PAD Day 30: Made it Again!

I can't believe that April's over already. I'm pretty happy with my production this month - depending on how I count them, I've written at least 41 poems this month (46, if you count all the two-line landays and four-line clerihews separately).  As usual, the results varied - I hope there are at least a few contenders for the daily prize of publication in the next edition of Poem Your Heart Out.  On some days writing was easy, and on others, a struggle, but I did write at least one poem for every day in April, and that feels great, especially after a few months of inactivity and "you-call-yourself-a-poet?" self-doubts.

Today's final prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a poem with the title "Bury ________", and
(2) Write a poem "backwards". By this, Maureen Thorson means to start with the last line of a poem and write it, working your way up to the first line; or you can take a poem you already wrote, reverse the order of the lines, and tweak them to make them more cohesive and coherent. I didn't mash up the prompts today, even though it might have been possible, so here's my "Bury" poem:

And here's my "backwards" poem, a rewrite of my Day 4 poem, "Domestic Departures". I thought it was a good choice because of the speaker's ambivalence in the original poem, and also the last line of the original suggests a certain cyclical nature to this relationship.

Domestic Arrivals

So everyone who leaves comes back again -

I walk through the arrivals to make sure.

And as your plane lands, I think that I might

feel I need you. You wrote now and then,

we parted friends, but I wished it was more.

I see you coming - what a lovely sight.

I have a soft spot underneath my smirks

for you.  I thought again - this is no game

inside my chest - there is a burning flame,

and yes, I think the sentimental lurks.

When you left, I felt like such a jerk,

my dry-eyed goodbye later felt so lame,

and it's my fervent hope you feel the same.

I swore I wouldn't but - look, waterworks.

I hope you all had a swell National Poetry Month!

PAD Day 29 Part 2: Written in the Sky

As promised, here's my more "serious" poem.  When you're really stumped, there's always Google, and when I googled "nobody knows", I got two news stories from the past day or two - one was about the terrible earthquake in Nepal, and this other one, much lighter, out of Australia:

PAD Day 29: Trashing Dr. Bill

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a "nobody knows" poem, and
(2) Write a poem in the form of a review.

So here's the deal.  I know I still want to write a "serious" poem today because the judge at Poetic Asides is Marge Piercy, one of my favorite poets, with whom I worked for a week in a workshop a few summers ago, and whom I know best of all this month's judges. (See my prior blog entry here for a chronicle of my experience, one of the best weeks I ever spent with poetry.) But I had so much fun responding to the NaPoWriMo prompt that I had to post it early. I'll post another poem later once it comes to me.  This may not qualify as a "poem", and it's certainly not a serious trashing of one my favorite poets of all time, but like I said, it was fun.

Poetry Review

 

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickensso much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickensso much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickensso much depends

upon  

a red wheel

barrow  

glazed with rain

water  

beside the white

chickens 

William Carlos Williams’  latest poem is a study in obfuscation. 

How can only sixteen words

(or fifteen, if one reconnects the maddeningly dissected “wheelbarrow”)

be so obscure and confusing?   

He begins with a statement that “so much depends”

on this piece of farm equipment. What exactly does depend on it?

Apparently, it’s been left out in the rain –

an object thus abandoned would seem to have outlived

its utility, in this humble writer’s opinion.

Methinks that not much really depends

on a wheeled hopper left to rust in the elements.  

And why state the obvious regarding the hue of this device?  

Everyone knows that wheelbarrows are red.   

Regarding the glazing by rain, of what other substance

would rain be composed other than water? 

This writer has never seen motor oil or orange juice

fall from the sky.  The fact that it sits beside the white chickens

seems trivial and coincidental at best.

Of course there are chickens – this is a farm, for pity’s sake. 

And is it really significant that they are white? 

