Saturday August 22nd, 2009

The exercise:

For as long as I've listened to music I've always seemed to pay more attention to the lyrics than most people I know. If I thought the words accompanying the awesome instrumentals were stupid or annoying, I hated the song. There was just no getting around it.

With that in mind, this week's Four Line Poem Saturday exercise is pulling inspiration from one of my (current) favorite songs, both instrumentally and, more importantly, lyrically.

So go ahead and listen to Respiration by Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Common and choose just one line to base your poem on. Here's a link to the lyrics to help you out (accuracy not guaranteed, but it seems to be pretty good).

Mine:

Hard knuckles on the second hands of working class watches

Step through the door and time slows to a crawl
I do what the Man says and give it my all
No promotion this year, same as before
But maybe next year, if my health I ignore

4 comments:

Greg said...

I like Respiration, it's definitely got some interesting lyrics in it. Instrumentally... not sure I heard anything there that a drum machine couldn't write for itself ;-)

I also like your poem -- I hope you're not working on the weekend! I sympathise with your narrator though.

Hell froze the night the city slept

A silent agreement in the minds of the masses,
At ten o'clock that night everyone went to sleep,
Hell froze over shortly after,
Then the poets woke up and thought this was deep.

Irish Gumbo said...

Marc:
My apologies for being off topic, unsure of how to best to contact you, so here it is. I wanted to thank you for your condolences on the passing of my Big Bro.

From my heart, thank you.
Peace,
Kevin (Irish Gumbo)

Marc said...

Greg - good lord no, I'm at home! Although there is definitely work to be done around here...

I understand what you're saying about the beat, but I tend to focus more on the lyrics, which I think are brilliant. The beat accompanies it nicely at best and doesn't ruin it at worst :)

Excellent choice in lyric and that's a great last line.

Irish - hang in there man. It's going to hurt for a long time - I hope you're doing okay.

I didn't leave a comment on your 'erase' post, but that's because it damn near broke my heart.

You've got a lot of people pulling for you - I hope that helps in some small way.

Thanks for taking the time to drop me the note.

springit said...

"Im wrestlin with words and ideas..."

The walls of my mind are bursting with words.
Bursting because they need to be heard.
They need to calm down, they need to be still.
It's hard to put them in order when their sound is so shrill.