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Today’s National Poetry Writing Month 2020 prompt was to write a poem related to objects found during a walk.

the meanderthal

a real-time archeologist
plays ambulatory tic-tac-toe
through the weakly-violated Cartesian grid of greater Phoenix Arizona
and collects
a Lug-Nut, a single Bristle from a Street-Sweeper,
a Tiparillo-Holder with Octagonal Cross-Section,
a Plastic Bottle-Cap with Grip-Ribbing, and–
O MY GOD!–a 1933 MERCURY DIME.

2020 9419 the meanderthal

elation is displaced by S O R R O W
when the archeologist intuits
that the dime was left
deliberately by a
woman facing Death
who had no further use for it.

Today our prompt is to write a poem celebrating the little nice things that get us through a day, a year, a life.

2020 0418 lite nice ness

Lite Nice Ness

Let’s look at the things that give a day a bit o’ gain
It’s as small as landing safely when you’re on a plane
T‘would be mush less saucy had we not War Chest or Shires
E‘er the wee! sweet! lovelinesses spiking our desires

One of the little nicenesses that get me through a day is Bad Puns. I love making them up, and I love when other people make them up and I read them. The third line of this poem is straight out of Badpunsville. “mush less saucy” is doubly punnish. Mush could also be Much, but Mush is edible. Saucy could be either attitude or condimental. And then “War Chest or Shires” is a wretchedification of Worcestershire, which is a sauce pronounced variously as “wurrshurr” or “woostisure” or “watery brown stuff.” I won’t apologize that “War Chest or Shires” matches no known pronunciation. It is closer to the actual spelling as anything I’ve heard.

Lastly, the whole poem is a setup for a Bad Pun. Notice that the first word of every line is a contraction. “Why, Gary??” I hear you asking. SO glad you asked, Friend! (Or “Friends,” if there is still more than one of you still reading.) (Or “Is there an echo in here?” if in fact no one is left reading.) The reason every first word is festooned with an apostrophe is answerable in two words. Here they come. Don’t hate me.

“Contractual obligations.” [Bdumph/Shhhuhh] (Rimshot.)

Ah, Apostrophes!! Don’t you just love the Little Things that Get You Through Life?

Today’s National Poetry Writing prompt called for a poem that featured technology that is no longer in vogue. When I saw the prompt the memory of the scent thrown off by the mimeograph at Glendale High School–of the ink and spirit developer, that second cousin of Magic Markers, liltingly aromatic–hit me in the nose, so I did a little bygone-era walkabout via Internet search, and watched a training film on mimeograph techniques courtesy of the University of California at San Diego, which in 1958 was called San Diego University.

(More Memory Laning came when the film reminded me of the sound the film projector made when in grade school and high school they showed us stuff like that. I remember in 8th Grade, Mr. Gasser showed us a film on digestion, featuring fluoroscopy after a food or drink item had been put in the mouth, and seeing the journey down the gullet to Stomachville. Hilarity ensued when Mr. Gasser ran the film backwards, and you saw stuff gradually coming up a kid’s esophagus, then consolidating in the mouth, and then you see the kid chew and chew, stick his fork in his mouth, and pull out an unchewed piece of cherry pie. Our darkened room exploded with laughter. So hey, Rudy Gasser, wherever you are–thanks for all the fun stuff like that!)

2020 0417 mimeo

Mimeo Graph

Make a stencil/get an ink pad/paper: cotton rag
Mockup/test/& crankcrankcrank/you got it in the bag

Images come flying out, 12 dozen for a dollar
It’s a boogie-woogie noise the envy of Fats Waller

Memoranda/flyers/Hell: The History of Cholera
Maybe even comic books–Osiris Vs. (Taller) Ra

Eventually, Xerox gave the mimeos the slip

Obsolescence makes them one with petro/hieroglyph

For Day 16 of National Poetry Writing Month we are supposed to write a poem full of overblown superlatives in praise of somebody or something..

glory bee

beatrice the hearts are thumping
all for you around the earth
sheep are bleating joints are jumping
all proclaiming all you’re worth

listen to the canyons howling
fox hyena wolf and dog
even bathrooms start unscowling
toilets here and yon unclog

we’ve been well and truly goddessed
basking in thy benediction
glory bee though thou art modest
thou’rt the stuff of science fiction

thou’rt the stuff of epic poems
thou’rt the stuff of stovetop stuffing
thou’rt the awe of sherlock hoems
and thy pornstars need no fluffing

giggling thou art windchime musicks
casting spells with merlin’s magicks
half-and-halfing tea and mueslix
kissing off cyanophagics

bliss away our deepest sorrows
tiptoe through our thirsty psyches
aphrodite our tomorrows
fleet our steps with golden nikes