The unusual line breaks only further confound the issues

in the poem, the aforementioned fracture of  “wheelbarrow”

being one such example.  Conceits such as this only help perpetuate

the distressing trends in today’s poetry, which include

the abandonment of classical themes, rhyme and meter,

and even sensible, syntactical arrangement of the words.

If Dr. Williams were not so busy with his medical practice,

and used paper larger than a prescription pad,

perhaps he would have had time to produce a longer,

more substantial poem. As it stands, it is chopped up

like a salad. It could be simplified just by eliminating

the line breaks and unnecessary words: 

So much depends upon a wheelbarrow glazed with rain beside the chickens. 

Congratulations, Dr. Williams – you have written a sentence.

But then we come back to the enigmatic question:

What depends on that goddamned wheelbarrow? 

This writer has lost sleep the last three nights attempting

to decipher its meaning. I guess we will never know. 

-        Reginald Overcrom, The Fusty Review of Literature, December 1962.

 

PAD Day 28: Why Bridges Matter

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NapoWriMo:
(1) Write a "matter" and/or "antimatter" poem, and
(2) Write a poem about a bridge.

I've already written one to fit the second prompt (Day 23), and I know I've written a poem for a previous year's PAD challenge called "Matter/Antimatter". (Did Robert recycle this prompt?)  Anyhow, I decided to use "matter" in a different definition, and came up with this list poem.


Why Bridges Matter

We cross them when we come to them
and must be careful not to burn them behind us.
They may carry us over troubled waters,
then it's just water under the bridge.

We use them to bridge the gap, whether it's a river,
a crevasse, or bad teeth. They blew up the one
on the River Kwai, hanged a man off the Owl Creek,
took pictures of covered ones in Madison County,
played Pooh-sticks off the one in Hundred Acre Wood.
One led to the fantasy kingdom of Terebithia,
Billy Joe McAllister jumped from the Tallahatchie,
and George Bailey contemplated the same fate,
till Clarence fell in the freezing river and changed his life.

We can drive across the Golden Gate, jog across
the Brooklyn, kiss under the Bridge of Sighs,
move the London to Arizona. But the Tacoma Narrows,
that object lesson in engineering,
snapped like a rubber band in the wind,
and Antietam's was soaked with Union blood.

All of them mean something to us, either a path
over adversity, a way somehow impeded,
or simply how to get from here to there.

PAD Day 27: Powers of Two

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:

(1) Write a "looking back" poem, and

(2) Write a "hay(na)ku" (more on that below).

Since it's my birthday today :) , it's easy to "look back". In keeping with my tradition from most recent years, I wrote a birthday poem:

2⁶ 

I don’t remember much about 2¹ or 2²,

but by 2³ I was a precocious second-grader

with three little sisters.  At 2⁴,

I was a geeky sophomore in high school

who was into Dylan Thomas

and thought Jefferson Airplane was groovy.

By 2⁵ I was married, well into my career,

and already raising 2¹ boys.

Now I’m 2⁶, the last time I will be

a power-of-two years old.

Unlike the Beatles’ prediction,

I don’t rent a summer cottage

in the Isle of Wight. I have 2⁰ grandchild,
but her name isn’t Vera, Chuck or Dave.

I’m proud of my 2² grown-up sons,

and I still have all 2⁵ of my teeth.

I could make it to 3⁴, but for now,

I’m just counting on the power of two,

and you’re the best part of that power.

Now for poem #2. The "hay(na)ku" was a form invented by poet Eileen Tabios, and named and popularized by my poet buddy Vince Gotera.  The form is simple: one word in the first line, two in the second, three in the third. You can string them together in inventive ways too. This one is in a form that Vince calls the "hay(na)ku sonnet". Pardon the reference to the same Beatles song:

What to Do on This Birthday 

work

like it’s

any other day 

but

take it

a little easier 

accept

good wishes

gracefully, and smile 

have

a small

celebration at home 

listen to Beatles’

“When I’m Sixty-four”

PAD Day 26: A Shakespearean Climber

Today's guest judge at Poetic Asides is Hélène Cardona, a French poet, actress, and Facebook friend, who also acted in one of my favorite movies, Chocolat. She is, I daresay, perhaps the prettiest judge of the month. 

