NaPoWriMo

Rhyme Time – NaPo 2025 Day Nine

Today’s challenge is to write a poem that uses rhymes, but unlike yesterday, without adhering to specific line lengths. That’s it.

The Pedagogue Bullfrog

Biology class.
Dissection Day.

The stink in the classroom would make ya cry. Remember?
When we were there to slay already dead frogs, not toads.

I think.
Step by disgusting step we cut the carcass open to expose wads and globs
of all the things I learned in high school: heart, lung, stomach.

But the smell is what I remember best.
Formaldehyde, Baby.

Like in the beer in the Nam,
A key component in dead humans when used to embalm.

But gizzards do not abound in and around Bullfrogs. Just chickens and turkeys
dissected at home by Mom for celebrations of life.

Of “all the crap I learned in high school it’s a wonder
I can think at all—but I can read the writing on the wall,”
and a good witch can read the petri dish entrails.

Look both ways and hear the moan of the bull
because those frogs are not an endangered species.
Mind the gaps and touch your face before licking your lips. Embrace the stink.

Pretty Little Love Songs – NaPo 2025 Day Eight

Today’s challenge was to write a meditative ghazal (I’m not a fan) poem in the form of a love song. A bunt is not a home run, but it still gets the job done.

Make it Real or Forget About It

You’re the melody I would never forget
You’re the forest of fantasy I forgot to forget

We don’t need the shabby old habits anymore
You say standing ovations we love not to forget

But if you’re willing to play our love’s game
This love is something we will never forget

Some kind of magic is inside you for me
Lying in bed beside one another we cannot forget

I want to show you the room in my heart
Imprints of history we two will never forget.

Look both ways and try something new, even if it tastes like tripe.
Mind the gaps because not every poetic form from other cultures
suits us better than others.

Why Not Art? – NaPo 2025 Day Seven

Today I am prompted to write “kind of” a self-portrait poem wherein I explain why I am not an object of art. Additionally; I should include a fake fact and a highly unlikely comparison.

objet d’art

A can of soup was not art.
Wait now, the can may be but not the soup.
Tell the chief her food is not art
and you may invoke a visceral emotional response
from them (pronoun problems today)
about his grossly gristly
chicken fried steak found at some greasy spoon
somewhere in the middle of Texas or Montana.

Intent counts in sin and art. Fuck for effect.
I am the conscious effort, like the fork, push pin,
or skin covered hairless fat over brittle bone and
Weird Andy Dubya paints me as a Brillo box
for which some fool pops millions. I’m not that.

But is it art? Am I?
Am I that posed and canned portraiture photo of me
p-shopped to make me artfully handsome and young
soliciting a salacious feeling from someone
who practices the high art of pornography?
I am not that kind of art, thank you, Reverend.

We all love being objectified, of evoking
an aesthetic or emotional response
from the neighbor’s horny wiener dog down the road which
is not art. The road I mean, not the cat. I mean dog.
But maybe, could be, should be transformed
into a painting of an old hammer, which I am also not, but
a can of soup is. Art’s weird if you ask me,
which you were not and I’m not saying.

Look both ways and up at a ceiling full of shit-filled condoms and call it art
because it evokes within you an emotional response.
Mind the gaps where function follows form, and a poem is a form of expression
but isn’t art.

Hot Chow – NaPo 2025 Day Six

To determine today’s NaPo prompt, I randomly selected a number from 1 to 10. I picked ten. Then I scrolled down to find a table of 10 rows and 4 columns. At the row corresponding to 10, the first cell to the right gave me the name of an edible item: cilantro. That was what my poem was to be about. The next two cells had words that were to be used in the flavor-descriptive poem. To see the entire prompt click here.

Cilantro

I don’t know when it came into my life.
Probably after I met my wife because
if it wasn’t meat with mashed potatoes
and some form of bean,
I had never tasted it.

Two things provided for expansion
of my sense of taste and flavor,
including smell. Marriage
and my military life. Chow halls
didn’t care, but they also did.
I actually like liver and spinach
(sorry Mom).

