Today's prompt from Poetic Asides: Write a "remix" of a poem you have written this month. This can mean any of several things: For instance, take the words of your poem and scramble them to re-assemble into another poem; or write a "response" or an "opposite" to a previous poem; or as in my case, use lines from your previous poems to create a new one. A fellow poet once described this as a "self-cento" I've done this a couple of times and it's kind of fun - it's interesting in which direction the poem ends up going. For this one, I set up two ground rules: (1) I could only use the last lines of previous poems (as many as I could to make a coherent new poem), and (2) I couldn't write more than one new line between the lines borrowed from previous poems. So here is the result:
Post-apocalypse
Glistening morning,
jacket required -
you watch the wine-colored clouds
put on a Technicolor show,
and think with some irony,
Well done, lads, well
done.
I want to know: Who fixes you?
You no longer think about how
peace someday may come.
Hopes roll in like tide and then
pull away into the dark water.
Time, the great leveler of aspirations.
Who's won?
It doesn't matter - you'll still have to watch
over your long-suffering family,
without worrying how their world will end.
You make a vow to
live.
Dark forces will not end you,
leaving nothing but a stump as your legacy.
You'll fight to sail
safely to your bedroom shore,
world without end,
Amen.
And here are the borrowed lines, with the day I wrote each one:
Line 1 - day 2
Line 2 - day 2
Line 3 - day 21
Line 4 - day 13
Line 6 - day 16
Line 7 - day 10
Line 9 - day 18
Line 11 - day 6
Line 12 - day 3
Line 13 - day 19
Line 15 - day 23
Line 16 - day 22
Line 18 - day 11
Line 20 - day 17
Line 22 - day 20
Line 24 - day 25
I made only some minor changes in some of the borrowed lines, mostly changes to the second person.
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