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:

(1) Make a title out of one or more words from a list of Shakespeare "coinages", and

(2) Write a "persona"poem.

William Shakespeare is credited with inventing more than 1700 words and phrases in English, but that number is probably inflated. While a man of his creative genius probably did coin many words and phrases, it's also likely that he may have been just the first to publish some of them in English. He may not have even the first to commit some of them to print, as there were many publications by other authors of the time that were not preserved over the years.  In any event, we have him to thank for at least introducing them to us.  The list that Robert Brewer provided as a link, which is just a partial list of Shakespearean "inventions", can be found here.  I challenged myself to include as many of these words in a poem as I could, so it was my "word bank" for the day. I got 17 of them into my poem.

As to the "persona" poem, it's a favorite device of mine, and I've written a number of them over the years, some from unusual points of view, like a conjoined twin, the planet Mars, and a middle-aged female crossing guard. But when someone tells me "write a persona poem", I get somewhat stumped, like today.  It took a while to come up with this, which really feels more like an exercise to me than a good poem.  Here it is, for what it's worth. (I underlined the "Shakespearean" words.)

Mountaineer

You may watch in amazement

as I free-climb the sheer face

of this wall, feeling invulnerable.

Nothing will impede my progress

to the summit. I am dauntless -

nothing will dishearten me

from achieving this monumental feat.

I will be the unequivocal champion

when I reach the top and peer out

on a majestic Olympian view.

I know what seems like a mountain

to me is just a bump to you,

and as I am vaulting to my goal,

your single finger flick

dashes my aspirations.

As I fall to the lower depths,

all my efforts seem worthless,

and the savagery of your foot

crushes my hopes into the floor.

PAD Day 25: Over the Ocean, Then and Now

Busy day today, but I still managed to crank out three short poems and a "regular-sized" one, that last one just under the wire. Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write an "across the sea" poem, and
(2) Write a "clerihew".

A "clerihew" is a light verse of four lines with an AABB rhyme scheme. The first line is the name of a famous person, and the other lines describe something about him/her. Meter and syllable count are not important; some clerihews even have run-on lines for comic effect.  So I wrote some "across the sea" clerihews:


Thor Heyerdahl
had us all in thrall
with his journey in a leaky
boat called the Kon-Tiki.



Captain John Smith
made landfall with
some doubts: "This will daunt us..."
till he met Pocahontas.



Mr. Charles Lindbergh
was no August Strindberg -
wrote no plays, but flew solo,
so low he could play water polo.


And here's a more serious one, based just on the Poetic Asides prompt:

Transatlantic Crossings

Many of us have ancestors

who came across the ocean

in a rickety wood boat

or a rusty steamer,

some of us of our own volition,

some in chains against their will.

It was risky, downright deadly

at times, with all the storms

and disease. So I shouldn't complain

that I will be over water

for the next six or seven hours.

I know about odds and statistics -

"You're safer than you are in a car."

But I also know if we fell in

from forty thousand feet,

it would make no difference

if it was water or concrete,

and even if we did survive

there would be no one around

for many miles to pluck us out.

So I pull down the window shade,

stick in my ear buds and watch

some movie I wanted to see

three months ago, maybe doze

for a little while, but not before

thinking of those immigrants

putting their lives on the line

to get to the promised land,

or the others who had no idea

what they would be subjected to

once the manacles came off,

while all I will probably encounter

tonight is a little turbulence.

PAD Day 24: From Poignant to Silly

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a "moment" poem, and
(2) Write a parody of a famous poem or poet.

