I ripped another page from the calendar hanging on my kitchen wall. We enter the month of May with thoughts of Spring swimming around in our heads. The sun is shining bright on the days it isn’t raining. The snow vanished into distant memory. This month I plan to explore a poetry style that reminds me of a trickling waterfall. Udit Bhatia created the Cascade poem. There are no rules for rhythm or meter. The layout is simple in that the lines of the first stanza are repeated as the refrain lines in the stanzas that follow. The poem flows like this ABC, xxA, xxB xxC. Add lines to the poem longer. Thus, you are making a cascading effect with words. How hard can that be? This Cascade Poem I titled Chasing Ghosts.
Note: I will also be adding Black Out Poems as we go along the way. I plan to keep using this style until the book I’m using runs out of pages for me to play with to create these unique and visual poems. I might as well get started. I’m excited about jogging down this road.
Chasing Ghosts
Chasing Ghosts Dreaming is like chasing ghosts Across a foggy field Playing catch me if you can An invisible figment of imagination Glows brightly in dark rooms Hats hung on a mahogany bedposts A fragile figment of costumes Cloaked in fantasy, you sleep On whisps of sublime flotation Dreaming is like chasing ghosts Harsh reality half-concealed Between a myth and a plan You know you’re in too deep Stuck in a sluggish stagnation Across a foggy field The ghoul is only the boogeyman Trying to work damnation A cringe-worthy creep Like most haughty hosts Playing catch me if you can More than a simple passing vibration Rattling chains and funky fumes Cosmic plasma under a doorway seep It amounts to something more than An invisible figment of imagination Some nights the moonlight zooms Through closed windows in frustration On a mission to make the sleeper weep Like shards of glass in a dustpan Glows brightly in dark rooms
Who is Molly Shea?
Molly Shea is an accomplished fictional short story writer from Indiana who writes short stories and novels about a fictional town called Tecumseh. To read more of her short stories and adventures, click here.
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Great poem!!!