This will be our last daily prompt for a while, Poetry People. I decided to end on a fun one, writing a silly limerick about a smack-talking Cyclops and a cheating golem made from bread running a race.
This year's final NaPoWriMo post invites participants to write a poem in which the speaker is identified with, or compared to, a character from myth or legend.
Hence, the Cyclops and the bread golem.
I believe this is the first time anyone has written specifically about a bread golem. In fairness, the infamous gingerbread man is also a golem made from foodstuffs.
I was up until close to three in the morning preparing my submission email for Dragon Soul Press. It's flown to its destination and was swiftly acknowledged.
This is the link you require if you're interested in submitting to their forthcoming horror drabble anthology (submission deadline 31 May).
Don't direct further questions to me 'cause I can't answer 'em! I'm just the messenger.
I hope one day soon I come to a place of peace with this damn CPAP machine. I fare better when I keep it on, but I don't like having things on my face. I usually take the mask off while I'm asleep.
I really do wish society, including the medical community, would stop shaming people for not being perfect specimens of exceptional health. I feel like a failure for having diabetes. I feel like a failure for needing a CPAP machine. I felt like a failure when I had to have an emergency C-section. I feel like a failure anytime one of my old fillings needs replacing. Telling people they're failures if they have health issues doesn't lead to improved outcomes, and this ineffective method of "encouragement" needs to stop.
Good afternoon, Poetry People! I must admit that my first thought on seeing today's NaPoWriMo prompt was, "Well, what the hell am I supposed to do with that?"
I have a quibble with the reference to these as being "Swiftean words." She did not invent these words any more than I invented the words ornery, sarcasm, or snark. She just used them.
I'm pretty sure Lemmy invented the word Orgasmatron. Lord Iffy Boatrace's butler Butler invented a rather horrifying sex machine called the Pelvotron in Bruce Dickinson's naughty and nutty novel The Adventures of Lord Iffy Boatrace. So, Orgasmatron may well be a proper Kilmisterian word, while Pelvotron is a Dickinsonian (as opposed to Dickensian) term. Bruce Dickinson, or at least his band, Iron Maiden, will figure into this post again at a later point.
Today's April PAD Challenge prompt asks poets to pen a proper Until Blank poem.
One of my favorite songs is Albatross by Judy Collins. However, I also recalled The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a lyrical ballad written in 1797 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and published in 1798 in a collection of lyrical ballads by Coleridge and William Wordsworth. 186 years later, Iron Maiden recorded a 13-minute tribute to the ballad for their 1984 album Powerslave, and lo, a nineteen-year-old me was grateful yet again for Steve Harris and his love of history and literature.
I used the word elegy in today's poem, which touches on the topics of my pig-headed persistence until the day I go tits up, whether anyone will be inspired to write an elegy for such an ornery cuss, and the fact that I would prefer to listen to the songs of Judy Collins or Iron Maiden over Taylor Swift. This actually isn't done in the manner of a dig at Taylor Swift, it's simply factual information about me.
I honestly don't care much about Taylor Swift one way or the other. I find it ridiculous that some man-children who either frequent incel forums or use religion as a cudgel to keep women in their place have their tighty whiteys in a bunch about the fact that a thirty-four-year-old woman is unmarried and childless. I find Ms. Swift's reported carbon footprint rather outlandish, but I don't have any vehement dislike for her.
I'm no Swiftie, but let's give Taylor a fair shake. The Lakes is a pleasant enough melody with rather evocative lyrics.
Albatross was first released on Judy Collins' 1967 album Wildflowers. I've always felt like she could have written this song about me. I had overly romantic ideals for much of my life. I learned the harsh lesson that fairy tales aren't real. No prince is coming to your rescue. You have to save yourself.
The lyrics also speak to my struggles with sometimes debilitating depression and extreme loneliness. I've learned over time that being an outlier like I am means that I will never fit in with other people. It's taken most of my life for me to be sort of okay with that.
This is an orchestral rendition of Iron Maiden's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with some illustrative AI images. Some of these are pretty cool, but the pirate in a dress at 4:01 and 5:00 is just funny. However, if a pirate wants to wear a dress, why shouldn't he?