It goes in with other stuff,
Where would salsa, soups, guacamole,
and other dishes be without it? Sure,
there is parsley, dill, and basil,
but they are not the same.

Where would be the fresh citrusy
and floral flavor? That peppery tang
we find in and among the Mexican gang.

If it tastes like soap, there is no hope.
Genetics rule. Thanks to a gene
called OR6A2 for that
and eat something else.

For the rest of us, we enjoy the
gentle chip drip into the culinary saucy sink.
Good food is more than you think.

Look both ways and learn to love the food.
Mind the gaps and pity the picky eaters.

Musical Notation – NaPo 2025 Day Five

A Saturday NaPo table prompted me to compose a poem given inspiration from a musical notation of my choosing from a list of 21. Then, I was supposed to select a musical genre from another list of 21. Finally, I was to use in said poem one or more words I picked from a third column of 21. You can see the entire table which was Bogarted from an old Twitter account by clicking here.

My selections were: “lord have mercy;” folk song; and bones, butterflies, + banquet.

Pay to Play

I am not a musician.
No instrument can I play.
My singing’s not worth the price of admission.
Not even in church while
surrounded by singing Baptists on the Lord’s Day.

I love music. I wanna be
all those things. Just good enough
will satisfy me.

When I hear it, the many from way back then,
when, lord have mercy, a folk song
written and sung during the genre revival,

gets into my bones
I can get butterflies. I become
the man-boy I was with hair and zits,
now my playlist becomes
a veritable banquet. Then I sigh,
and I wonder why
they don’t get it.
Like rain they hear it but they get no feel.
Frankly, they just get wet.

Look both ways but remember; your song is yours, your music is born into your soul.
It matters not what others think, this is your thing.
Mind the gaps but you’ll never explain not knowing what was for lunch,
yet you still know the words to songs from fifty years ago.

 

Rock Poem Metaphor NaPo 2025 Day Three

Day three of NaPo prompts me to follow the easy style of Frank O’Hara and to write a poem that obliquely explains why I am a poet and not some other kind of artist.

I looked. Oblique means not straightforward: indirect, obscure, devious, or underhanded. Perhaps metaphorically?

Poemhenge

Like most,
as a child I found rocks and stones interesting
to see, to hold, to gather, and to throw.
There were cool ones for holding
and some for skipping on water.
Some were hot rocks. Jocks protected stones.

I didn’t know any of the names.
Fools gold wasn’t gold or diamonds
but was filled with glittery sparkles.

Rocks had formations.
Many were famous.
Rocks and stones were even in songs.
And in idioms like rock solid
or your stone-cold heart,
or the millstone around your neck.

Eventually, old stone makers interested me
and new stone makers challenged me.
And the colors and cutters of gemstones
like emeralds, sapphires, rubies, and diamonds.

As I grew, my view of stones got more solid.
Famous rock formations attracted me,
I wanted to imitate the creators.
In the gym I used soft rock like talc
as I listened to the rock music and dreamed
of the rock candy mountain.

Rich people wore and collected rocks.
They called them jewels and gems
but I could not always tell you why.

Later, maturity took ahold of me
and I found my fit, even as a fossil,
to make rock and stone creations of my own.
Polishing stones. Stepping stones.
Stumbling blocks are rocks.
My mind one stone quarry among many quarries.
I walked the limestone line on cordoba cream—
noticing colors, styles, and finishes.

One day I collected some of my stones.
I trimmed and polished them. I included
abrasive stones, message stones, smooth stones,
and made them ready for display to the world.
And I named them all poems.

Look both ways and if you see Frank O’Hara, tell him I want to be a painter too.
Mind the gaps, especially as you traverse the rocks, then stop, sit, have a “J.”
Mind what the poets have to say.

Note: “J” is from the Paul Simon song “Late in the Evening.”

Poem to a person – NaPo 2025 day two

NaPo 2025’s second day challenging prompt invited us to write a poem that directly addresses someone, has a made-up word, includes an odd or unusual simile, makes a statement of “fact,” and that includes something that seems out of place in time.

