Author: Brian

Today's prompt was to write an exhaustion poem, and given the time of the semester, and the length of my Thursdays, it would have been pretty easy to go with physical exhaustion as a topic. But I also felt like that would come off as self-absorbed whining, especially given that my current job is far … Continue reading Day 23

Just jammed this out in the break between classes. It's an earth poem, and that's really all I think I need to tell you about it. It's pretty straightforward. I knew that learning the Greek alphabet while in the fraternity would pay off one day. Earth is not alpha and omega; more like iota and … Continue reading Day 22

The prompt for today is to write a poem with the phrase "According to" in the title. One of my favorite terms is "according to studies" because it has the air of authority while being so vague as to have no meaning at all--perhaps it even offers a negative measure of meaning because of that … Continue reading Day 21

Today's poem is cynical, but the prompt asks us to look back, and while I write a lot about my past, I try not to do so with any sense of regret or nostalgia. I hate nostalgia--there's no greater lie we tell ourselves as humans, I think, than the one in which we imagine a … Continue reading Day 20

Today's prompt asked for a name in the title, and I tossed this one around for a while before deciding. I wrote one to Amy last night, and I've written a lot to my daughter and parents and so on. I considered writing about my best friend in high school, the one who I looked … Continue reading Day 19

I've been preoccupied all day by other peoples' poetry--and I have more of it to deal with--which meant getting original today has been difficult. I'm not really satisfied with today's poem, mostly because I was never able to figure out what kind of poem this wanted to be--a love poem, an ironic poem about love, … Continue reading Day 18

Today's prompt was for a science poem. I love science--I love that it makes my life better in often unthought of ways. Had I been born a hundred years ago, it's likely I wouldn't have made it out of infancy. I had asthma as a child, and a severe reaction to the smallpox vaccine, which … Continue reading Day 17

Today is a death poem, which I suppose is appropriate given that tax day was yesterday, though at my current income level, tax day is always the day I get my W-2 form, so I can spend my refund as soon as possible. Maybe one day I'll need an accountant--it would be nice to make … Continue reading Day 16

Because it's tax day, the assignment is to write a deadline poem. So I drew a little inspiration from E. E. Cummings's "next to of course god america i" and strung together some incomplete phrases which played on both the standard definition of deadline and some alternative readings of the word and its roots. This … Continue reading Day 15

I only now got the chance to sit down and really think about today's prompt--something to do with an island, as I recall. I've marked somewhere north of 30 papers today, and still have more to do, but I had to have a break for a bit. So here's the story. Fort Lauderdale, and most … Continue reading Day 14