I hope you enjoyed this extended penultimate post of prompts and songs. I'll be back tomorrow for the grand finale!
I'd rather play chess with an octopus and a bunch of weird mutant aquatic squirrels underwater than sail on a cursed ship with a dead albatross around my neck.
I've got clever designs on using my writing Tumblr as a vehicle for a weekly recap as well as for other promotional posts and interesting stuff. Check it out if you like!
Good morning, Poetry People! Just three more days and we'll be wrapping our prompt session for the year. I'll start publishing poems to promote Soul Ink 2 when I receive word which if any of my poems have been selected to appear.
I haven't been doing a very good job of promoting my books lately. However, I have been working on bringing my anxiety under control so I don't wake up every morning feeling like I'm about to pitch a panic attack. Marketing and networking are very stressful for me and sometimes I have to take a step back. That being said, let's get to it!
Today's April PAD Challenge prompt asks participants to pen a remix poem. I always save this prompt until the end of the challenge.
Today's NaPoWriMo prompt invites poets to create an American sonnet. The American sonnet has fewer rules than a traditional sonnet. NaPoWriMo suggested the following site for inspiration on writing your own American sonnet.
Today's NaPoWriMo prompt asked poets to write a poem that involves alliteration, consonance, and assonance.
Alliteration is the repetition of a particular consonant sound at the beginning of multiple words. Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds elsewhere in multiple words, and assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds.
I needed a persona promptly, so I chose a chunk of charcoal and penned a volcanic (or at least fiery) verse.
There will be no sitting back basking in the glow of my cleverness, however. I need to edit the story I'm submitting to Dragon Soul Press for their fairy anthology. I need to begin composing my query letter and selecting which poems I'll submit to the Soul Ink 2 anthology. I am also planning on releasing a drabble memoir for your 60th birthday next year, so I want to lay the groundwork for that.
It can't be my 60th birthday coming up. Therefore, it has to be yours.
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?
Hello Poetry People! I fell down a Norse and Slavic mythology rabbit hole yesterday. We'll get to that as we go along.
First, I used this Maximum prompt as the inspiration for taking my poetry ambitions to the Maximum and writing a sweet suite of four poems instead of just one poem for each day.
The final Twofer Tuesday prompt for this challenge asks for a Heart of the Blank and/or a Blank of the Heart poem. I went with Heart of the Rage and Rage of the Heart.
The NaPoWriMo prompt for the 23rd suggests participants create a superhero poem. Well, nuts to that! Go big or go home, I say. I went full-on Goddess.
I probably did a search for an angry goddess and was given Skaði, a lesser-known Norse goddess who just can't catch a break and is pissed off about it. Don't tell her I said so, but it's probably best to choose your husband based on criteria other than having good-looking feet. Skaði thought she was getting Balder, but she ended up with the sea god Njörðr, and they were a terrible match. She didn't like the sea and he didn't like the mountains.
I brought in this plovers and sandpipers prompt to create a Rage of the Heart Tanka to describe Skaði's dismay at being stuck on the beach in her husband's domain.
Making my rounds through the goddesses, I learned about the Western Slavic goddess Marzanna, who is drowned in effigy every year on the first day of Spring. I wrote a Heart of the Rage Tanka with this ceremony in mind.
The NaPoWriMo poem asks poets to begin with a line from a well-known poem and then go their own way. I started with "shall I compare thee to..." and went straight off the rails!
Good morning (or whatever it is where you are) Poetry People. I dragged my worthless ass out of bed at 5:40 AM, took my pills, stabbed myself (with an insulin pen), put drops in my eyes, and came back to my computer to write one of those brief, hard-hitting Haiku about how the human race selfishly harms the world that gave us life.
We need to stop behaving like a cancer. One person may not be able to make much of an impact, but together we can make real changes. One of the most important things we can do is hold corporations accountable for their actions.
To construct my take-no-prisoners Haiku, I took inspiration from the following prompts.
