Luc Bat is a Vietnamese form of poetry I blogged about earlier this year. The name means, “six, eight” and refers to the alternating lines of six and eight syllables. There’s also a fun rhyme scheme, which I diagram in my other post.
“Coloring Outside the Lines” was my first attempt at a Luc Bat poem; it will appear in my second book, Event Horizon, which I plan to self-publish in June. This poem celebrates the space arts provide for us to be children again. This is more important than we realize since we remain children of God no matter how grown up we are.
Coloring Outside the Lines It’s A-OK to pound a piano (for sound) when you can’t beat the floor and fume. Screaming is fine in music at times but not on a street corner. Splattering paint on the wall will often earn a whoopin’. But paint thrown against plane engines, speckling runways, is met with great acclaim as art. Statues can run round stark naked but live nudes startle men. Sword fights are risky when they’re not confined to pen and page. Sobbing or fits of rage are quite at home on stage but not in other public spots. Clearly, we’re not robots. Maybe arts create space to be kids again, to make believe, to wail without caring who hears. We can strip down to our bare souls and run (if we dare), and play with all God shares, dreaming in crayon, coloring outside the lines of things defined.
A Wandering Minstrel 