I probably could have combined these prompts fairly easily if I could find a famous poem about a "moment" to parody.  However, I responded to the Poetic Asides prompt rather quickly and forgot about NaPoWriMo till later in the day. I'd been thinking of writing about the Oklahoma City bombing  (whose anniversary was on April 19th) for a few days now, and thought I might do it yesterday for the "history" poem, but didn't. Then when the "moment" presented itself, so to speak, I knew I had to write about that terrible moment twenty years ago. This one got a lot of emotional response from poets on the Poetic Asides blog today, and some even wondered if it was autobiographical - it's not.

Empty Chair

Sometimes I wonder what he would be doing today –
would he be working on his doctorate
or expecting his first child, driving a semi
or digging for fossils? He liked trucks and dinosaurs.

The gate to the field is etched with the moment
it happened, 9:02, when that coward
parked a rented van in front of the building
and blew it up, tearing off the whole façade,
ripping into offices and my son’s day care center.

In the field, one-hundred and sixty-eight stone chairs,
Including nineteen smaller ones,
arrayed in the pattern of where each victim fell.
That one has my child’s name. Twenty years ago,
a single flash took them all away, a heinous crime,
eclipsed only six years later.

I’m not a devout man, but I hope there is a Heaven
where he still plays with his little friends,
because it would also mean
that McVeigh burns in Hell.


One of the perks of not combining the prompts, of course, is that if you still use them both, you get two poems. Technically, as you'll see below, I got three.  My inspiration here is a favorite book, The Holy Tango of Literature, by Francis Heaney, which I've mentioned on this blog on prior occasions. Heaney took the names of famous poets and playwrights, anagrammed them, and made that the title of a poem or theater piece that lampooned the author.  Thus, T.S. Eliot becomes "Toilets", and Emily Dickinson becomes "Skinny Domicile". You can actually find a free text of the book here, but I still recommend you buy it to support the author - the illustrations are funny too. And by the way, "Holy Tango" is an anagram of "Anthology".  

I have written a series of poems using Heaney's premise, like a parody of Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" ("The Errand Boy") one in the style of Gertrude Stein ("Registered Nut"), and a satire of W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming" called "Stay, Web" ("And what rough virus, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Microsoft to be born?" )  However, I never did a "holy tango" poem in the style of my favorite poet, William Carlos Williams - until now. Here are two that parody two of Williams' most famous short poems, "This is Just to Say" and "The Red Wheelbarrow". (P.S.: After writing these, I remembered that Heaney did a parody of  "This is Just to Say" in his book, called "I Will Alarm Islamic Owls". I trumped him, however, on "The Red Wheelbarrow", and I daresay I had the better anagram.)

I'm Ill; Mail is a Slow Crawl

by William Carlos Williams

I have not delivered

the girlie magazines

that should be in

your mailbox

and which

you will probably

not get till

Saturday

Forgive me

I feel lousy

I have a fever

and a cold

or :

so much depends 

upon 

a sick mail

carrier

glazed with yellow 
snot

beside the white 
tissues

PAD Day 23: A Very Trivial Poem

I was disappointed that for the second year in a row I couldn't attend the launch party for US 1 Worksheets, that great, long-running journal out of Princeton NJ.  However, I did get my contributor's copy in the mail yesterday, which includes my poem "Señor Morning" (written during last year's PAD challenge). Thanks as always to Nancy Scott and all the fine folks as US1.

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a "history" poem, and
(2) Take a deck of cards - any kind of cards - shuffle it, and pick a card at random. Use that card as a starting point for five minutes of free-writing and make a poem out of it.

Since I had to write about something historical, I thought using the History question on a Trivial Pursuit card would be a good idea. I took it a step further, though, and tried to incorporate elements of the other five questions on the card into the poem. As I was working on this, my son pointed out that Dorianne Laux has written a poem about London Bridge in Arizona. I read hers after writing mine, and I think mine is quite different, so "not to worry".

My Fair Lady

When I was sixteen, London Bridge was literally

falling down. So they sold it to an American oil man,

took it apart, stone by stone, and shipped it to the States.

