Today's April PAD Challenge prompt asks participants to pick up their pens and pen a homonym poem. The host also provides examples of both homographs and homophones.
I steamily stewed while fishing through queries to stew up a questionable kettle of steaming homographic and homophonic phish...er...fish.
Then I noticed the immersive questionnaire at the end of the NaPoWriMo post.
Back to work with me!
I may turn these questions into a series of essays or just drabbles. I may do the same with the Proust questionnaire. Maybe I'll get a jump on next year's A to Z Blogging Challenge.
I'll be finishing the April Camp NaNoWriMo today. There's another Camp NaNoWriMo in July, and because I'm a masochist who hates myself, I'll join in.
Before wrapping this session up, I wanted to take a minute to tell you about AutoCrit. I rely on this program for self-editing, but they also provide numerous writing workshops every month, and many of these are free for members.
I always love these deep house mixes. I'd rather they featured images of the ocean or boats or something rather than an endless flow of scantily clad young women. At the very least they could throw in a little phantom man-ass, though admissibly, the men they chose would all be too young for me. I prefer my phantom man-ass well seasoned and tough enough to handle a salty old kitchen witch like Yours Truly.
I've yet to find the right man for the job and am pretty well convinced he doesn't exist outside of my imagination. Plus, in fairness, this kitchen witch is an untrusting old bitch. How's that for an unabashedly honest revelation?
Good morning, Poetry People. Or afternoon, evening, or whatever. I have an incredible video to share with you while discussing how I used today's prompts in my creation. This Roger Waters reboot of Comfortably Numb features a striking dystopian landscape complete with damaged buildings, bomb blasts, and crowds of displaced people. It is a stark reminder of the conditions some people have endured in the past and are currently facing now. Here is what Roger has to say about the video.
Before lockdown I had been working on a demo of a new version of ‘Comfortably Numb’ as an opener to our new show "This Is Not A Drill”. I pitched it a whole step down, in A Minor, to make it darker and arranged it with no solos, except over the outro, where there is a heartrendingly beautiful vocal solo from one of our new sisters Shanay Johnson.It’s intended as a wakeup call, and a bridge towards a kinder future with more talking to strangers, either in "The Bar” or just “Passing in the Street" and less slaughter “In Some Foreign Field.” Here it is. Love R.
The video is by Sean Evans. The mix is by Gus Seyffert.
I think it is quite rude of ProWritingAid to tell Sean Evans that he should spell his name differently. Sean, you can be Stan, Dean, or Sian Evans or you can be Sean Evan. Your name cannot be Sean Evans, Boyo! At least not according to ProWritingAid.
I mean, what the hell?
I guess if I ever again have a moment to write a smackerel of fan fiction, I'll have Sam and Dean Winchester go incognito as Sam and Dean Evans. Yes, Grammarly and ProWritingAid, the word I intended to use is smackerel. I'm not writing about fish.
Overall, I find programs such as Grammarly and ProWritingAid useful, but sometimes I find them ridiculous. Especially when they tell me a character or a real person can't be named the name I've just typed. That assertion is simply uncouth.
Thanks to Scottish Tommy for posting this and many other wonderful videos. Please be sure to check out his Odysee channel. The link for this video is above.
I wrote my poem prior to discovering this video, but I think they complement each other perfectly. I can't share the poem here because I am submitting it to Dragon Soul Press for potential inclusion in the forthcoming Soul Ink anthology. I will provide a synopsis of the work.
The poem is a Haibun. The theme is death. I focus on the differences between the kinds of deaths I've witnessed during my lifetime, including the passing of family members, patients, and pets as opposed to casualties of war. I have never had the firsthand experience of seeing people killed by an invading army. Such a thing seems unimaginable, and yet there are people living with this experience every day.
The Senryu at the end of the Haibun seems, on the surface, to compare a waterfall to experiences and memories.
I have encountered much disagreement about what a Haibun should encompass. There are those who say a Haibun should always be non-fiction. There are those who say that the Haiku or Senryu at the end should be unrelated to the subject in the prose portion. I say the poet should write their Haibun about whatever they wish to write it about and have the Haiku/Senryu relate to the prose portion or not as they see fit.
I'm not a professor of poetic knowledge. I have no degree in poetry. I'm not even Japanese. I have loved Japanese poetry forms ever since my class studied Japan when I was in the fourth grade. I'm self-taught, and I'm not a stickler. I say Haibun away in whatever manner suits you.
If you're wondering how long a Haibun should be, I usually confine my prose portion to 100 words, but I have occasionally written longer Haibun.
