Today, I’d like to challenge you to read a few of the poems from Spoon River Anthology, and then write your own poem in the form of a monologue delivered by someone who is dead. Not a famous person, necessarily – perhaps a remembered acquaintance from your childhood, like the gentleman who ran the shoeshine stand, or one of your grandmother’s bingo buddies

NaPoWriMo

My mother taught me to be kind and polite
But the thing she didn’t know was
No adolescent boy can surpass the 
hellish aches of puberty without 
tripping his friend,
cheating on a test, or at least peeing
himself from laughter when he gets
so stoned he thinks his friends are porcupines
holding tiny swords

I never did climb my way into adulthood 
thanks to whoever-the-hell didn’t know
what a stop sign meant 
And if I’m being honest and--sorry, Mom--impolite
I’m fucking glad I’m not up there 
with my old buddies who haven’t
smoked a joint on a balcony in the summer in a decade
and who wear ball-busting khakis every dang day
of their 
Kind
Polite
Aging-ass
Adult lives

Today, I’d like to challenge you to pick from two of them – the shadorma, and the Fib.” ( I chose the shadorma, a six-line, 26-syllable poem. The syllable count by line is 3/5/3/3/7/5

NaPoWriMo

I was born

Then I was living 

Slip sliding 

Buoying 

My arch developing quick

Fantasy catch up

Go to a book you love. Find a short line that strikes you. Make that line the title of your poem. Write a poem inspired by the line. Then, after you’ve finished, change the title completely*

NaPoWriMo

I was once asked, with an iced coffee in hand
and a head tilted sideways sucking on ice, 
when was the last time you cried?
Never having been asked this before, 
I laughed, the ice crashing into my front teeth.
It was both an easy and difficult question.
Well, it was yesterday of course.
What happened?
Oh nothing. Nothing major. 
And it wasn’t, it never was. 
But to know you can resort
to deep, breath-taking, eye-puffing
crying is a comfort
not unlike remembering you have ice cream
in the freezer,
Or that you have a body right here and now
that can give rise to acute, toe-curling pleasure.

It’s a comfort learned awfully young.
Genetics?
Parental (dis)attachment?
Or perhaps everything is too well and good
and we fear we’ll grow
bored in the kingdom of the dead
if our lives are too happy here
in our breathing, seeing, feeling bodies

And so we exist, remember, 
cry, bruise
Cry heavy tears for our sunsetting lives
Too full and too empty
like a bottle of wine
on a lonely Friday night 

*inspired by a quote from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, specifically the first underlined part: “Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.”

This prompt challenges you to find a poem, and then write a new poem that has the shape of the original, and in which every line starts with the first letter of the corresponding line in the original poem.*

NaPoWriMo

it has been one year since

                           time has compressed and elongated in synchrony  

If only it would stop entirely

and allow us to dance wide and with

                                    Abandon

                                               without bleeding hearts

towards greater certainty

                                      incapable of bending or breaking 

Should it could it would it be

wary waves of youth

                              With their deep knowing

                               of the future

In their bones

             After short lives of

laughing,

fumbling

    Anxiety, will they find us worthy

*inspired after ‘I Will Wade Out’ by e.e. cummings’ found here: https://annieqsyed.com/2011/04/28/i-will-wade-out-e-e-cummings/ 

In honor of the always-becoming nature of poetry, I challenge you today to select a photograph from the perpetually disconcerting @SpaceLiminalBot, and write a poem inspired by one of these odd, in-transition spaces

NaPoWriMo

I have just landed back home.

The parking lot is dark

and I must scroll through photos to find 

the blurry, sideways shot 

telling me where I parked my car 

so many moons ago. 

It’s never where you would’ve guessed, is it?

Did I really walk this far?

I parked under this lamp,

not that orange sign? 

I’m walking parallel to other single travelers,

ones I imagine as business associates 

but perhaps they are adventurers, too. 

The sound of rolling suitcases

and cicadas binds us together

in this space.

There’s also the pitter patter of the streetlamp

that’s trying hard to not give out on us.

We all make eye-contact with its strobes of light

and pledge our silent gratitudes. 

And there’s the roar of a plane’s engine

taking off overhead, sending shockwaves

through our stomachs, wishing we were on that flight,

wondering who up there is looking down at us

wondering if we are looking up at them.

In this silence and sound,

this darkness and artificial light,

we are wanderlusting nomads

requiring no home, no assurance,

only moments like these to just be —

To be before the reality of sunlight, traffic,

small talk, calories, schedules, boredom

comes knocking on our temples

Today, I’d like to challenge you to make a “Personal Universal Deck,” and then to write a poem using it

NaPoWriMo

A sweeping, vibrating sound fills

the room

Cheeks are kissed by red poppies

of internal heat

Ivy slides up the window pane

and secures its spot among

the inanimates

Summer winds fidget at the same window

before being pulled away by invisible jealousy

All is as quiet as mist

until the velvet begins her dance in the heat

A slow but precise waltz like

bold droplets of honey on the

creases of smooth hips

A final collapse into a lagoon

of sweetness that even the sleeping

bees of the world awaken to join

the rhythmic buzzing of these four walls

…for today’s (optional) prompt. In the world of well-known poems, maybe there’s no gem quite so hoary as Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem about your own road not taken – about a choice of yours that has “made all the difference,” and what might have happened had you made a different choice.

NaPoWriMo

I didn’t move, live, learn,

love, or ache there.

Among the perpetual rains,

the books,

the whispering willows,

the beet-red shine of small-world

creativity.

Does geography determine whether

we cut our hair

or give up meat?

Or do we create home wherever we go

and pick up where we left off across

the country? 

But what if —

what if there was a boldness in the water

that you couldn’t help consume

and integrate into your bones?

It could change you from the outside in.

Carve a line in your bark 

And say,

You’re home. Please sit. Be Yourself. 

An awe for life that throbs in

the pavement underneath your bare feet?  

To know the emptiness and joy

that exists somewhere on another path

and the joy and emptiness that I 

can touch here, alive

and reaching for more

Write a poem inspired by this animated version of “Seductive Fantasy” by Sun Ra and his Arkestra.

NaPoWriMo

Synapses seduce and are seduced; 

they take mitochondrial dips on the moon

like the tips of toes in July water.

Cold and electric. 

We see human faces in trees,

houses,

breakfast —

Is it because we are 

deluded, illuded,

fooled,

subdued

by hues of gnosis: 

we are half-evolved —

have we lost the lion’s blood in 

the long strip of our heritage? 

Are we not mighty? 

In the eye of the beholder you may find:  

(a) a field of green 

(b) a single plucked piece of grass —

Does the world hold us or do we hold the world?

“Write a poem about something that returns”

NaPoWriMo

In winter he hibernates
With a bottle of vodka
Under a sheet of stars
On a waterbed that is like riding 
The sea.
But his sickness doesn’t end on land.
It is controlled by the seasons.
The winter dredges on for years,
And the one month in spring that marks
The anniversary of a death lasts as long
As it takes for the first signs of tiny green leaves to 
sprout up tall.
Something deep in him awakens then too,
And he grows with the garden as the summer
Months arrive with berries.
Joy becomes like a swing swinging high, but as
The leaves crumble and the last of the potatoes are baked
And eaten, it drops low like a hoe into the dirt,
stuck and now busy with another kind of work:
the work of stars, of slugs, of the unseen.
It will take seasons to appreciate
But when it is time again, and the work is less burdensome,
He will return to us.