frames on top of the china hutch and who—every morning, rain, shine, sleet or thunder—throws up her window and plucks off the crunchy dead leaves and feeds a bit of water and sometimes fertilizer to those geraniums and speaks to them in a quiet high lilting voice, a voice from many years ago on an island off the coast of scotland - speaks to them of love lost of babies dead of too many years alone in a city that never was her own.

today i passed by and looked up and the window came open and a girl—a wisp, with shiny black hair sleek like a helmet who wore no clothes, whose white and tiny pink-tipped breasts were cheerful and free for the looking and who had shapes in colors all along her arms and who wore a silver ring in her nose—looked down at me and winked and smiled, one that would light a room, and she poured water on those geraniums from a green tin can and somehow in a blink of time i saw her seventy years later, with waves of very white hair and bright blue eyes, eyes much younger than her years.

Call it what you will, kat; it is wonderful. "A voice from many years ago on an island off the coast of scotland..." -- does it get any better than that? You have given us so much in so few words, not only what you saw but what you felt. The stark contrast of the tattooed lady is humorous and I can feel your disappointment. And then you determine that by god she is a little old lady; so there!

Wonderful!

First, wow! I caught my breath, and for some reason this Texican's eyes are a tad damp, ma'am...

What evocative, wonderful imagery; I see her! And the young naiad who has been lurking behind the aged eyes all this time. You capture the playfulness, the winsome wistfulness and staid acceptance of life's trials, loss, yet gamine hopefulness. And the juxtapostion of her granddaughter (?) and her yesteryears thrust 70 years hence was wonderfully done.

What you have done here, kat, is called prose poetry. You've done it well, and you join the ranks of Amy Lowell, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, as well as a few guys, too, e.e. cummings, Oscar Wilde, thomas Wolfe, Whitman, Emerson,who have written in the format.

Keep on keeping on what you do like this, and we'll soon be using akabukowski as a source for excellent poetry. You have a gift for the poetic prose, and now you show why your prose sings, as well.

You know, this reminds me of marys' piece where she imagines where the man is going on his bicycle with the box fan.

Maybe there should be a separate category for this kind of writing: images evolving into imaginings.

Or something. Whatever, it was nicely done -- I see these women so clearly.

No, I wasn't able to show the couplets as a form because of the limitations inherent in TBD's paragraphing format. 'Generations' is three paragraphs (couplets); 'Tiger' is four, but we aren't able to see them to scan, so , oh well... off list, if you like, I can send them so you can see what I mean...