It boggled the mind. U.S. customs classified it as a “large antique.”  

(“Anything to declare?”  “Just this 930-foot bridge.”)

I wonder what kind of appraisal it would fetch on Antiques Roadshow.

Mr. McCulloch bought it for $2.4 million, more than Dumbo’s ears

or an original Calder mobile. He re-assembled it in Arizona

like a big Lego project, sunk it in the sand, then cut a channel

across the peninsula which he filled with the waters of Lake Havasu,

as blue as a painted bunting’s head. Now it’s the only thoroughfare

to that man-made island. But why Arizona? Why not North Carolina,

“First in Freedom”, or even New Hampshire,”The Granite State”?
It still looks a bit incongruous, a bridge built in 1830, plunked into

a planned community more than a hundred years younger

that’s irrigated against the natural order of things. 

It would be like hanging the Mona Lisa in an Apple store,

or taping the Declaration of Independence like a concert poster
to that big glass pyramid at the Louvre.

[Source facts from the Trivial Pursuit card that I used as material for the poem:

1. North Carolina puts "First in Freedom" on their license plates.

2. Dumbo's ears were insured for $1 million (in the movie).

3. U.S. Customs classified London Bridge as a "large antique" when it was shipped here.

4. Artist Alexander Calder invented the mobile.

5. The painted bunting (bird) has a blue head.

6. A Boggle game has 16 letter cubes.]

PAD Day 22: Happy Earth Day!

It's hard to believe it's been 45 years since the very first Earth Day, which I am old enough to have celebrated.  We planted trees on the quad that day, and I started to hang out with my first college girlfriend.  I wonder how big those trees are now.

Today I'm giving a poetic shout-out to my friend Kendall Bell, who has been over-achieving for the last couple of NaPoWriMo's.  Dude has probably written between 50 and 60 poems so far this month. I'll make it to 30 today - what a slacker I am. Anyway, Kendall is editor of Maverick Duck Press and the poetry journal Chantarelle's Notebook.  He has a carload of chapbooks out (one of the perks of having your own small press).  You can read some of his stuff here.

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo are very similar and in honor of Earth Day, I presume:
(1) Write a nature poem, and 
(2) Write a "pastoral" poem.

I actually relieved some of the pressure of producing a poem by writing a haiku first thing this morning (more of a senryu, really):


cherry trees in bloom
his only daughter tries on
a prom dress


Later on, though , I wrote this one, After hearing today's weather forecast, I actually did start to hear this classical work in my head:

Suburban Pastorale

The forecast for this spring day sounds like
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, his paean
to nature – seductively sunny and warm
until late afternoon, when thunderstorms will roll in.

Out the door this morning in a light jacket,
I see that all my trees are flowering –
the apple, the dogwood, the weeping cherry.
If there was a brook in my yard,
it would be babbling –
Herr Ludwig’s strings would see to that.

I drive to work allegro ma non troppo,
plod through my day until release, and
back into a glorious afternoon, heading home
with flute-and-clarinet birdsong in my head.

Kids play hockey and ride bikes in the street,
a scherzo of activity. Almost in unison,
we look up at the dimming sun,
as dark clouds build in the west.

The low strings begin to rumble,
the tympani stands ready.
Here comes the crescendo.

PAD Day 21: Erasing and Defining

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:

(1) Write a "what you are" poem and/or a "what you're not" poem, and 

(2) Write an "erasure" poem.

The erasure poem is a found poem of sorts, where the poet takes an existing text and cuts it down so there are many fewer words that create something quite different from the source. The words are often left in the position they occur on the paper originally, giving the poem a sort of "concrete" feel. I once did an erasure of Billy Collins' "Victoria's Secret" that I think came out pretty good, but I haven't really many others till now. This is actually an erasure of my Day 17 blog entry, including the two poems I posted that day. Actually, this would have fit well with NaPoWriMo's earlier prompt to write a "social media" poem.  I don't know if this one is totally coherent, but see what you think. (I did compress the layout of some of the lines for aesthetics' sake.) The title is a partial "erasure" of the letters in the title of the blog entry - otherwise, it doesn't mean much.