We are in the fight of our lives against the very world that gave us life. If the world is to survive, we need to be on its side. We must listen to the Earth and hear what it is telling us. We must work to heal it rather than doing further harm.
Good morning, Poetry People. Or whatever it is wherever you are.
Today's poetry prompts converged to inspire some grim subject matter. Add to that the fact that I woke up at 3:30 this morning. I don't know what it is about the 3 AM hour. It's like the veil between the worlds is thin or something.
Today's NaPoWriMo prompt asks poets to recount a historical event.
One of history's worst dictators was born today in 1889.
I summed this event up in six words with an acrostic.
I believed this brief work would be more impactful if I stuck to facts. It's easy to spiral into hyperbole where people such as the subject of today's work are concerned.
There is no need for me to directly point out that Adolf Hitler was a monster or that his actions and attitudes inspired destruction. History speaks for itself.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about Hitler is the fact that much of the time he didn't appear monstrous. He loved animals. If he believed he had offended someone, it would trouble him to the point where he couldn't sleep. People who knew him described him as being charming and dignified. During the war, he visited hospitals to offer soldiers comfort and encouragement.
Indeed, the most terrifying thing about Hitler was the fact that a person embodying all the above positive attributes was capable of ordering the imprisonment and murder of millions while believing his actions to be completely correct.
In today's climate of intolerance towards anyone whose opinions differ in the least from prescribed political correctness, it is important to police our own behaviors and beliefs while keeping the following advice in mind.
When fighting monsters, be careful not to become one yourself.
"I think we have got to learn to disagree without being violently disagreeable..." Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt invites participants to
take poetic inspiration from postage stamps.
I decided to go with a Haibun. I selected what seemed
to me an incongruous stamp. This stamp originated in the former
Soviet Union but uses a religious image. Since the Soviet government
was not merely irreligious but actively opposed to religion, I am
puzzled by the existence of this stamp.
To complete my baffling Haibun, I wrote a Haiku using
a prompt from the Carpe Diem Haiku site.
Today’s NaPoWrimo prompt asks poets to closely
describe an object or place, and then end with a much more abstract
line that doesn’t seemingly have anything to do with that object or
place, but which, of course, really does.
The style of Haibun that I use for the first two
poems in the Soviet Stamp Suite ends with a Haiku unrelated to the
prose part of the Haibun. One can infer subtle connections between
the prose and the Haiku, I suppose. I’m honestly not terribly
concerned about it one way or the other.
For my next trick, I took my two Haibuns and created
a blackout poem. A blackout poem is a form, but the resulting double
Haibun is a nonstandard Haibun and therefore an anti-form poem,
methinks.
Enjoy the Works of the Weaver from the Ancient Realms
channel on Odysee.
A typo would have put me way over the top for my Camp NaNoWriMo goal. I'm not a cheater, though. I corrected it. It's kind of painful to subtract 145,000 words from your word count!
Today's April PAD Challenge prompt asked us to write about a major event. I chose the eclipse. I wasn't in the path of totality and the sun was behind the clouds anyway.
I did a bit of a different take with the Twofer Tuesday format, which asks participants to create a love and/or anti-love poem. I wrote about spirit guides and how much it must suck to try and help corporeal fuckers who ignore every sign you send them.
My use of the NaPoWriMo prompt in this poem is a bit obscure. The prompt asks participants to write a poem that centers around an encounter or relationship between two people (or things) that shouldn’t really have ever met – whether due to time, space, age, the differences in their nature, or for any other reason.
I've never come to terms with the veil between worlds thing. Without going into details, I've seen some shit and experienced some other shit. This shit is the reason I'm an agnostic rather than a full-on atheist. However, more often than not, the living are just left stranded to be mired in grief when they lose someone who meant the world to them.
It's a shitty system, and I like it not. However, I can't do anything about it, so I wrote a cheeky poem about it because that's how I roll. Maybe someday, light years from here, some other misfit fucker will read my poem and say to him or herself:
"At last! Another fucker who gets it!"
To that person, I say from my place in your distant past, I salute you!
