Here's the new word list, folks. This list is compiled from a *Top Secret* source, mixed with words sent in by Catherine Meng and Xtina Strong. I threw in one of my favorites, too:

pupil, pressure, gauge, impropriety, ampersand, shoulder, withered, social, climber, tickler, hen-speckled, spyglass, smarmy.

Welcome to the new Verbophobia posting! Whoo-hoo.

As always, I flipped a coin to see which lucky poet would win the Dante's Ass Prize. This week, the lucky versifier is Giuseppe Agosta, a.k.a Joe London. Check out his blog if you haven't already.

And--an editorial slip on my part. Because, generally speaking, I'm dim. Alohalani Brown sent in a poem, which used the previous word list, but I missed the email. My apologies! I've posted it below Alohalani's current poem.

Thanks to all for sending. I'll post a new word list soon...

ELEPHANTINE FAIRY OF GROTESQUE CERTAINTIES
by Giuseppe Agosta

Overwhelmed by ridicule,
flaking are the certainties
with which you were ballasted,
your smile has lost its luster
and I am afraid you look grotesque
with your elephantine weight
of fallacies and delusions
yet moving like a fairy
living in the alcove
of a buttercup, in glistening
crinoline of absurd fabrications,
gayly complying, giving in,
accepting torpid metaphysics,
immensely unpersuasive,
obstinate in embracing
myriads of lies with myriads of facets,
to make a sense out of nonsense,
to see words in what is illegible.

*

TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT
by Catherine Meng

April startles itself & then goes on

to shock the rest out of stillness

like an educated passenger on an airplane crashing.

Soon enough, the grass plays

nicely with the buttercup, sharing the occasional luster

that flickers there, beneath the tree's dappled crinoline.

Bach worries momentarily on the birdlessness

of the sky, its illegible distance

ballasted by a wish for geese & their signature necks--

something to mark the measure as fleeting.

She calls him Jo & the sound of it

is as elephantine as their honked calls

until the urge is a flock erupting in an alcove,

until he wishes to fill all the facets

with the mis-appropriation of his name, to hear it

brim immensely on the cuff of his ear.

So much depends on the count of four.

So very, very much. So the brick from which

the fire has left is the equivalence of strings

allowed to still, or cinders

flaking off toward the mouth of the flue.

*

UNTITLED
by Alohalani Brown

Little ugly caterpillar retreats to her cocoon.

Ballasted by her mommy's words that

She'll be pretty soon.

A flaking ego shall be shed

To reveal the ID within

Not believing in the bible

Isn't always the equivalence of sin.

My ideals have long since lost

The luster of my youth

But sometimes in my dreams

She sips a yellow buttercup

Ignorant of what she seems

A monkey dressed to kill

In bright red crinoline

In the alcove of my ego

I run to find refuge

Immensely ashamed and

Mortally maimed

By elephantine truths

That trod my psyche

Drawn to the kaleidoscopic facets of my guilt.

*

Ah, with such panache did you deceive me.The record of your misdeeds is your genealogy. Harl of memories, unfit to eat are woven into a tapestry of a false reality. My love hurls into an abyss, vomited forth when my pride, no longer exultant was shackled by the suavity of your lies. And as the majestic sequoia grows toward a turquoise sky from a tiny oval seed, so shall this pain fester into hate and serve as balm for my blistering heart and an instrument of vengeance.

*

BUTTERCUP PETTICOAT
by Emma Barnes

Well ballasted
I walk
my crinoline flaking around
my legs, illegible
under layers
of you
under layers
of petticoat
buttercup shaped
they flush with steps

short of luster
my eyes

are all dull facets

and you you're elephantine
my memory
sees you
immensely and quietly
walking somewhere
the weight of you
too much to bear

this ground made of
alcoves
not enough earth

too many sidestreets
and not enough
forgetting

our equivalence
has lost its edge

you unbalance me
and I step strange
you are the
leaves of my tree
shining black with
veins
shivering thick with
wind
listening to the dawn

you are.

*

"THE NEW COLOR OF MONEY"
by Michael Helsem

Our immensely ballasted
Flaking will be illegible
Under the crinoline of
This buttercup luster alcove,
Whose elephantine facets brook
No equivalence.

*

Hello all. I am currently waiting for some responses to random, niggling editorial questions. Therefore, I'll give it one more day before I post all the poems and a new word list.

I'd like to take this opportunity to try something NEW, however:

send me your favorite word. Of all time. Of the month. Of the minute. I'll compile the words and we'll all write with one another's faves. Sound good?

New poems and a new word list will be posted Monday night, when I return home from work. So...any last minute subs are welcome. Adieu.

Hello all. The deadline for submissions using the current word list is this coming Sunday, October 19th. Keep writing.

By the way, check out my new email address for all Verbophobia related stuff. Thanks. And have fun, girls and boys.

New word list, brought to you by Gustaf Sobin's Breaths' Burials:

ballasted, flaking, equivalence, luster, buttercup, alcove, crinoline, immensely, elephantine, facets, illegible.

Look for a new word list later on tonight.

Welcome, kids. Thanks to all for sending in poems. The latest winner of the infamous Dante's Ass Prize is...

Ryan Fitzpatrick!

Way to go Ryan. The coinage flipped in your favor, lad, and the booty of Dante is now yours.


