“Today, I’d like  to challenge you to write a poem inspired by your favorite kind of music. Try to recreate the sounds and timing of a pop ballad, a jazz improvisation, or a Bach fugue. That could mean incorporating refrains, neologisms and flights of whimsy, or repeating/inverting lines or ideas – whatever your chosen musical form would seem to require!”

NaPoWriMo

We may be Ghosts           lost on an island
listening to the       ~ haunting~ tune of the wind 
chasing our tails through wooded aisles 
Darling,
Listen with me             by the shore
I vow to run to the 
Ends     of the    Earth 
for you

We track through the wild west of kicked-up sand 
visiting neon-lit bars with rowdy crowds
following a love that’s worth every punch 
Like fools and hurricanes,
we love and destroy 
Walk with me through these strange trails, oh little darling 

Wandering       lost brought me through time&space
beyond bars&cities 
i follow   the emerald star   in an empty 
black
void
Where r u? 
i’m turning back from the edge
meet me by 
the 
river, i’ll be 
waiting 

“I challenge you today to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets, and other people who inspired you to write poems”

NaPoWriMo

Mary Oliver teaches me to see Nature as She is,
to welcome Her in the face of joy and trauma
as an act of connection.
She turns my gaze to the owls and the streams and the geese
and the leaves that haunt and howl in our lonely and full world. 

Odes to the body make me feel less alone in my own: 
Sharon Olds imagines the hymen as something magical, mystical 
And I step forward to have a closer look.

Billy Collins shows me that the mundane can be hilarious and 
uplifting all in one. A train ride can be a marvelous adventure.
Cats are beautifully strange. 
A mother’s love is un-repayable. 

Poe and Baudelaire draw me to words that have become 
indispensable in my own vocabulary:
Macabre.
Melancholic.

Neruda and Rumi lasso me into the power of love. 
Lemony Snicket makes me a child again, slipping down those slippery slides. 

I relish in hopping from snow-capped mountains to a day 
on the couch to the purpose of the moon to trench-heavy
melancholy to ravenous delight to the perfection of a raspberry
to the sweatiness of sex to dishwashing with a view to gratitude 

Poems capture moments of sadness and make them
whole; moments of joy and make them last like stretching taffy; 
moments of love and make them larger than life; 
moments of seeming boredom and flip them over as the reason 
we’re all here. 

“For today, I challenge you to write a poem in which one or more flowers take on specific meanings.”

NaPoWriMo

We mourn like weeping willow, 
her long locks sweeping like a broom 
on the earthen floor. 

We wish to cast a spell like witch hazel
to return to normalcy, to bring back
Ignorance. Let us forget.

Magnolia we love you, how you come into spring 
in your pink blossoming buds 
seen only from the inside of gray homes
like a painting in a cage. 
Love us back, love us back.

We are full, satiated, but somehow starving.
Abstain like the azaleas so that we may grow as beautiful
and so that we may find solace in the simple, in what we 
are accustomed to regarding as not enough, lacking. 

Forget me not! cries the grass and the yellow sweeps
of daffodils and dandelions.
Forget me not, whispers the blue sky---the gray sky, too--
the white moon, the setting orange sun.
Forget me not! Forget me not! 
and perhaps, I will forgive you with all that I got.

“Our prompt for the day (optional as always) asks you to peruse the work of one or more of these twitter bots, and use a line or two, or a phrase or even a word that stands out to you, as the seed for your own poem.”

NaPoWriMo

Inspired by: “They stand about in grandmotherly disguise” (Sylvia Plath) and “My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say” (Anne Carson)

The Dead walk backwards.
And so the living must designate themselves as Living
by walking forwards.
This is what grandmothers tell us. 

If you choose a combination of the two,
you might get a chuckle from down below
but it depends on the day--their moods shift as quick as centipedes--
You know what they say about stepping on a sidewalk crack.
Don’t test your luck.
But if you’re a child, 
that’s what you are born to do.
You test the boundaries of the world by
playing with poison and laughing
in the face of fear.

You wonder if that grandmother really is Grandmother.
Perhaps just a really good disguise.
Question everything.
You pull at your sister’s ponytail and ask
the sky for rain.
When the clouds spit down on your cheeks, 
you learn how powerful you really are
and decide that today is a good day
to break the rules
and you step two steps back, three steps more,
and you never look forward again. 

“Today our prompt (optional, of course) is another oldie-but-goodie: a poem based on a news article.”

NaPoWriMo

The Lonely Non-Island: Unfortunately, Moose Boulder Doesn’t Exist

We are circling, rewinding through the onion layers of earth. 
Water to island to rock, here we stand. 
An island of One--an illusion to remedy the loneliness.
We each take our turn hop-scotching through the layers,
rolling up time as easy as the sleeves of our dry-cleaned shirts, 
wetting our toes for this moment of non-ness.
Some eyes can’t see the smallest island, the boulder that hides itself
like a fairy that isn’t believed in.
This is what happens when a corner of the earth is untouched.
It becomes invisible, retreating into the imagination. 
Without a compass, without a GPS
we are forever searching in the dark.
Life is brimming with labyrinths of all shapes and
temporal landscapes. 
If we step into this black hole of the nomads,
we might find exactly what we’re afraid to lose
by getting lost in the thickets of nowhere. 

“Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem from the point of view of one person/animal/thing from Hieronymous Bosch’s famous (and famously bizarre) triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. “ 

NaPoWriMo

We are the strawberry’s caressing nest,
holding close to one another, dreaming of immortality
and sipping the air like we’ve been spit up by the sea 
onto this here generous grassland. 
Our sinful skin dots itself with goose-pimples, 
shivering with joy.
We begin to camouflage sweetly with our berry sister. 
If only for a fleeting moment we, too, could be desired like this:
sliced down the middle, juices sucked up by the handfuls,
spread on bare skin like jam on toast. 
Each bite becomes lust in our iron blood. 
Each drop of nectar is elation like sweat on the brow. 
There are so many of us here--
How will we all be fed? 
Who will be chosen? 

“It’s called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. The challenge is to use/do all of the following in the same poem…”

NaPoWriMo

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

The heart is a bright maraschino cherry. 
It beats in the chest like lips smacking together in furious love or sour-lemon reactivity. 
On the day the sun will rise in stunning horror, 
River was hopping through the skies of gray Copenhagen.
He would not dare be caught in daylight, at least not in the heaviness 
and monstrosity of lavender ass! 
He wished to taste the neon lights of eternity, to have a firefly glow 
under his tongue and deep in his belly. 
“Āmi tōmāẏa bhālōbāsi.” 
The words rang through his eardrums like a forgotten song. 
He would never say it, not out loud. 
It was all because of the blue cat of brutality 
that haunted his dreams,
The way it shoved creamy mushroom leather in his mouth
to stop his chatter.
The way it demanded clay masks as payment. 
Clay masks are shaped like human faces, therefore they are human. 
The cat wanted to be something it was not. The brutal bastard. 
He would say it one day. Out loud. 

As he tried to avoid the coming day, and the terrors of night, 
the cherry heart and fireflying tongue set sail at sunrise for an adventure 
so far from blue and brutal that he could nearly taste
Hope like a hatching chick in the palm of his hand. 

“Write a poem based on an image from a dream…”

NaPoWriMo

There is a battle scene taking place
in the downstairs hallway: ghostly, vengeful bodies
heave axes and swords in the glow of the blue
aquarium. 
Yellow tangs and pufferfish swim along in all realities. 

I am not scared, but I am exhausted. 
If only the soldiers would knock me down quick,
but they disappear through me like mist,
my own slashing--embodied from the likes of Saving Private Ryan
and Kill Bill--is in vain 
I want to be woken from the tediousness of this war. 
Dying seems to be the only way. 
Soon enough my wish is granted.
I feel no pain, but I know I am near the end. 
Lying on the carpet-battlefield, I am 9 years old and
I tell my comrades as they slice me, as if I am meat to be packaged,
to please give my pieces back to the forest where they belong.
There’s no knowing whether they hear me--
I am pretty dead after all--
but I smile as they continue their work and think 
of my heart rejoining the roots of the earth 
my lungs returning to the soil
my 9 years inscribing life into the belly of a hundred-year old tree.

 “First, make a list of ten words. You can generate this list however you’d like – pull a book  off the shelf and find ten words you like, name ten things you can see from where you’re sitting, etc. Now, for each word, use Rhymezone to identify two to four similar-sounding or rhyming words. For example, if my word is “salt,” my similar words might be “belt,” “silt,” “sailed,” and “sell-out.” Once you’ve assembled your complete list, work on writing a poem using your new “word bank.””

NaPoWriMo

A steep sleep soaking
in acoustic lava--reverberations in my shaky spine--
Such exotic frippery I hardly know whether
this rose in my palm is but an aura,
so blurry--perhaps bloody--
or if in fact, the circumference
of its dendritic petals are tendered to my own larval fury,
buried in the underneath, stroking like an orgy at my raw skin
or is this sweet fleur only here, with me, on sufferance and 
only in this state of arousal can I smell it so deep?

“…write a poem about a specific place —  a particular house or store or school or office. Try to incorporate concrete details, like street names, distances (“three and a half blocks from the post office”), the types of trees or flowers, the color of the shirts on the people you remember there.”

NaPoWriMo

Lined up, my 12 co-workers and I could join hands from
outside the office door, gallop across the avenue 
& up the slanted sidewalk like drunk pigeons
and easily reach the fingertips of the smiling barista.
A place filled with quiet chatter and, most importantly, 
stealthy introverts who snag the window that serves as a 
bench for reading books and pretending you’re sipping a capp in a private nook. 
You are alone but not lonely, they whisper softly into the frothed milk. 

A crafted, foamy chocolate espresso lands in my
hand, so close to spilling-over like a waterfall to the coffee-stained tile 
that I lap up the dusted cocoa powder while holding unwavering eye contact 
with the man-bunned man behind the counter.
Using my square hips to open the door 
and with the sound of a jingle-bell to signal my exit from the caffeinated air, 
I pass my cup to the 5th coworker who passes it to 6, who passes it t0 7,
who passes it and who passes it, taking little sips, and spilling many droplets.
Back to work we go.