Meanwhile, the NaPoWriMo prompt suggests writing a poem about a news tidbit found on the Yesterday's Print Tumblr. I take it no one is surprised that I chose a story about a cussing parrot.
Hello, poetry people! It seems to be working out for me to publish a double post every other day. I can't guarantee this format will stick, but let's roll with it for now.
Meanwhile, the NaPoWriMo prompt suggested poets take inspiration from The Strangest Things In The World, a book that shares brief descriptions of oddities.
"Well, what the heck am I supposed to do with this?" I wondered while marveling at the weird wonders presented in the tome.
Then it came to me like a flash--like a vision! I just wrote it down. I can't share the poem here, but I will reveal the epic title.
My Most Magnificent Monody For My Many Favorite Mistakes.
It's a poem all about love and what it shouldn't feel like. If it feels like what I describe in these verses, it ain't love, it's limerence, and that's not good.
And now, on to Day 5.
Apparently, QuickWrite can't render old women, but the dog is cute, and the tulip is purty.
I'm an old woman, but I'll do you the favor of not sharing pictures of me, seeing as they would break your computer monitor. Then you'd be mad at me.
The linked post contains all sorts of nifty information about the periodical life cycle of cicadas. I have to admit, at first I thought cicadas hadn't been seen in certain areas since 1913. That's a very long nap or gestation period or whatever.
I hope you gather poetic inspiration from this post. If you do, please be sure to visit the linked blogs and let them know!
If you are inspired by the tremendous forthcoming swarm of cicadas, I suggest letting them know. Perhaps if we pay sufficient tribute to their mighty splendor, they will spare us.
Greetings, poetry people! I got behind and lost my mind because that shit happens, but now I'm back to share prompts with you and wax philosophical on this poetical day.
I created a two-verse Senryu using the following prompts.
The first Twofer Tuesday for this year's April PAD Challenge invites poets to create a sad poem and/or a happy poem. My poem was a bit of both because it honors a friend who is no longer of this world, but he still visits me in dreams. Believe that or don't. Any comments written with the intent of stirring the shit will be ignored.
The April PAD Challenge prompt integrated nice like stir fry and rice with the NaPoWriMo prompt, which asks poets to write a platonic love poem. I love my phantom pal very much, and it's always been a platonic kind of love. I'm his kid sister from another mother. When you learn that I'm 59 and he would be 77 if he were still here, that may sound kind of funny. I say there are some people who can make you feel young no matter how old you are, and if you have one of those people on your team, they're an MVP.
And now, on to Day 3.
Cactus Clem
Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors
"Hey Grover, I'm startin' a black metal band!"
Ghost Town Grover
Free use image from Clker Free Vector Images
"That's swell, Clem! What's it called?"
To understand more about why I think this is funny, read this.
This bit of humor isn't entirely original on my part. Someone once posted a photo of a pile of wood on Facebook stating it was going to be their new black metal band's name.
Now, how in the world did I get started down this path?
The first thing I saw when I got there was this image.
Image by Aimee Pong
The image rather reminded me of a black metal band logo. Combine that with the April PAD Challenge prompt, which asks participants to include a musical artist in their poem title, and my bad brain started working overtime.
It's serendipity, I suppose, that I'd recently gone down a black metal rabbit hole while doing a bit of research to try and get back into writing the stuff I really love rather than spending most of my creation time trying to generate the elusive social currency.
I'm not sure I managed to nail the surreal part. I decided to roll with a Haibun. It was speculative but not necessarily surreal. I dedicated it to this dude who used the stage name Dead during his brief life. He has been inspiring my work for a couple of decades now and still does.
Per Ohlin
16 January 1969 - 8 April 1991
He was a talented and creative person, although deeply troubled. I prefer sharing this photo over those in which he's wearing his stage attire. Too much has been made of his image. There is, unfortunately, a notorious photo of the aftermath of his suicide that is still in circulation today. I will repeat what his bandmates from Morbid had to say about that.
No thanks to the distributors and buyers of the post-mortem pic. Fuck you.
I will add this.
Show some damn respect.
Ornery Owl Has Spoken in a Grim and Frostbitten Voice
