Tax day! And for once, I didn't wait till the very last minute. (Well, almost the last minute - I mailed my return out on Friday the 12th.) I hope you like my "clean" new look. I got tired of glitchy problems with cutting and pasting content into the blog and then having to finagle with the text and background color. There was no exact color match with the previous blog background, and things looked highlighted in a particularly ugly green. So black-on-white seems to solve the problem.
Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) write an "infestation" poem, and (2) write a "pantun", which a Malaysian form that's a cousin to the pantoum. It consists of a quatrain (or quatrains) with an ABAB rhyme scheme, each line 8 to 12 syllables. I don't think there's a specified meter, but I went with the iambic. Also lines 3 and 4 are supposed to be thematically unrelated more or less to lines 1 and 2, but still have some implicit connection. Since today's pretty busy, so far I've only turned out one. Coincidentally, both the poems that the respective bloggers gave as examples mentioned ants, so I took that as a sign to include them too:
Infested
The ants are in the peonies again,
the mice run rampant in the shed.
At one a.m. the smoke alarm blared on, and then
turned off. A glitch, but it's still in my head.
P.S. Interesting story about my Day 9 prompt, "Billy Collins, Private Eye: Chapter One". After writing it, I realized that it sounded a bit like one of those "Guy Noir" skits on Garrison Keillor's radio show A Prairie Home Companion. So I Googled and found out that Billy Collins has actually been a guest on the program, and he's even played himself in a a couple of Guy Noir skits. Here's a transcript of one of them - it's pretty funny, riffing on a favorite poem by William Carlos Williams:
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