Na/GloPoWriMo Day 30: Final Challenge, try your hand at a minimalist poem. What’s that? Well, a poem that is quite short, and that doesn’t really try to tell a story, but to quickly and simply capture an image or emotion
Words and thoughts
meant for the page
not the air
the point and click same day delivery generation
created a new art form
It’s really a thing
it’s really a word.
Day 29 of Na/GloPoWriMo 2019 : Today’s challenge is to blend these concepts into your own work, by producing a poem that meditates, from a position of tranquility, on an emotion you have felt powerfully
Maybe
if I smile more and dress in pasty oatmeal colors
and hold open doors
and let everyone else pass through
and thank them for the chance
to serve them, to help them, to be there for them
One day I will fit in.
Maybe if I walk slower
and think slower
and give up my favorite spot
under the shady tree where me and my dog rest
after our long walks
and scuttle and hustle behind everybody else instead
One day I will be rewarded
and be allowed to fit in.
Maybe if I agree
I was not right, I am never right
where did I get these silly ideas of mine?
If I turn off the lights
behind my eyes
I will be allowed to fit in.
Or.
I could just be me
a flawed and imperfect Soul
sitting under a shady tree
with the best dog in the world
and not worry about
ever
fitting in.
Na/GloPoWriMo 2019 #28: Challenge Write a meta poem or poem about poetry:
Do you know that thing you do to words Anita?
That thing where you bang them together on a page and you
cut and nail and draw all over them
and in the end you stand up and call your Freak show of malformed words
Poetry?
Don’t do that.
Poetry should flow and dance
and leave a trail of starlight in it’s wake
It should shush you into silence
it should make you feel light and
you should always
but always
sit in reverence
as you read it, hear it absorb it into your unyielding skin
like flowers
in a field
feasting on sunshine.
So in all politeness I reply:
I have pumpkin seeds for brains
and a dark place in my chest where my heart used to be.
I always write about the things crawling and nesting inside of me.
I am like Poetry’s weird Auntie
who shows up at Funerals
and laughs at the graveside
as the coffin is being lowered into the ground
and everyone wonders as they stand there silent and somber
” Who in the Hell invited her?”
Day 26 of Na/GloPoWriMo 2019: Today’s (optional) prompt is centered around repetition. Repetition is at the heart of the rhetorical strategy of “Duplex.” We engage with it daily in the choruses of songs, and it’s long been recognized as one of the ways to keep a listener’s attention and create a sense of satisfaction or closure in spoken or written language, whether that language takes the form of a speech or a poem or even a comedy routine. Many forms of poetry expressly require or rely on repetition – for example, the villanelle or pantoum.
This is the truth and nothing but the truth so help me God:
Robert Johnson
did not sell his soul
at the crossroads
to the Devil
so that he could play the Blues
Robert Johnson
did not go to Hell
after he died
because he sold his Soul
to the Devil
so that he could play the Blues
Robert Johnson
was never at the
Crossroads
with guitar in hand
calling the Devil Forth
to sell his Soul
so that he could play the Blues
I know it for a fact,
I know this is true
because I am always at the Crossroads
and I know who has been there
because I am always here
when it’s time to pay up and pass through.
Final Thursday of Na/GloPoWriMo 2019 #25 :
I love the summer
so say my friends
who love to wear flip flops and insist they only feel alive
when the Sun shines relentlessly in the sky and the cool nights close in
and the crickets chirp and the nightingales sing.
Cool fruit flavored drinks in hand, swathed in slick, thick Sunscreen
the Summer air is heavy with the sent of charcoal fueled barbeques and freshly washed cars and
backyard shampooed dogs
all around them
they sit upon their plastic chairs and cry in agony, ” I hate the winter”
relentlessly like a broken record.
My Summer loving friends sing their praises to the Sun.
Shouldn’t they be singing them all to Ra?
Because every Summer I watch my friends
take one step closer, they are one Sunbeam nearer
to looking like the
unwrapped mummies
on a shelf in the Museum of Cairo.
Na/GloPoWriMo Day 24: Locate a dictionary, thesaurus, or encyclopedia, open it at random, and consider the two pages in front of you to be your inspirational playground for the day. Maybe a strange word will catch your eye, or perhaps the mishmash of information will provide you with the germ of a poem
When it is bored
and looking for some fun
my brain sends a crazy message
straight to my tongue.
It plays with words I see
and ties them up in knots
it shoots them past my eyes
and straight out of my mouth:
Like.
Façade, facade
such an easy word to say!
One day I read it
and then in a meeting I pronounced it
Fuk-ah-day
Thanks for that internal organs
just remember
I know how to hurt you too.
Day 23 of Na/GloPoWriMo challenge: Write a poem about an animal.
Have you ever had that dream
where you woke up by moonlight
not in your bed, safe and warm
but maybe you were running through a field or into a forest
and you could feel your heart race and your mouth full of teeth, grinding impatiently
because you were so eager to get to where you needed to be
out there in the moonlight
where you could sing as loud as you want and run as hard as you want until
you found your prize and brought it down as smooth as a leaf being pulled down stream
Have you ever had that dream?
I do, every time the moon is full.
Day 22 of Na/GloPoWriMo: Today’s challenge is to write a poem that engages with another art form – it might be about a friend of yours who paints or sculpts, your high school struggles with learning to play the French horn, or a wonderful painting, film, or piece of music you’ve experienced – anything is in bounds here, so long as it uses the poem to express something about another form of art.
Photo A.M. Moscoso
My brain will not talk to my hands
my eyes will not see for my heart
Ink and paint and clay are noise to me
a jumble of sound, lines without form, the bones that create art
are strange to me, alien to me, magic to me
to capture one single line that could create a face, a tree ,bliss or despair
what that must feel like for just one single second
for my brain to talk to my hands, for my eyes to work with my heart
to experience the joy when color and light embrace.
Photo A.,M. Moscoso
Photo: A.M. Moscoso
Photo A.M. Moscoso
Photo A.M. Moscoso
Na/GloPoWriMo Day 21: Today’s challenge write a poem that incorporates wild, surreal images. Try to play around with writing that doesn’t make formal sense, but which engages all the senses and involves dream-logic.
It was my face, in the mirror looking back at me but it was smiling
and I was not I
could not to yell at it, I could not to touch it I was
fading away my hand was turning to glass, it was as light as a desiccated leaf and I was empty except for the
coldness that was creeping out of my ears, my eyes my breath all of it turning to frost
in the air but my face in the mirror was flushed, tan and smiling lifting it’s face to the sun in it’s world with a photo shopped smile
but I was not smiling and I thought if I could just move away from that image of me
the fake image of the fake me with the fake smile in the fake world I could feel warm again so I turned around
and there was another me, in another mirror and it was smiling and I was
not.
Photo A.M. Moscoso
Day Twenty of Na/GloPoWriMo
Write a poem grounded in language as it is spoken – not necessarily the grand, dramatic speech of a monologue or play, but the messy, fractured, slangy way people speak in real life.
I keep my darkness
inside
unpracticed
but sometimes it dreams
of
what if…and so do I.
Sometimes
I dream of dancing bones
and cats running through graveyards
some of the time, I scream myself awake from that dream,
most of the time, I don’t.
Sometimes I dream I have bouncy blond hair
and frosty blue eyes and I that I can
flip my IQ on and off like a light switch
I always, always scream myself awake from that dream.
Sometimes we sit there
me and my darkness and
we wonder why we are so quiet,
in a world that gives you permission
to let your freak flag fly.
Maybe we need to be invited in, like Vampires
maybe- sometimes.
at least, that’s my story for now
and
I’m sticking to it.