Take a look around Poetry International for a poem in a language you don’t know. Now, read the poem to yourself, thinking about the sound and shape of the words, and the degree to which they remind you of words in your own language. Use those correspondences as the basis for a new poem.
I found the thought-provoking prose poem I Have Thought that I Thought of Death by Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski.
Trying to do the thing of comparing the sound and shape of Estonian words to English made my brain hurt, so I simply used the theme of the poem.
I used the prompt word waterfall to create the Senryu portion of the Haibun. I found this prompt in one of the first posts from Chèvrefeuille's Carpe Diem blog.
Unfortunately, Chèvrefeuille has been unable to keep up with blogging during the past few years because of personal circumstances. He has left the blog up as an archive and it contains a wealth of prompts and poems for the seeker's enjoyment.
Here is the music I listened to while creating this post. I was pretty intensely "up in my feelings" about my poem and the new Comfortably Numb video. This powerful game soundtrack from Destiny 2 helped me become energized yet grounded so I could continue with my work. I find video game soundtracks very useful as background music while creating.
Today's prompt asked participants to write an "In the Blank" poem. I could not be stopped. I changed it up a little and made it a Rolling in the Blank poem, because that's one of my favorite songs. Sorry to blemish your reputation, Adele, but Ornery Owl is a fan.
Here's a link to the video, because that's how I (ahem) roll.
The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, designed to be "Bob Dylan-esque"; however, the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words "all right". Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers. The intent was to demonstrate the idea that while many Italians loved authentic English-language songs, not many knew English well enough to understand what the authentic songs' lyrics meant.
The woman playing the harmonica is Adriano's wife, Claudia Mori, a singer/actress-turned-record producer. Adriano and Claudia have been married since 1964.
I certainly don't think I would have cut class as often as I did if my school had been this cool!
This work is the intellectual property of Naughty Netherworld Press/Poetry of the Netherworld.
Reblogging is acceptable on platforms that allow it. Odysee’s reblog function is called repost, which makes things confusing since reposting is considered a no-no on most platforms. It’s fine to share the post using the repost function on Odysee. It is not okay to copy-paste the material into a new post.
Sharing a link to the post is acceptable.
Quoting portions of the post for educational or review purposes is acceptable if proper credit is given.
Evidently, I'm not ready to wrap up the Haiga party yet. Today I have a splendidly gloomy Choka for you inspired by the Six Sentence Story prompt and by the resulting post from Six Sentence Stories' Ghostess with the Mostest. After all, who could fail to be inspired by a post including a video from the mighty Maiden, especially when the song is entitled "Hell on Earth" and I frequently wax poetic about climate change?
The October Spooky Writing Challenge is a go, but I'm using that in a few of its incarnations for slapping out stories. I am using other writing prompts and the images that I find through either pixlr.com or Pixabay for my own October poetry month, or, as I like to call it, Helloween.
This is by no means an official challenge, but if anyone has poetry or stories that they'd like to share this month, you are welcome to do so in the comments.
I'm not sure what's happening with Morgan, who usually hosts OctPoWriMo. I'm concerned about her.
This work is the intellectual property of Naughty Netherworld Press/Poetry of the Netherworld.
Reblogging is acceptable on platforms that allow it. Odysee’s reblog function is called repost, which makes things confusing since reposting is considered a no-no on most platforms. It’s fine to share the post using the repost function on Odysee. It is not okay to copy-paste the material into a new post.
Sharing a link to the post is acceptable.
Quoting portions of the post for educational or review purposes is acceptable if proper credit is given.
Here are some Moonbeasts flying through Dreamlands space in a black galleon. I am not sure who the artist is but will be happy to credit them. Sadly, it isn't me.
I can't help but think that this classic deep cut from Iron Maiden is the perfect Dreamlands theme song.
Sparked by these prompts:
The prompt: Peruse Twitter bots that tweet the works of famous poets. While Lovecraft was better known for his prose than his poetry, my latest fictional foray addresses his 1927 poem, Nathicana. Also, I don't know if there is a Lovecraft Twitter bot. Lovecraft was simply my poet of choice.
April PAD Challenge Day 8: Write a future poem. The Dreamlands can be accessed from any point in time, and many people consider Lovecraft to be a science fiction author. We from his future are still inspired by his steampunk visions.
April PAD Challenge Countdown Catch-Up Day 2: Write a hope poem.