Pay Another

I'm not entirely happy

I don't th but I guess I'm more satisfied with this one, which

                             the Poetic 

                   Playground

They dedicated it today on Capitol Hill
so the kids of senators and congresspersons
can learn what their mommies and daddies do.
Here, they can seesaw up and down on the issues,
slide down from integrity to scandal and shame,
spin on the merry-go-round without getting anywhere,
sit in a seat on a chain and kick their feet Into the air,
and depending on which way the wind blo right.  

 second one was an interesting exercise if not wholly successful.  I decided to take every tenth word that I've posted I'm not the mos Facebook, it wasn't a

ridiculously longmore common, throwaway words like "the", "in" and "for" as well as                                                        repeated words (though I kept "try" and "pot:

And here's the poem, using and so is my persona
, to a

n I unfriended you yesterday

In the beginning, we were soulmates,

sharing our poetry and offering critique -

I liked your honesty. We also had a mutual love

for music - we discussed favorite CD's and great albums,

even reminisced about our first stereo.

We both liked a Billy Collins' poems,

Roseanne Cash's songs,Sporcle quizzes and Candy Crush.

Then you started to swing to the Right.

I may never know why you

That was my warning bell -

maybe we weren't so alike after all.

I'm just an average 

I can't stay           with you 

grab me 

We can post and exhibit anything, we want

but even when we take down our notes,

remove the tacks from the surface,

the afterimage 

We need to think of     repercussions;

we're neither blameless nor anonymous anymore.

Online friendships are tricky 

can bring it all crashing

And here's a "bonus" poem written just for Robert's prompt:

Mezzo

I am not your best day ever

or your worst nightmare.

I am not climbing the corporate ladder,

nor am I heading down a slippery slope.

I am not Spartacus or Legend, the Walrus or Groot.

I am not Tinker, Evers or Chance,

nor am I Dewey, Cheatem, or Howe.

I am not Who's on First,

but I am Who Wanted to Be a Millionaire.

I don't have all the answers

because I don't know all the questions.

 I am not Iron Man, but I am a Pepper.

I am not Walt Whitman, W.C. Williams, or Billy Collins,

nor will I ever be. There is no way I will be

Elizabeth Bishop or Mary Oliver, either.

Maybe Ogden Nash, if I could come up with more clever rhymes.

I am not an animal;

I am a human being.

I am not the first to ever,

nor will I be the last.

I am not the world's foremost authority,

or its last hope.

I'm not the best or worst.

I'm somewhere in the teeming hordes of the middle,

and though I would prefer more privacy,

I like it just fine.

  

PAD Day 20: My Brain, the Junk Drawer

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write a poem with the title, "My ____, the ______", and
(2) Write a poem that states the things you know - a series of facts, beliefs, etc.

Here's my result, a kind of free-association of trivia and facts connected to personal information and observations.  Does your brain work like this too?

My Brain, the Junk Drawer

Johann Sebastian Bach had twenty children.

My son won’t eat anything that swims.

The tomato is a fruit.

My wife’s cousin is allergic to gluten and milk.

Richard Nixon is the only US president to resign from office.

I will be retiring soon.

The basic Medicare B premium for 2015 is $104.90.

I need to pay my mortgage this week.

Thomas Edison produced the first “Frankenstein” movie.

I can’t decide whether to drop Netflix.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1, 1967.

I always wanted to be a radio DJ.

Ken Jennings won $2.5 million dollars on Jeopardy!

I was on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire but didn't win any cash.

Walt Whitman was a nurse in the Civil War.

I haven't written a poem today. I need some paper clips.

About 40,000 people die each year from pancreatic cancer in the US.