GET SQUIRRELLY: AN ADVENTURE STORY FOR ALL AGES. IN VERSE!!
by Ryan Fitzpatrick

Squirrely Harl’s smile was savagely exultant,
squirrelly on-road and a bit less
in the groin with enough wit and panache.
“Where do I get this thing at?” Squirrely asks.
Cookie adds,
“stop looking so fucking squirrelly,”
Cookie's been too sick to care.
Squirrely loves Cookie.

Sometimes in the movies, Heidi hurls a grenade
pulls Soldier #1 off her and hurls him into Soldier #2
his boat being too squirrelly. Squirrely Harl likes
these parts. Sway bars and steel-braided brake lines
could get Squirrelly above 65mph.
Squirrely needs to qualify. Needs to propose to Cookie.

Cookie dons a turquoise beehive wig,
teaches squirrely second and third graders
about genealogy and friends of sequoias.
So girl next door makes a hand plane tremble in fear.
Body needs to be aerodynamic diving
to lower side of the one-third mile banked oval.
Suavity cartoons from the
ground with girly manpower. There was the oft repeated
charge that we live in ignorance of love.
Early and coast into a turn, you get decent adhesion.
When Cookie sees these new speed records
Squirrely thinks yes.

*

HARL
by Noah Eli Gordon

That trees record in rings & that records make of the sequoias an exultant panache or a plainclothes genealogy & that turquoise is valued as a gem & that you wear your copper suavity in ornament & the ornamental sway making an oval of the charge between hurling stones at the fire trucks & the things felt as hurls themselves & the bark & the bold accusation buried in your idea of a chainsaw & the line of trees in the park & the shape of the people with whom you'd rather conjugate...you little verb you!

*

DONCHA KNOW FUN?
by Mike County

Talk about the turquoise, you
shoulda seen the oval, exultant and
(let's be blunt) arrogant, in charge of the
beach light, his genealogy a
panache of exultant strikes
against beauty or ambition.
I've got all of his records:

The Oval Sequoias Sing Songs You Know
Sway and the Candid Dream
Hurls, Harls and Harangues: A Blister Pack of Hits

Suavity nothin' to do with it. The boy
could play.

*

"PORNO MEGASTORE"
by Michael Helsem

When that dire November hurls its sway
And all Undead-Americans are exultant
To have seen the last sequoia's day:
Let the chameleon man begin, resultant
Of fraud befrauding those whose suavity
Is greasepaint rhost. Instead of kissing daylight
Turquoise, we shall join up too. The tea
Party has room for losers' panache, & froglegs...

The pro-Saddam wing. Charge of the fiery lilac
Harl, no records but our oval eclogues;
A good squirm will be had. Not fray-peripheral,
To hairlip the Pope whose 15kg dildo

A genealogy of orcs reaps feral.
In the stable of harmony, the swarms build.

*

VISION OF SEAN COLE AS TARZAN
by Aaron Tieger

With such panache you hurls
into the turquoise sequoias

charge and sway through the admiring
                 oval
exultant!

There are no records
of such a genealogy.

There is no harl
                 to match
your suavity.

*

HARL
by Chris "Jimmy Nickles" Bratt

akin to a clown, so the legend goes,
that monolith really a punished boy
who fooled his village once too often
and was constrained by tricky gods.

Oval cracks in the rockface suggest
his petrified tears, an eternity set aside
for weeping boulders, ice and talus.
The strata a genealogy of shale sobs.

The desert sun, elsewhere exultant in
the suavity of all things handsomely
lit, here seems to bray against stone,
stripped somehow of its will to bless.

Its shadow unpeels, a strand of black
enough to engulf sequoias or castles,
a rind that records shape of the fruit,
fruitless, and looks at certain angles

not unlike a boy. At night the rough
rectangular dark that blocks out stars
tiptoes away, so they say, who claim
to have seen it float, and sways as if

in wallowing. On the turquoise jewelry
at the stands in town, the boy-rock's
etched in the pose-panache he struck
when spirits hurled their charges. And he sells well.

*

THE BECOMING OF THINGS
by Giuseppe Agosta

harl of instants spinned
as form intends to emerge
exultant, with careless
plenitude, panache, sway
of acts or sounds, hurls
in torquoise skies
the silent egression of things
in their diversity
has something consuming:
each wants and will find its way,
each unique, however alike
in the making with particles

(meanwhile I hear outside
the screams of children
and playful, earlier,
a young girl was telling
secrets to another, laughing,
while combing her hair)

everything is incessantly
dragged into the unceasing
movement of things
and in any given instant,
the imperfection is perfection,
the provisional is accomplished

there is not concern
in the tension of this becoming,
everything happens, without reflection,
everything is, untorn by indecision,
in this flow of necessity, unfurls
with mysterious suavity engrossing all

the shaping of rocks, by winds or seas,
the geography of lands and bodies
and thoughts, the growth of plants,
or fungi or moss, the movement of fish,
the ambulation of mammals, the teeming
of insects, the cohesion of molluscs

the fractioned sunlight of skywards
sequoias, the perfect oval of faces,
the light of eyes, the gleams
of water's edge, the charge of lightning,
(records layered, not only in thought
but in the chemistry of cells),
all is the result of a careless
incessant movement, all promulgates
a genealogy of happiness and sadness

*

Welcome to the new home of Verbophobia, peoples. Hope you like it.