Today’s prompt: “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! Perhaps a good way to start is to listen to your favorite piece of music and “free-write” for the duration  of the piece, and then use what you’ve written as the building blocks for your poem.”

freewrite prep:

sometimes jackson browne is easy listening
sometimes less so despite his oiled voice
“lives in the balance” is masterfully unsettling
“sky blue and black” makes me cryabit for the loss
of my so great friend
but it is good to be uneasy
it is even good to wallow
as karen said she did
while playing beethoven’s “moonlight sonata”
which she said left her sopping
and jackson browne now sings
“if you ever need holding
you’re the hidden cost and the things that’s lost
in everything I do
YEAHHHH, and i’ll never stop looking for you…
that’s the way love is”

and the way love also is
is quicklikeabunny goneinaminute
when it’s at its best….

****

Geez Louise, did that open up a vein. All right, then, let us begin.

Uneasy Listening

In the course of one day
The mix tape may lull
and then excite
and then inspire
NEED A SKETCHPAD A PENCIL crankcrankcrank

and then the music fades without loss of volume
Because focus Because otherrealm Because it does not fit
AND Then there is a bit of discontinuity
And THEN the music returns to the ear

and the sequence is off
and the mood Doesn’t match
Through no fault of the performer
nor the receiver/it’s just a jump cut/that’s life

find McCartney/Lennon/Billy Preston/georingo

GET BACK
GET BACK
GET BACK twear youonce blongd

twiddle that dial
no–Why So Sirius?
Seek The Specific
Heal The Unease
find Jackson Browne
and let him sing for both of you:

I’M
ALIVE

And then get centered with Mitchell, Joni
with the roundabout
cyclic delight
“The Circle Game”

Gooooood…

And then Prine
Lost-But-Not John
“When I Get To Heaven”

smoke em if ya got em John
we love you
have a Vodka Ginger Ale for me

Ease
Restored….

Day Fourteen, and here is a paste of the prompt:

“Today’s optional prompt asks you, like Alice Notley, to think about your own inspirations and forebears (whether literary or otherwise). Specifically, I challenge you today to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets, and other people who inspired you to write poems. These could be poems/poets/people that you strive to be like, or even poems, poets, and people that you strive not to be like. There are as many ways to go with this prompt as there are ways to be inspired.”

So I thought of the poets, and there are too many. Then my inner acrosticist took three cards out of the Rolodex: Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sylvia Plath. All left their mark. All were driven and bedeviled and haunted. And they haunt me. I know the opening lines of “The Raven” and “Daddy” and I know all of “IF-” And Kip, Poe and Syl uniquely identify them with three letters. So there may be an Acrostic in the future…but I’m not feeling Acrosticky right now. But let’s see what happens.

2020 0414 kip poe syl

Kip Poe Syl

Rudyard and Edgar and Sylvia Plath
Let us be shaped by this odd Threefold Path.
Let us get Kip for the blood and the bone,
Firmly embed in Testosterone Zone.
Poe is for Passion so darkly uncomic,
Endlessly rhymed with a beat metronomic.
Syl’s so unsilly, such willies she gives,
Pouring her hope into such porous sieves.

Put them together, you get KipPoeSyl,
Mournful and frantic as Hank’s Whippoorwill.

“Hear the lonesome Whippoorwill.
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low,
I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
Hiram “Hank” Williams, Sr.

2020 0412 triolets

Friends, National Poetry Writing Month is in full swing, no matter how many earthquakes or tsunamis or volcano eruptions or pandemics try to stop it. Here is a compilation of the three Facebook posts I made for today, Day 12, including prefatory and postpoem comments. They get increasingly political, you will see. My country, Number One in the WORLD for total COVID-19 cases, and total deaths, is being mismanaged horribly, and my poetry cannot but be affected. I am urging my fellow Citizens of the United States of America to Vote Blue this November, all ways that I feasibly can, and my poetry is at the service of this cause.

****

National Poetry Writing Month 2020, Day Twelve. Challenge: Write a triolet.

Triolet: Iambic tetrameter, eight lines, abaaabab rhyme scheme, lines 1 and 2 are repeated (or nearly repeated) with lines 7 and 8, and line 1 is also repeated (or nearly repeated) with line 4.

