NOTE: NaPoWriMo is shorthand for National Poetry Writing Month, which was founded on April Fool’s Day, 1996. To participate, the goal (“mission”) is a minimum of one poem a day, every day through the month. But there are no requirements. The Facebook page says “NaPoWrimo is a contest you hold with yourself, so grab inspiration from wherever or whatever you want. Write about anything you want.” I see my own participation as an opportunity to become a more well-versed (haha) poet by setting additional challenges; and the challenge I want to meet today is to write a “prose poem.” (There is controversy about what constitutes a prose poem; for instance, what would distinguish it from flash fiction? My personal definition is “writing shorter than a short-short story that contains both storytelling and fanciful turns of phrase without relying on stanzas or other form-specific line breakage.”)

The SHAME of It All, Or Not

Shame drives my car. I do not own a car. Shame is what I feel when I think of what I regard as my criminal history. I have never been arrested, indicted or tried in a court of law. I paid a ticket for Consuming Alcohol While Driving a Motorized Vehicle once. The shame was that I was caught. I had accepted a Michelob bottle from the young, attractive woman in the passenger seat on our way to skiing. Skiing is sliding down snow in near-frictionless fashion. The friction is reduced via wax. One brand of wax for surfboards is Sex Wax. Its popularity relies obliquely on Shame. I have used boogie-boards and my body to surf, but never a surfboard. Thirty-five years ago I “borrowed” some hundreds of dollars from a cash box belonging to a company I was working for. I replaced it within a day, but during that day I was stealing, and could easily have been indicted, tried and convicted.  My behavior changed, but don’t take my word for it; sometimes I tell lies. We all tell lies, but that does not excuse mine.