PAD Day 4: And Now for Something Completely Demented...

I needed today's prompt. It was silly, demented fun. The dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "wish" poem, and (2) write a poem based on an image from a dream. The latter blog offers several Twitter accounts that generate some strange and surreal dream-like images than could be used as poetic inspiration, so since I rarely remember my dreams anymore, I used them as my source rather than my own brain. I especially got into "Magic Realism Bot", which generates something whimsically weird every four hours, like "An ostrich whispers to an office manager: 'I feel so alone'," or "In Colorado there is a lime tree which likes to drink margaritas." I read a bunch of these to get into the spirit of it, but I didn't steal any of the images for my poem - they are entirely my own. As I said, it was silly fun, and I needed that badly.y.

Ode to Magic Realism Bot

[after a thing on Twitter]

O Bot, I wish I could make my own dreams like you.

I wish I could play pinochle with cheddar cheese.

I wish that Peruvians could drink iced banana wine.

I wish for a private jet stuffed with pancakes.

I wish that dreams could unspool like vacuum cleaner cords,

and slide on linoleum until their hands were blue.

O Bot, give me dreams of major league toads in pinstripes,

or of Michael Stipe as a refrigerator.

Let me dream of falling from a seventeen-story toilet,

checking my cellphone shaped like a unicorn

before I land. Help me see Atlantis through a Coke bottle,

and play "Melancholy Baby" on a tube of toothpaste.

I wish for the ghost of Salvador Dali to pull off his mustache,

for hula hoops to grow from trees, for eight more days

of strawberry yogurt rain, for my bed to turn upside down

and shake me out before I disappear into the mattress.

O Bot, make this all happen every four hours,

and repeat as necessary.