So, I’ve been cheating a little. The past two days poems have actually been building towards me trying out a new poetic form. When I say new, I don’t mean just for me because the form was only invented in 2014.
To quote from The Academy of American Poets:
A recent invention, the Bop was created by Afaa Michael Weaver during a summer retreat of the African American poetry organization, Cave Canem. Not unlike the Shakespearean sonnet in trajectory, the Bop is a form of poetic argument consisting of three stanzas, each stanza followed by a repeated line, or refrain, and each undertaking a different purpose in the overall argument of the poem.
The first stanza (six lines long) states the problem, and the second stanza (eight lines long) explores or expands upon the problem. If there is a resolution to the problem, the third stanza (six lines long) finds it. If a substantive resolution cannot be made, then this final stanza documents the attempt and failure to succeed.
Here is the full poem (with the final stanza being today’s poem):
Take the tablet once a day,
wash it down with water
you can taste the past in.
Learn to live with last night’s nightmares,
better them than memories
dark enough to lose sight of the future.
Would you like to up your dosage?
See, serotonin gets stamped down,
pushed into a corner and told
‘Maybe not right now’. In a sulk,
the chemicals take your dreams with them,
say that you can’t play without their say so.
Dreams, for their part, miss you,
head at you in a rush and bowl you over
with a whole week’s worth of love at once.
Would you like to up your dosage?
A world just real enough to believe in,
drawn together from the threads made in your head.
Teased out from hope and long past happiness to
depict a tapestry of delusions that you try not to unpick,
lest in the morning you be left with strings and sadness –
nothing more and nothing less.
Now, would you like to up your dosage?
Cameron Holleran 