Category: Poetic Asides

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

Today is a love poem (or an anti-love poem, whatever the hell that is), which is harder than it might seem at first glance, at least if you're going to be original in any way. Here's my entry. If the title is confusing, say it aloud a few times. Mime Is Tress Yser Your eyes … Continue reading Day 13

My father was a nomad, and a son of a nomad. He lived in every small town and on many of the farms outside San Antonio as a kid. His father was a fiddler and journeyman carpenter, and often housed his family in the old houses on many family farms while he remodeled them. Once … Continue reading Day 12

I stretched the prompt a little today--instead of using the phrase "the last" in my title, I just used the word last. I've never written a "13 Ways" poem before, and I used some of my tweets from last year as sections. I'm pretty sure I'll be changing the first section at some point. 13 … Continue reading Day 11

Write a horror poem. Except I don't really do horror. Never liked horror movies--the closest I've ever come to liking one was "Shaun of the Dead." Even monster movies didn't do anything for me as a kid, and today's torture porn? Ugh. No thanks. But it turns out I did have something to pull from … Continue reading Day 10