self

NaPoWriMo 2026, Day 22

NaPoWriMo 2026, Day 22 prompt: Write a poem in which you are in dialogue with yourself.

Let it Be

You always pulled it off.
In some strange and lucky way
you were slicker than they thought.
You’d turn and away you would walk.

I was just playing the game like everyone else.
I placed my bet and took my share.
You should know,
you were there.

You never cared about right or wrong,
only if you might get caught.
The trick you said was to never stay too long.
Every love you had you would forsake.

I am not the same and you know that.
That part of me has gone away
and now I wonder who I was.
The guilt and shame, I’m not the same.

It will catch up with you someday
And I’ll be standing in your way.
We will have to take the stand,
You’ll have to choose who’s in your band.

Maybe. But some things will never change.
My life I’ve worked to rearrange.
And now is the time to end it all.
And you’re too late to make that call.

Sammi’s Weekender #248 (capricious)

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What Am I, Popeye?

An assemblage of contradictions
unified with random masses of cosmic protoplasm,
launched unwilling into life,
pretentiously posing upon past
protoplanetary disks.

I am a self-contradictory collection of word gestures,
influences, and impulses dancing to dialectically
distracting, consistent capriciousness, and
categorically confused morphing emotions.

Wish for sameness but anticipate reality.
I’m muddled by me without constraint.

Look both ways into the reflection of lefts and rights,
ups and downs, love and loss.
Mind the gaps of unshakeable faith and wander through Sagan’s Cosmos.

***

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” …. “Extinction is the rule.” (Carl Sagan, 1934-1996)

Gloss:  A protoplanetary disk is a rotating circumstellar disc of dense gas and dust surrounding a young newly formed star.

Poetry: Sammi’s Weekender #178 (Asinine)

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I’ve not written a letter to my teenage self.
If I did, it would be
crude,
rude,
and threatening.

I knew that boy
wouldn’t heed warnings.
He did little good.
The bad I remember,
the stupid,
the asinine and foolish acts
I cannot deny.

I was me.

I was there. I did it. I was
the thick-headed marauder
they claimed.

My survival is a mystery.
How it turned out like this; I’ll never know.

 

Look both ways in life to connect the dots.
What happened to all those years?
Mind the gaps in recall for memories denied.

 

Footnote: My wife edits these. She brought this to me saying, “it turned out well because you married me.” I agree. Ok, late addition of a video that kind of says cool stuff.