“Try your hand at writing your own poem in which something that normally unfolds in a set and well understood way … goes haywire, but is described as if it is all very normal.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-one-10/)

Today we begin the end of our life,
the end always a beginning,
and we decide how to proceed.

Options:

• with joy
• with anger
• with hope
• with fear
• with love
• with hate
• with acceptance
• with resignation
• Other (please specify)

We choose: All the above,
with the addition of:

• Compassion
• Composure

Admixture to chef’s choice.

And so we can proceed,
toward our end.

Thank you for choosing temporary existence!
We hope to serve you again soon!

Please note an 18% gratuity will be added for parties of 8 or more.

Once again, I didn’t really follow the prompt for this one. (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-twenty-12/)

In stillness,
in motion,
with feeling,
dead inside,
we contradict
ourselves, heedless
riotous, incautious,
as we
dance, sing,
scream, weep,
laugh, love,
all still,
chaotic motion,
dead to
the world,
we create
our reality
with such
intense feeling.

I was inspired by this day’s prompt but didn’t really follow it: “Write your own poem that tells a story in the style of a blues song or ballad.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-nineteen-10/)

I need a keening kenning song,
to sing my love,
to pay proper respect to
memories of you.
People aren’t meant
to suffer in silent
stoic strength.

I watch videos of mourning
in other parts of the world:
Proud public displays
of heartbreak and struggle,
communities coming together,
a chorus of intolerable
pain, loss shared.

I need a keening kenning song,
a way to voice my grief.
I need someone to tell me:
It’s good to feel,
you don’t need to buck up,
to get through (but don’t take
too much time).

We carry far too much shame
around our most human feelings.
We hide what we share
most deeply, most truly,
embarrassed by our raw
naked need, as if to say:
We shouldn’t feel.

I need a keening kenning song,
to be human, to dive deep
into lingering love, lost
and lonely together, and so
deeply, painfully, hopefully,
fully alive.

“Craft your own poem that recounts an experience of driving/riding and singing.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-eighteen-11/)

Our little red Hyundai isn’t big enough to hold so many memories, nights of bored driving, shared ennui, screaming along to NIN’s cover of “Get Down Make Love”, you so excited to have me listen to the Sugarcubes, I let you see me weep as Tori Amos shared her pain.

We were so young, so sure we knew what was up, angry and passionate like our music, confused about our feelings, excited and hopeful and scared for our future, you always hated how I dove into mosh pits heedless of how dangerous it was, I always wished you’d let go and let yourself dare.

When you sang along to “Losing My Religion” I knew you were trusting me with your soul, when I raged along with “Jeremy” I trusted you to sit with my anger and know you were safe from it.

But you weren’t safe, and I was dangerous, and I knew you needed to leave if you wanted to thrive, as you drove off in our little red Hyundai, too full of memories, and I hoped someday you would remember the good ones.

“Write a poem themed around friendship, with imagery or other ideas taken from a painting by Carrington, and a painting by Varo.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-seventeen-11/)

I saw you across a room (such an embarrassing
trite way to see someone!) and I was
shocked at how fully you existed in space
without any apparent care for how people
see you. You were more yourself than anyone
I’d ever witnessed. I’d always been a wallflower,
someone often not noticed when I arrived,
unnoticed when I left, and I never knew
how to be around someone as blazing and
visible as you! I didn’t know what to think
when I saw you, standing in the center of
the room, amid your adoring crowd, basking
in their attention, because somehow I saw
myself, too, through you, and I couldn’t
understand why. You saw me, and came over,
said “Hello” and for once I didn’t wilt
farther into my wall. I said “Hi” back,
so out of character, and then it was the next day,
and the sun was coming up, the golden hour of
morning, and we had talked about everything
in the whole entire world. I delighted to learn
how utterly weird you were! The kind of weird
that makes you so deeply yourself, and I got
to be my weird self with you without
embarrassment. We were never weird
the same way, but to the same degree, and
ours was such a wonderfully compatible
weirdness! Today, I came to visit you, as so many
times in our past, and you let me speak this time
without interruption, without passionate argument,
and now it’s sunset, the golden hour to end the day,
so I rise from the grass, remove the dead flowers
and dirt from your memorial (such a normal thing
to mark the life of such a definitively
weird person!) and I don’t know how to be
myself anymore without your shining glorious
weirdness buffering against me, I no longer
know how to be weird alone.

“A poem that … imposes a particular song on a place.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-sixteen-12/)

This is our song,
you said, as we danced
in the headlights
of your car, parked
in our favorite park
after dark, just us.
Teach me how
to dance, you asked,
eyes alight with
mischief, sly smirking
smile, so alive and
beautiful. Just us, alone
in our favorite park.
So we opened the
doors, turned up
the radio, and danced
in the headlights
of your car. This
is our song, you said.

Now far distant, alone
in my apartment, our song
comes on the radio.
No longer ours, mine,
and memory’s, and it
all becomes such
an ordinary world.

“A poem that … imposes a particular song on a place.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-sixteen-12/)

A perfect moment:
When a song syncs precisely
with my car’s blinker.

“Write a six-line poem … informed by repetition, simple language, and express enthusiasm.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-fifteen-11/)

I will never understand people who don’t like music.
It’s the cheat code to my soul, to my heart, to my passion.
I thrill to it, mourn to it, dream to it!
I move to it, sing along with it, celebrate it!
Music is human being made manifest.
We are the music and the music is us.

“A poem that describes a place, particularly in terms of the animals, plants or other natural phenomena there. Sink into the sound of your location.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-fourteen-12/)

What difference:
A trembling of the ground?
Or a rumble of deep sound?

What difference:
A spike of fear?
Or a shriek to pierce the ear?

Pitch becomes hum becomes rhythm
Becomes a feeling in the bones.

Such sounds travel miles
Through the earth,
Through rock and river,
Tree and terrain,

The great beasts speaking
Across vast spaces,
Vast spectrums.

Deep time in
Thunderous silence.

“Six-line stanzas use lines of twelve syllables, and while they don’t use rhyme, they repeat end words. Specifically, the second and fourth line of each stanza repeat an end-word or syllable; the fifth and sixth lines also repeat their end-word or syllable.” (https://www.napowrimo.net/day-thirteen-11/) I ended up rhyming rather than repeating.

There’s a yearning toward the divine in all the world,
A spiritual stretching, flowers grasping for sun,
A soul gasping for grace. But there’s a counterweight,
Fear and doubt pulling us down, ourselves overrun,
     Striving for better, for best, for something (not this!)
     Bright and good, a clarion hope we can’t dismiss.

We defy the darkness! Resist the fear, the doubt!
Our nature’s better angels soaring toward the light,
Pulling us, urging us, to follow where they lead!
Darkness disperses and righteousness becomes right.
     We find meaning in creatures’ inter-relation,
     Kindness defines our locus in all creation.

Such hope is rare in this world, far too delicate
To trust to capricious vicissitudes of chance.
So we care and nurture hope, fulsome with yearning,
To navigate light and dark as a kind of dance,
     The rhythmic ebb and flow which defines existence.
     Our defiance is how we sustain resistance.