More Than Love

My dearest philologloth,
Are there worse places?
Is your prison like a happy place?

Your soul is good.
Unlike the dark life fiction
of your self-inflicted addiction.

Like a blade runner
missing for thirty years,
a gauntlet falls upon deaf earth.

Hearts grind to needless halts
when minds forget to remember
when my me died that September.

Come, my son
rise above it all
but not the love.

That tote we carry
full of all the good
and all the bad losses we’ve both had.

Love you, Dad.

Look both ways to discover the dark side of pleasure.
Mind the gaps for forgiveness and step carefully into whatever future you have left.

It Begins – NaPo 2025 day one

The first 2025 NaPo prompt was to write a poem that uses a new-to-me word from either the glossary of musical terms or glossary of art terminology. The new part for me is the use of the word impressionism  in music.

Impressionism was a term at first used mockingly to describe the work of Monet, et al. It was similarly used to describe vagueness, imprecision, and perceived excess of attention to colour in the early music of Debussy.

Hay Fever

One hundred eleven million greenbacks
for a line of fuzzy haystacks,
a sunset or morning sky and blue flowers
where nothing looks real. Art

by a mocked artist who wisely
adapted the moniker to that style
of bright, pure, unmixed colours.
Insults taken to the bank.

Impressionism.
Is it art?
Is it music?
What does it do, say, or mean?

Would Claude be proud now
if he knew how his art
drew a fortune
at auction.

 

Look both ways at music critics and all art.
Mind the gaps because one critic’s trash is another’s needle in a hundred-million-dollar haystack.

NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 30, Controlling Feline

For the final day of the challenge, we were to write a poem in which the speaker is identified with, or compared to, a character from myth or legend.

I chose a Greco-Roman mythological goddess, Megaera, from the three Furies: Alecto (anger), Megaera (jealousy), and Tisiphone (avenger). I embodied her as a pet cat.

Controlling Feline

I am Megaera the Cat, your jealous Goddess
sent here by Gaea and made from
the blood of the Lord tomcat, Uranus.

My holy task is to punish you for being human.
You may do nothing without my revocable approval.
If I have not approved your every action,
the indignity of Hades awaits within my hairball.

You must be shamed into submission by me.
I will make you fall; I will pee on everything
and everyone else you love until you bow,
honor, and feed me. Pet and feel bitter pain.

Privacy is a sin. Your computer is mine now.
All this furniture is mine and mine alone
to use and abuse as, and when, I see fit.
My water bowl is only half full. Fool!

I am a daughter of Darkness. Do not even look
at another cat, animal, bird, person, or
(may Nyx and Zeus forbid such sin) a dog.
You will pay dearly and experience
the smell of Hell, if you ignore me.

Look both ways, forward into May and back to April.
Mind the gaps as you recover from 30-in-30, all to prompt.
We are saved by the human gift of humor. Empowered by babble.

NaPoWroMo 2024, Day 29, Antithetically Self-effacing

The darling lexicographers at Merriam-Webster selected ten words from Taylor Swift songs. I was double-dog-dared to choose one of the words and write a poem that uses that word in its title.

Antithetically Self-effacing

Having a love-hate relationship
with attention and spotlights
and being “that guy” when attention
is focused on me, which makes it weird
that I like to stand and speak at the mic,
to be the MC, the introverted old man
who is not very shy—that guy
is certainly me. She said I had
“mic presence” (whatever it was).

I will talk to anyone, especially
those who break the clichéd ice first.
Me! The stage crew grunt who,
without notice or one second of rehearsal,
had to read his lines from
Macbeth in front of the entire
student body, whose girlfriend
said, “Your pants were so tight,
I was distracted. You read lines?”

Yeah, I am that guy.

Look both ways and listen to the words of the tortured and ravaged poets,
and when the West Reading angel sings, or gives one of her looks;
sing, sing, sing; or dance, if you can’t.
And mind the gaps if she gets you tickets for the Super Bowl.