PAD Day 27: Oh, Humanity...

 Today's prompts:

WBP: Write a "remix" poem. (That is, take one of your previous poems and change it up in some way - turn a form poem into a non-form one, or turn its message into its opposite, mix the lines around, etc.)

NPWM: Write an "American Sonnet."

PSH: "Human beings are so pervasive; we insert ourselves in every situation. Write a poem about a time you saw human’s influence in an unexpected place. Bonus points for using an unexpected form (one you don’t use often.)"  (C.W.Bryan)

I'll probably do the "remix" prompt later. (What I have liked to do in the past with that prompt is take individual lines from previous poems I wrote this month and string them together into a new poem.)

The "American Sonnet" is simply a shorter poem of about 14 lines, with very few rules regarding meter or rhyme. It's just supposed to be a discursive poem that captures the general spirit or form of the traditional sonnet. Several famous poets have written what they dub "American Sonnets,", like Billy Collins, Terence Hayes, and Gerald Stern. I often find, when I've written a shorter free verse poem, that it happens to end up being fourteen lines, with maybe an average of ten syllables a line, so some of them could probably be labelled as American sonnets. As to the third prompt, one example that sticks in my mind (and certainly not a positive one) is an incident at a national park that was captured in a now-viral video and made the national news.

To the Two Men Who Destroyed Ancient Rocks at Lake Mead
 
Bros, what made you think it was cool
to “trundle” those huge red sandstone rocks
that began to form in dinosaur times
one-hundred-forty million years ago?
You watch with glee as a young girl screams
and they explode to sand on the ground,
ancient marvels, reduced in seconds to dust.
What an example for your daughter,
watching you ruin nature’s antiquities.
Would you dynamite a glacier,
smash stalactites in a cavern with a hammer?
These are Mother Nature’s works of art,
chiseled and polished over eons,
long before you, allegedly, evolved.

As of this writing, I don't think these two have been identified or caught. Unfortunately, they happened to pick an area for their shenanigans that has already been devastated most likely by man-made climate change: the drought-driven drying of Lake Mead.