PAD Day 3: Plums and Connections

 Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "connection" poem, and (2) "Find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite.... Your first draft of this kind of “opposite” poem will likely need a little polishing, but this is a fun way to respond to a poem you like, while also learning how that poem’s rhetorical strategies really work."

Once again, I had trouble combining the prompts, but that's never really a problem because I get two poems out of them instead of one. These are short, though - I have an affinity for shorter poems these days. Maybe it's my busy life, or my short attention span, but short poems seem to be in fashion these days, with the popularity of poets like Rupi Kaur. (Don't get me started.) And Billy Collins' new collection is all shorter poems. Anyway, here's the first:

Disconnected
 
You call and leave a message
that she has passed away.
 
Maybe I'll call you back.
You have my sympathy,
but not my grief.
 
You broke that connection
years ago.

And the second is a response to the famous William Carlos Williams poem "This is Just to Say." I have done parodies of this one before, as have many others, so you might say it's "low-hanging fruit," ha-ha.

I'm Not Sayin' 

I didn't eat
the prunes
that were not
in the refrigerator
 
and which
you probably weren't
saving
for dinner
 
but I'm not sorry
they were awful
so sour
and so warm