You came across Plate 43, an etching from the series Los Caprichos by Goya with the title “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos). Goya is asleep amidst his drawing tools, his mind dulled by slumber, bedeviled by creatures that prowl in the dark. Bats and owls fly above him, a lynx watches, wide eyed, alert to the rise of monstrous forces. Imagination, mother of the arts and source of their wonders, mirrors teeth of incandescence that glow and shimmer in melodrama. Goya summons you to listen, paint your portraiture. The children went there before you, they went with each other and they went alone. Speak your poetry of the night.

Isaac Orobio de Castro took you to the Castillo of Bragança, a medieval castle in North Eastern Portugal. His family originally came from this area. He had not been there since he was a child. Full of emotion he climbed the castle’s fifteen turrets to gaze at the Culebra Mountains, northeast of Porto. You wandered off to explore the grounds. There were large underpants hanging on lines, slightly off-white, from overuse, a man’s underpants with broad worn-out elastic at the waist. There were no women’s underpants. Why were there so many, did he wait until he had no more clean ones and then begrudgingly stood at the washstand, behind the kitchen, and scrubbed them with a bar of olive soap wearing his overalls and nothing else? Did he feel exposed? Had these underpants gone everywhere on these grounds? Did they venture out into the main plaza of Bragança looking at pretty women? You asked Isaac Orobio de Castro: “Who lives in those underpants”? He said “Don’t be a crazy woman”.

The following prose poetry pieces are part of my new prose poetry limited art edition book called No Such Stories containing 50 prose/poetry images with drawings. I have joined the NaPoWriMo 2018 project to write a poem a day for 30 days.
This is #1 for April 1st.

#1

Thus I have heard, that you love to write about clouds but the others say, “we do not want to hear about one more cloud”. Clouds overcrowd their doubtful minds. They are short tempered and want you to move on. They say you are merely a puppet of the sky. But for you, clouds are like honey mixed with orange sweet mandarin juice carefully spread on your naked body for your husband to feed on. For you, clouds cry out home, I am home. From pure white puffed up cotton consuming the sun to stretched-out yellow spills of water over moonlight, from red-orange leafy veins and imaginary foxes to dark capped cloaks of soundness and perhaps doom, the clouds are your witness of the witness.

Use what you have
in your refrigerator
Don’t reject wilting vegetables
And fill up the compost bin too fast
You can start by wiping the steel covered island

She is a poet and a cook
but the cook whispers like a fast speed train
Your studio is a mile away, out of sight
When in fact it is merely 35 steps away
Long ones, leaping ones

You know knives need honing
with that sharpening steel tool
it makes you feel good.
And slash, slash, off comes the head
lettuce and her brain melts into butter.

The poet is restless
She looses her shoes and tries on different ones
Not hers, someone else’s, she does not know
Of course it does not work and she hops around
like an invalid, one shoe on, one shoe off.

Enough says the poet.
No more cooking, just go sit in the studio
do nothing
She watches the hectaganol steps meander
Around the tree with thorns

Sometimes getting it wrong
is the best thing
but in the end, she knows she will get it right
having the divine at her muddy feet.