April 30, 2011 Poetry Challenge

Today’s prompt is “walking in someone else’s shoes.”

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Seth Brown:

Walking Shoes by Seth Brown

(mp3 audio file)

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matt mcfadden:

Walking in someone else’s shoes

might give you blisters.
You may also pick up some foot-stank.
It is very possible you could be laughed at
or arrested,
if the shoes don’t happen to match your style,
or if you took them without asking first.
(You should definitely ask first,
or run instead of walk in them).

Walking in someone else’s shoes
probably won’t help you understand
that person better,
their experience and world view,
their struggles and fears,
their desires and delights.
But listening to them will.
Listening is like walking
that way.

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emily pulfer-terino:

Finale

You’d thought it was that way with want,
thought that to have would end it. Streams
fast again, and clean, the current catching
nothing but sun and the occasional shape

of blown trees on that thinnest surface.
The kitchen always full of afternoon
somehow, good radio, the scent of bread.
All the perennials in their cool beds

would open, end their work at imminence.
The end of spring is long and has no resolution;
it just disappears in a June and you’re moving.
Some books, a box of photos from before, so now

it is his face that comes before you, wanting
everything, that you might put an end to it.

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Bill Riley:

after
as i walk for the first time
through the apartment
really
and my eyes melt into
mindsight and
fall through photographs
and that painted variousness artwork you did
of what was me atta time
not now
i see basement stairs
when commander patrick
oh my captain
howled to starlit never-where nights by my side
as tequila sadness
was referred to gun slinger
side arm status
and your halo to me
seemed fleetingly unimportant.

now
onward we age
and decide ridiculously
in brushstroke failures
too real to call art
and too much to call less.

and how is it that
what was so
unimportant then
has lately become
such a god to me?

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Chris Funkhouser:

Running with Someone Else’s Blues