day four: ♡

day three: in/con/se/quence

it's quarter past midnight here, and i need to get some sleep, but first let me share my Day 3 poem with you all!

whe prompt for today was to write a fourteener, a poem of indiscriminate length but with fourteen syllables in each line. i kept drawing blanks when i tried to think of something with, you know, gravitas that i could write about, so at 23:52, i sat/lay on/in my bed with my exam pad paper and an old red pen and scribbled out this:

if you can't read my writing or the additions to a few of the lines (i found, as it happens, that i'm pretty good at naturally writing 12-syllable lines once I get in the groove, so i had to add a couple syllables to at least a couple lines!) i've typed it out below :)

in/con/se/quence

A poem with fourteen syllables to each line I write
Eight minutes before midnight, here I sit and sigh and scrawl
With little to inspire my thoughts or set my mind alight
I tap my pen on paper and await the speechless call
Of inspiration, words of magic in my squinting sight
Or a bright bolt of lightning, knowledge that might someday fall
And yet I sit and scribble this inconsequential rhyme
I check the clock again and find that I am out of time.

and now? now for something super consequential like SLEEP ;)

day two: stars

the prompt for today's NaPoWriMo poem was "stars", and immediately i thought of the spoken-word poem 'A Finger, Two Dots Then Me' by Derrick Brown. if you haven't heard it before, DO IT... and if you have, listen again. it is always worth it!

now that you're all in awe of Derrick, i'll just leave the little and vastly less significant poem i wrote today down here. i was thinking of the prompt as i walked home from a friend's house tonight and tried looking up to catch some 'inspiration', but the stars just weren't visible. that in turn led to the rest of the poem :) it doesn't yet feel finished to me, but such as it is, it is:

tonight the sky wears its black-blue

like a deep bruise

and all hope of conventional star-views 

is halted by streetlights.

walking home, instead i look down

and am met with the sight

of tiny glass galaxies blinking back at me,

a million shards of beer bottle stars;

the cars

parked on the street have had their bonnets brushed

with a fine dust of drizzle and

the drops catch onto all light, dazzling;

the brightness of your imagined smile

and the crinkles that gather in the corners of your eyes.

please, world, remind me that 

i do not have to look up to see the stars.

i want to stitch all of these views

into new constellations, and share them with you.

hello, NaPoWriMo!

today began April, meaning a few things:

it is darling Lucy's birthday!

it is also April Fools Day (and i was fooled a couple times... meh.)

it is ALSO the start of National Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo for short :)

the aim for the month is to write a poem a day - for fun, for inspiration, to get back into the habit of scribbling down poetic thoughts or feelings... whatever the case may be. this will be the third year i participate (my Mama and i try to egg one another on from afar!) and hopefully i'll manage to finish this year! every day, the awesome people over at NaPoWriMo.net put up a prompt for the day, as a way to kickstart ideas. you're, of course, not limited to the prompt, but i find it super fun to follow along with their suggestions or ideas and see what i can create!

today's prompt was to create a poem of negation. their example:
if you chose a whale as the topic of your poem, you might have lines like “It does not settle down in trees at night, cooing/Nor will it fit in your hand.”

i tip-tap-typed this out distractedly and reworked it a little in between working like a packhorse on a programme layout/design, but it's still kinda rough. i like it that way, though. it's called not at all.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
you are not at all what i expected.

you do not curl up the way a cat does in the middle of my bed;
you are nothing like the foamy lip of the sea, kissing at my toes, and
you taste entirely unlike the tang of citrus on my tongue.

you are not a memory; you do not linger on the fringes of my mind the way they do.
nor are you like a poem with discernible rhythm or rhyme

but i find that i'm

drawn to the way that you
are unlike a glacier
different from a shattered teacup or a weed
the negative of a photograph
the complete and utter opposite of
unnecessary to me.

you are not at all what i expected.

you are instead everything i need.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

so, there you have it - my first poem for the month :) now i'm headed bed-ward - but stay tuned for more poetry out of yours truly!