PAD Day 30

I made it!  Thirty-nine poems in thirty days. And while they're not all classics, it felt good to be productive again and have some fun writing.  On the other hand, I'm kind of glad it's over.  Some days it was a real struggle just to produce something as brief as a haiku. I also wish I'd been more successful some days at combining the two prompts I was using. (But then again, if I had, I may not have written more than 30 poems.) It's a good challenge and exercise in writing self-discipline.

The final April prompt from NaPoWriMo is to take a poem from earlier this month and write its "opposite" - in other words, substitute the original words with their opposites. My Day 21 poem, "Fortune Cookie Senryu", which contained inspirational messages, seemed like a good target for this exercise.  What I came up with here could probably be called "dispirational".

Misfortune Cookie Senryu

Measure failure by 
how low you have sunk, and what

you don’t do down there.

Despite how relaxed
and idle you are, take one
thing off your list: work.

Don’t go out today,
ignore your environment,
don’t reflect on it.

Optimism hates
air, pessimism dies worst
in total vacuum.

My divorce account:
squander laziness and joy,
and I’ll go bankrupt.

Poetic Asides' final prompt is to write a "finished" and/or "unfinished"poem.

Junked

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

- Paul Valery

The poem sits in a meadow,

rusting in spring rain. Once

it carried me to delightful destinations,

but it wasn't perfect. I  tried tinkering

with it - new engine, transmission,

a different rhyme scheme,

tightening the meter,

a fresh coat of metaphoric paint.

Then just  when I  thought

I fixed it up the way it should be,  

someone would walk by and say,

Do you have the right tires? or

Those door handles look clumsy,

or, I don't understand your imagery.

Eventually, it ended up in a drawer,

and later moved to this field.

Today I found it again, a corroded shell

of what it once was.  I sat down

in the April drizzle and begin to write

a poem about an old abandoned car.



I hope you've all had a great National Poetry Month!