I think I’m getting a cold.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858.

I can’t find my cellphone.

The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

I need a tape measure. Where’s the tape measure?

Only about 8500 DeLorean sports cars were ever produced –

none were actually outfitted for time travel.

I need to borrow your car keys.

PAD Day 19: Landays and Authority

I'm excited again about today's judge at Poetic Asides, Dorianne Laux. I worked with here, albeit briefly, in a workshop at Peter Murphy's Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway a few years ago.  She's an  excellent poet and teacher, as well as co-author of one of my favorite craft books, The Poet's Companion.

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo:
(1) Write an "authority" poem, and 
(2) Write a "landay".  A landay is a traditional Afghan form of couplets containing a total of 22 syllables, usually 9 syllables in the first line and 13 in the second. The form has been popular among Afghan women, many of whom are obliged to write them in secret, or not write them at all but memorize and recite them. The themes are often about male oppression in their culture, but also can be erotic or satirically sensual, or topical, addressing subjects like the American occupation.  I thought this was a perfect mesh of prompts for today, but I grappled with how to approach it.  My first drafts of the landays were from a woman's point of view, but I didn't want to sound disingenuous, so I rewrote them from a sympathetic man's point of view.  I also took liberties with the syllable count in each line, though each still has a total of 22 syllables.

Four Landays

You come to my office, dressed black from head to toe.

If not for your eyes, you'd be a shadow.

You are Pashtun. You can't marry for love.

The closest to a kiss comes from his heavy glove.

American women say they're oppressed.

Your cynical smile is hidden by how you're dressed.

To want an education's not a sin.

A brain is to nourish, not put a bullet in.

And here's a "bonus" poem, written just for the Poetic Asides prompt:

Another Century

I fight authority, authority always wins.

                    - John Mellencamp

After four students lay on the ground at Kent State,

we were galvanized to shout at authority,

occupy the administration building,

march on Washington with long hair,

peace symbols, signs and chants.

Phil Ochs and Joan Baez sang to us,

some of us had a picnic,

some of us were tear-gassed,

but we all thought we were making a difference.

That was another century. Now, I'm planning

nothing more subversive than my retirement

from thirty-eight years with the government,

in a job I'd like to think made a difference

in people's lives, while some may see me

as holding the power of life and death.

I fought authority and won.

I fought authority and lost.

PAD Day 18: Vanishing Vowels

One of the problems of National Poetry Month for me, at least in recent years, is that there always seems to be so much going on that it's hard to find time for poetry - either events (I'm missing two this weekend that I really would have loved to attend) or just finding a few minutes out of the day to write. Not only do taxes loom over me till the 15th (we're always last-minute because we always end up owing Uncle Sam), but there always seem to be a lot of family obligations.  This month, we have a christening and a first communion to attend, a relative staying with us recovering from surgery, on top of our usual duties watching our granddaughter four days a week.  Several times this month I've found myself stealing five minutes here and ten minutes there to work on my poem throughout the day, and on at least one occasion I was up till after midnight finishing it. But I have turned out one or two a day, every day for 18 days, so it's getting done.

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: 
(1) Write a poem using only two vowels, and 
(2) Write a poem that involves an urgent journey and an important message.

I was fairly proud of this one till I realized I didn't really follow Maureen's prompt - there's an urgent and important message but no real journey, unless you consider the conceit of my poem as a kind of journey,  The conceit is this: Each successive stanza uses fewer of the five nouns (plus "y") than the one before it. The fourth stanza is actually the one that fits Robert's prompt of two vowels (o and e). It was a fun but challenging write, and when I had the first draft almost complete I realized I forgot about "sometimes y" which sneaked all the way into the fourth stanza. So I eliminated both "u' and "y" after the first stanza. I kept "o" and "e" through the fourth stanza so I could continue to use the word "vowel". I'm pretty proud about including "incomprehensiblilities".

