PAD Challenge Day 15

Late again, for the same reasons: taxes and computers. In the middle of preparing my last-minute return on my wife's laptop (because my desktop is still busted) I got an e-mail from Comcast Xfinity that they identified a possible bot or virus in the laptop. What perfect timing. The tech guy scanned everything remotely and cleaned up the hard drive - took about an hour - but everything seems fine now. That's what i get for having an unsecured network.

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo are (1) write a poem using the words slash, button, mask, strap and balloon, and (2) write a parody poem, preferably of a poet you don't like. Well, I don't which I love more: word prompt poems or parody poems, so I had a ball with this one. My inspiration for the parody is Francis Heaney's hilarious Holy Tango of Literature, in which he anagrams a famous poet or writer's name, makes a title out of the anagram, and writes a poem or prose piece in the writer's style, usually parodying one of that writer's famous works. Thus, T.S. Eliot becomes "Toilets". ("Let us go to the john, you and I...") So I decided to parody Gertrude Stein, whom I never really liked or "got". As a bonus, she wrote a series of prose poems called "Tender Buttons", a perfect tie-in with one of the words in the prompt. Finally, to my mind, at least, the anagram is perfect:

Registered Nut

by Gertrude Stein

Tender buttons, but on tender, tender your buttons, butter your tendons. Strap on your mask to mask the strap. Button the strap on your mask and strap your mask with buttons. Button your yap and yap yap with a strap on your tender buttons. The moon’s a balloon and the balloon’s a moon balloon too soon in June. The moon’s a tender button with a mask or a mask with a moon. Slash the strap and stash the slap and button your yap. Prices slashed on masks with buttons, balloon straps and moons that yap. Tender, tender button-strapped masks and slashed balloons under the yappy moon.