I've always felt that the Dreamlands were, despite the myriads of lurking horrors, a place of hope.
notes
With Cancel Culture being what it is, I suppose that I should explain that yes, I am aware that H.P. Lovecraft held xenophobic views. This is rather an oversimplification, neglecting to take into account his peculiar upbringing and strange life circumstances. Lovecraft was an introverted and depressive personality who feared further disruption in a life that had been filled with disruption for as long as he could remember. At the time of his death in 1937, those who knew him said that his xenophobic viewpoints had softened.
Lovecraft was married for two years to Sonia Greene, a writer herself and a patron of the arts. In her biography, she stated that he would write her long, romantic letters, but he never told her that he loved her. His mother was a deeply disturbed individual who imbued in him the idea that he was more monster than human (he is the protagonist in the story "The Outsider"), and his aunts were unaffectionate personalities as well. He expressed himself best through writing, which is a quality that I can relate to.
Those who corresponded with Lovecraft knew him to be a gracious and kind man with a dry sense of humor as well as a unique imagination. I first read his writing at fourteen years old, and I feel it would be a pity if future generations were deprived of his masterpieces due to the overly zealous thought policing so prevalent in modern times.
Try some Lovecraft on for size. If you purchase the book through the link, I will receive a small commission from Amazon.
HPL's twisted imagination continues to wreak havoc 83 years after his death. T 'was he and Stephen King who inspired the writing of this tale.
You can check out the King of Horror's contribution in this fabulous collection of Lovecraft-inspired spine-tinglers.
Must-have Maiden for your Dreamland listening pleasure.
Trigger warning/content warning/warning warning/danger danger: Discussion of suicide ideation. If you don't want to read about that, don't read this post.
Would you like to know the practical problem with being thrown on a downward spiral?
Have you guessed that I'm going to tell you anyway?
"With" is correct in this case, Grammarly. Not "of." Fuck off.
Anyway...
The practical problem with falling down the hole is having to re-establish my productivity patterns after making a break with them in favor of Netflix and Brood While Hoping the Asteroid Obliterates The Earth Soon So I Can Quit Feeling Like This.
Seeing as my brain is (as I have explained before) like one of these fucked-up spiderwebs...
Click to enlarge
"Like" is correct in this case, Grammarly. Not "as." Fuck off again.
Anyway, my brain is a Peyote spiderweb or an LSD spiderweb. Those look normal at first, but on closer examination, they aren't.
I think it's freaky that the Peyote and LSD spiderwebs look more normal than the Caffeine spiderweb. I drink coffee and tea all the time for "mental clarity." Or maybe just because I like them, seeing as apparently in a person with ADD, caffeine really doesn't do jack shit for your mental clarity. This is why I can drink coffee and then go to sleep, no problem, except for the fact that I am perhaps a bit more likely to wake up having to pee two hours later. Which might happen anyways, so it's kind of a crapshoot.
Anyway, enough about my caffeine consumption. The OCD part of my synaptic fuckery (yes, I really do have OCD, I'm not using it as a euphemism for "hyper-organized," which I am not) hates like a motherfucker when my patterns get disrupted. I don't have an exact time of day for getting things done--the bipolar part of my synaptic fuckery hates the fuck out of rigid deadlines--but I do like to have certain things done on certain days at a certain period in the day. For instance, I like to have my Monday morning "share this shit around with these certain blog hops" post done in the morning. Not "at *8:15 sharp" or even "by ten," just "in the morning." Because that is how I roll.
When my shit psyche has decided to take me off the rails into "fuck everything, it all sucks" town, and I have gotten nothing accomplished, my pattern is fucked for the day, possibly for the week, and I am anxious as fuck.
This is why I start wanting to throw shit whenever some clown-ass shrink sells a book claiming that people can be "cured" of mental illness if you just follow their sage wisdom, which is probably the same fucking "sage wisdom" that some other fucker touted in some other book, and it probably involves Stopping that Stinkin' Thinkin' and instead Thinking Positive, Say Halleluja, and Boy Howdy, You are Cured! And if you aren't you're doing it wrong. Kind of like with all the cabbage soup Special K Weight Watchers Jenny Craig Nutrisystem Medifast Slimfast Alli Atkins Detox Tea Shit Your Pants In Public and Be A Fucking Grouch that No-One Can Stand To Be Around Because Your Ass is Fucking Starving And This Shit Only Works Long-Term For About 5% Of People diets out there. If the millionth one of these crap-ass bullshit not enough nutrition to keep a fucking ant alive diets doesn't work long-term for the dieter, it's always the dieter's fault and not the fault of a flawed-ass program designed to keep you paying into a flawed and fucked system forever while you remain filled with self-loathing for your entire miserable life.