Disavoweled

This message has great urgency,

about a dire emergency:

our vowels may soon become extinct,

and then our language indistinct.

For instance, soon we may not see

big words such as “facetiously”.

It’s happened now, two vowels are gone;

we’ve got the rest to soldier on.

This crisis might bring you and me

incomprehensibilities.

And if a headache does kick in,

we’ll take acetaminophen.

We’ve lost another, that’s a fact.

How can our threatened world react?

We need to take care, stop the loss

of more vowels , or regret the cost.

So please take heart, and don't feel odd -

We can spell "chocolate", thank God!

We’re down to two, we’ve got one mess,

More problems loom, we do confess.

Those vowels we’ve lost were good for sense,

so now we've got no recompense.

Don't toss the towel, there's hope  - well, jeepers!

we've got long words - for one, "bookkeepers".

Oh no, not good, got only “o”.

So not OK - no word control.

Don't go to pot, no, not tomorrow -

shot of scotch to drown old sorrow.

Shock of loss? No comfort, fool -

woodwork, cookbook - go to school.

M gd w wr afrd f ths:

wv lst thm ll, ths vwls wll mss.

Nw y ll knw wht hppns nxt -

Th lngg tht s lft s txt.

W cnt wrt mch, wll WTF -

xprss yrslf? M frnd, gd lck!

PAD Day 17: Another Two-fer

Well, I wrote two poems today, but I'm not entirely happy with the results. Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: 

(1) Write a "swing" poem, and 

(2) Write a "social media" poem, using material from your own Facebook or Twitter account, blog, etc. 

I don't think I really succeeded at combining the two prompts, but I guess I'm more satisfied with this one, which was written just for the Poetic Asides prompt:

Congressional Playground

They dedicated it today on Capitol Hill
so the kids of senators and congresspersons
can learn what their mommies and daddies do.
Here, they can seesaw up and down on the issues,
slide down from integrity to scandal and shame,
spin on the merry-go-round without getting anywhere,
sit in a seat on a chain and kick their feet Into the air,
and depending on which way the wind blows,
swing to the left, swing to the right.  

The second one was an interesting exercise if not wholly successful.  I decided to take every tenth word that I've posted in my Facebook account in 2015 and use them as a "word bank" for a poem about social media. Since I'm not the most prolific poster on Facebook, it wasn't a ridiculously long list, but I eliminated the more common, throwaway words like "the", "in" and "for" as well as repeated words (though I kept "poetry" and "poem").  Here's my list:

honesty ever neither wait tricky yesterday grab CD's stereo Sue Bell album great corkboards wife poem while Roseanne also stay Cabot Sporcle beginning man other why know Collins former municipal exhibit how poetry included want

And here's the poem, using all the words and then some. ("Sue Cabot" is a fictional person, and so is my persona, to an extent.)

Corkboard

Dear Sue Cabot:

I unfriended you yesterday.

In the beginning, we were soulmates,

sharing our poetry and offering critique -

I liked your honesty. We also had a mutual love

for music - we discussed favorite CD's and great albums,

even reminisced about our first stereo.

We both liked a Billy Collins' poems,

Roseanne Cash's songs,

Sporcle quizzes and Candy Crush.

Then you started to swing to the Right.

I may never know why you waited till now

to show your biases: "Obama is a Muslim";

"Vaccinations are evil", and other such things. 

That was my warning bell -

maybe we weren't so alike after all.

I'm just an average man with a wife and three kids,

and a job in municipal government.

While I think we should all be included in the dialog,

I can't stay friends with you when your views

grab me by the throat like they do.

How did you ever get this way?

Social media is the public corkboard of our age.

We can post and exhibit anything we want,

but even when we take down our notes,

remove the tacks from the surface,

the afterimage of the words remains.

We need to think of the repercussions;

We're neither blameless nor anonymous anymore.

Online friendships are tricky - one ill-advised comment

can bring it all crashing down.

Your former friend,

Bill