Sunday, April 1, 2018

PAD, Here I Come!

It's that time of year again - the April Poem-a-day Challenge!  Despite my dismally paltry output of poetry since last November when I last did a poem-a-day challenge, I'm getting back on the horse and trying to crank out at least one poem a day for the next thirty. I may start out a little rusty, but I hope to produce something of value. (One of my poems from last April will appear very soon in the new issue of US 1 Worksheets poetry journal.)
As usual, I will be trying to combine the prompts each day from Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides blog and Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo blog. Today is easy, because they both seem on the same wavelength: both prompts are to write a poem about a secret, but Maureen's more specifically suggests writing about a secret shame or secret pleasure. Since they sometimes go hand-in-hand, here's my take on it:


Balance

I walk a line, a boundary between two properties -
on the left is shame; on the right, pleasure.

I can't tell you where these secret places are,
but when I walk that line, surveyed out,

marked with chalk and little yellow flags,
I am in both places and neither.

So when I stay up late while everyone's asleep
to watch trashy movies and eat tortilla chips,

when I'm supposed to be doing my taxes,
but instead I go down a rabbit hole of click-bait,

when I air-guitar to some favorite classic rock
instead of pushing a vacuum cleaner,

I am walking heel-to-toe on that long borderline,
and maybe I feel guilty, but I'm smiling too.

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