But my misanthropic self digresses.
You can't "cure" mental illness any more than you can cure type 2 diabetes with whatever brand of snake oil or mantras or "defining yourself" or whatever the fuck bullshit they're spouting. Type 2 diabetes occasionally goes into remission. Occasionally. It can never be cured. Myself, I ain't going to bank on it going into remission because that's highly unlikely. I'm going to go with Reality Bites on this one, use my insulin, and other than that, try not to obsess about the fact that this fucking disease makes me multiple times more vulnerable than your average 54-year-old for strokes and kidney failure. It wouldn't do me one damn bit of good to obsess about that shit, so I'm not going to. Not the same thing as being in denial, I'm fully aware that I have diabetes. But it's not going to cure me to think about it all day long or to try to pray it away or wave magic wands at it or eat only bran and some sort of overpriced oil for the rest of my life.
With mental illness, you don't cure it, you learn techniques to cope with your fucked and broken brain. Nobody has ever "cured" mental illness. They have taught people to deal with shit. That's all. If you're lucky, you find a sympathetic shrink who will help you learn some coping skills and hopefully teach you how to get along with yourself rather than just teaching you to be an obedient little cog in the machine. If you're not lucky, well, welcome to the club. I've never resonated with mental health professionals. I always feel like they're not listening to what I'm really saying. Some of them are sort of pleasant to shoot the shit with, the rest just piss me off. Most of them have nothing to offer me. So, I'll make do with what I can do. It's cheaper, both in terms of money and time lost.
Because I have rapid-cycling type 2 bipolar disorder, I've had people imply that it's no big deal when I go down the hole, because I'll cycle back up again within a week to ten days. This is true to a degree, although circumstances do impact mood and feeling ignored and ostracized can keep me down for longer. On the other hand, sometimes I just need to be left the fuck alone for a while. An adorable little bundle of contradictions, me.
I read that statistically, people with type 2 bipolar disorder are more likely to commit suicide than people with bipolar 1 or schizophrenia. On the surface, this doesn't make sense. Since bipolar 2 presents with hypomania rather than full mania and people with bipolar 2 don't experience psychosis, wouldn't this mean that they are more capable of reasoning things out?
What it means is that people with bipolar 2 do not experience altered states and therefore tend not to experience the euphoria which sometimes (by no means always) accompanies a full mania. I've only experienced full mania when taking SSRIs and I don't know how anyone handles that state. I was tremendously agitated and nothing made any damn sense at all. I did not experience euphoria. It was like my entire body was electrified and I just wanted to turn it the fuck off, but I couldn't. Bipolar 2 does not come with full mania, although when untreated, I did at times experience giddiness surrounding a given situation. When I realized that I was mistaking giddiness for happiness and that I have only experienced actual happiness a handful of times in my life, that right there kind of made me want to off myself. It was really discouraging.
Similarly, people with bipolar 2 do not experience hallucinations or delusions (except when taking narcotics, at least in my case). The metaphysical part of my belief system thinks that it's possible that for people with schizophrenia, the barrier between worlds is not closed and they see creatures such as elementals and spirits all the time. Whatever the case, for people with Bipolar 2, we are aware of the world as it is. This means we are more likely to aware that reality, in fact, does fucking suck, and sometimes we are not able to Stop That Stinkin' Thinkin'. The more we look at our crap-ass, hopeless situation, the more hopeless we feel. There is no magic fairy dust. There is no Happy Ever After. There is only more of the same fucking shit to look forward to because even if we pull ourselves out of this round of fuckery, we're just back on the same roller coaster. As Sylvia Plath (who had bipolar disorder) said:
"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?"
--Sylvia Plath (27 October 1932 - 11 February 1963)
As I have learned, it does descend, again and again and again.
Sorry, but I'm rubbish at making shape poems and I just got through writing a book review and I haven't even gotten to writing a chapter in my own story yet, so you get this tortured-scream free verse, in part inspired by the song I'm about to share, one to which I've been able to relate to all too well in my life.
Please, I implore you, this is one of those don't try to fix me pieces. Let me let it bleed. If there's one place a person ought to be able to express the dark, the bitter, the broken, that place is poetry.
Also, please don't say "I hope this isn't autobiographical."
It is, and saying that will not make it not autobiographical.
Let me let it bleed.
The aftermath of bullying is forever.
To every bastard who mentally, physically, or sexually abused and took advantage of my younger self with her low self-esteem who was so desperate to be loved, burn in hell.
These sorts of assholes seek vulnerable women to prey on. They are low-life predatory sadists.