In a perfect Verseworld I would now write a trio of triolets. Trouble is, it’s been a long day, I’m physically and mentally beat, and I only have juice for one, though I have the key words for all three. So I’ll do one, call it a night, and let my refreshed brain tackle the other two sometime before midnight.

The three words are FORMALDEHYDE, ACETYLENE, and INCOMPREHENSIBILITY. So here comes

formaldehyde

formaldehyde plays hide and seek
it poisons and yet it preserves
it makes those things in jars look bleak
formaldehyde plays hide and seek
it humbles, silences, makes meek
as doctor jekyll hydes and swerves
formaldehyde plays hyde and sikh
it poisons what it then preserves

And on that cheery note, Friends, good night and sweet dreams!
Here’s Number-Two-Of-Three of a trio of triolets for Day Twelve of National Poetry Writing Month.

acetylene unsettling

take oxy and acetylene
to spark and now you have a torch
to weld an empire’s mezzanine.
take oxygen and fettled green
and cee-oh-two and ways unclean
and now your scene may heat, may scorch…
that oxy and acetylene
sparks conflagration with its torch.
Here is my third and final triolet, completing my Triolet Trio for National Poetry Writing Month 2020, Day Twelve.

inn comm pre-hen sib ill: a tee

incomprehensibility
enables bafflement and crime
with podium non-jabber-free.
incomprehensibilty
is reprehensible as we
descend into a fear-fraught time.
incomprehensibility.
in free-fall it is hard to climb.

Yes, political. Vote Blue. Because we Libtards, we Card-Carrying Commie Socialist Globalist Illegals-Loving National Workers Party Ninnies have another mess to clean up, just like the one we inherited in 2009.

Friends, I’ve written a poem a day in April for National Poetry Writing Month 2020, but this is the first one I’m sharing here. I may post some others, or do an “anthology” in a future post, but here’s this one for sure.

Each day there has been a prompt. Here’s a copy-and-paste of today’s:

“Our optional prompt for the day is based on the concept of the language of flowers. Have you ever heard, for example, that yellow roses stand for friendship, white roses for innocence, and red roses for love? Well, there are as many potential meanings for flowers as there are flowers. The Victorians were particularly ga-ga for giving each other bouquets that were essentially decoder-rings of meaning. For today, I challenge you to write a poem in which one or more flowers take on specific meanings.”

And here’s what I wrote, and originally published about twenty minutes ago on my Facebook timeline:

****
the fickle delphinium

i blossomed and woke up in a crop
of my bachelor’s button brothers
who had yet to bloom.
“pardon my dust, buds,
i am going to work my magic
and go look for love.” with that
i shook the potting soil from my roots
and went mobile.

almost immediately i saw HER.
Great Horticulturist, but she was
as pollinatable a thing
as ever tickled Georgia O’Keeffe’s fancy.
but by the time i got there
some showoff hollyhock was already sidling
and giving me a sidelong sneer to boot.
didn’t matter. i moved in.

soon we three discovered
how fickle a flower could be–she played us,
dismayed us, and stem-to-stern near-flayed us.
she LOVED being fought over. she could use
a simper like a whip, a sigh
like a blowtorch. “cage match, boys,” she half
DEMANDED as she sun-seekingly spread.
“winner take all.”

well, he had the brawn, but i had the wit,
the speed, and the wherewithal. got in
some sepaljabs and jabbered into his
pistil-holder, “dude! bet you don’t even know
what rhymes with delphinium!”
“like i give a steermanure,” he growled.
“you should, holly hock-a-loogie. delphiniums
LOVE poetry.” i twined off a petal of his.

“she loves you KNOT.” i queen-anne’s-laced him
to the soil. he was melbafied. (toast.)
WOW, was she ready to cross-pollinate. I found
that her breathy oxygenated coo jazzed me more
than a swarm of bees. “i DO love Poetry,” she cooed.
“what DOES rhyme with delphinium?” uh oh.
NOTHING does, according to the rhyming dictionary!!
think fast, buttonhead!!

“my darling, my dearest delphinium!” one line down,
four to go. retrofit!!! “i see you’re….deLICIOUSly…”
whatwhatwhat–AHH! “,,,SKINNY! YUM!” (whew!)
dammmm, was she throwing pollen!! the scent
was flaring my petals!! “a blossom so lavish/i’d
LOVE to enravish…” NOW WHAT??! void! blank!!!
–AHA!! “let us DUST UP a posh CONDOMINIUM!!”
and, though fickle as hell, she was thus made mine.

****

Hope you have an April-Flowery day, Friends!