National Poetry Month 2014

Welcome back, Dear Readers, to Math Awareness Month and the fifth annual incarnation of this poetry blog.

This year, I'm getting back to basics: for the next thirty days I will write and post a new poem determined by the following randomizing system: I have a deck of playing cards and a twenty sided die. Each card is assigned a prompt and each side a form. In the morning I will draw a card and roll the die, and then, using the randomly selected topic and form, write and post the poem here before I go to sleep.

The list of prompts is as follows:

2c	Minimum Wage
2d	Gong Farming
2h	Small Victories
2s	Palate Cleansers
3c	Blurred Lines
3d	Slow Television
3h	School Photos
3s	Spirit Animals
4c	Heroin Chic
4d	Stars Without Makeup
4h	Stage Kisses
4s	Cold Feet
5c	Easter Island
5d	Flightless Birds
5h	Constellations
5s	Koala Attacks
6c	Armchair Quarterbacks
6d	Armchair Suicides
6h	Dead Grandfathers
6s	The War on Christmas
7c	Bloodless Coups
7d	Sleeper Cells
7h	Strategic Losses
7s	Pyrrhic Victories
8c	Saffron
8d	Lotus Eaters
8h	William Blake References
8s	Circular Logic
9c	Reality TV Villains
9d	Horrible Bosses
9h	The Westboro Baptist Church
9s	Tea Parties
10c	Bay State Road
10d	The Western Wall
10h	Espresso Royale Caffe (sic)
10s	The Moana Surfrider Hotel
jc	Catharism
jd	Second Chances
jh	Errant Knights
js	Being Older than James Dean
qc	Miscarriages
qd	Amelia Earhart
qh	Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe
qs	Killing Two Birds With One Stone
kc	Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain *
kd	Elvis Impersonators
kh	Henry IV Part 1
ks	Divine Right
ac	Survivor Guilt
ad	Unfinished Screenplays
ah	Failed Actors
as	Poetry Blogs

And forms:

1	Prose
2	Shakesperian Sonnet
3	Tweet Length
4	Rubai
5	Writer's Choice
6	Limerick
7	Folk Song
8	Free Verse
9	Haiku
10	Acrostic
11	Tweet Length
12	Blank Verse
13	Hip Hopera (detail)
14	Writer's Choice
15	Free Verse
16	Tanka
17	Rondeau
18	Tweet Length
19	Alexandrine Couplets
20	Writer's Choice

Ground Rules:

- I will follow the system every day even if it means I have to write a Haiku about 'Blurred Lines'.

- Once a topic is used, it will not be put back in the deck.

- Jokers are wild (explanations to come)


Check out previous years here:


2010
2011
2012
2013

Enjoy and thanks for reading!

* To commemorate Confederate History Month

April Is On Its Way

Welcome (back), dear readers!

April will be here before we know it and that means that we'll all soon be celebrating Tweed Day (April 3rd), Plan Your Epitaph Day (April 6th), Hairstyle Appreciation Day (April 30th).
(There's got to be a Morrissey joke in that last sentence somewhere.)

Also, for the fifth year in a row, I will be embarking on the Put Your Collar Down Elvis project.

For those of you who have been here before - I'd love to get your feedback about what you'd like to see. Send gripes, accolades, and most important poetry topics to putyourcollardownelvis@gmail.com

-

If this is your first time here, awesome!

Check out the basic premise here

And successive years here:
2011
2012
2013

Below is a sampling of some of my favorites:
Teen Angst
Intellectual Conundrums
Righteous Gentiles
Double Entendres
Buddhist Allegories
Alcoholic Businessmen
Boxcar Hobos


Expect some new content here April 1st. Read and enjoy, my friends!

April 30th - Fan Fiction

Five of Spades - Fan Fiction

Discovering Fan Fiction

You really enjoyed Harry Potter

You read it out loud to your daughter

So when searching online

You’re bewildered to find

Some weird shit involving an otter

-

I will not provide links to anything I stumbled upon while researching today’s topic. Certain things cannot be unread.

-

That's all for now. Thank you for reading, my friends. 

If you like what I'm doing, tell someone about it. Or become a fan on Facebook. Or find me a wealthy benefactor, or whatever.

Until next year (maybe a little sooner)...

April 29th - 20 Sided Dice

Ace of Hearts - 20 Sided Dice

Manhattan Island, Seventeen

It rolls
Across the table
A jumble of angles
Thousands of degrees
An Icosahedron in motion

Moist palms anticipating
We wait
The six of us
Hunched forward
With no faltering
With no sense of resignation
No weariness
Shining eyes knees shaking
Drinking sugared soda from the can

East River breezes float through curtains
Carrying Canadian air
Against the table
Affecting our outcome
Infinitesimally
As still in flux
The die rolls towards certain resolution
One outcome
Of twenty
Only twenty!

April 28th - Bonfires

Ten of Hearts - Bonfires

Hatteras Island, Seventeen

We drag through the sand
Collecting driftwood, dry grass
Abandoned beer cans

Anything to use as fuel
To ignite the summer night

April 27th - FPB

Four of Spades - Female Pattern Baldness

What Fell

I find you
Everywhere
Dark shrubbery in the carpet
Vines crawling up the wallpaper
In the shower
Latticed in the drain
Like a robin's nest
Fallen branches
On your pillow

All over my body
Threaded through the bases of my fingers
Hanging tenaciously behind my ear
In my boxers
Coiled around and inside me
Climbing up my thigh
Coming out in clumps in my hands

April 26th - Joker

Joker - ???
Three of Hearts - Facebook Engagement Photos

Please, stop it America.

April 25th - Emotional Adultery

Five of Diamonds - Emotional Adultery

Syllabic Adultery

I can tell
By the way
You roll your tongue around his
Name - his vowels and hardstops
They have interesting company:
Veil
Kiss
Love
Fuck
Vic

April 24th - Veronica Lake

Queen of Hearts - Veronica Lake




Much of the credit here goes to Nico, who provided a much needed prompt.

Oh, and this is not a poem.

Oh Sister, Where Art Thou?

The reason I grew out my bangs in fourth grade was because my mom said it would be like Veronica Lake.

                Our favorite movie was Sullivan’s Travels and we would sit on the couch together and watch it. We’d watch it together on rainy Sundays under the dinosaur blanket that smelled like Dorothy. I’d sing along to the score on mornings that I was home sick from school. I’d mouth the lines while dozing against my mom’s small shoulder. I’d dream that I was The Girl, sitting at the fire with a circle of kind hobos, faithful Dorothy at my side.

                This dream would often carry into morning. I would take it to school with me and outside on the padded puzzle piece floor I would lean against the covered slide and try to explain my games to my cohorts:

                “So you’re the driver of the car, and you’re driving the van, and you’re the chef inside the van, and…”

            “Why is there a chef inside the van?”

“Because there is a kitchen in the van.”

“This game is dumb.”

                I yearned to live in the world of Sullivan’s Travels and my mother’s declaration about Veronica Lake gave me hope. I spent all summer waiting. I’d scowl at the mirror impatiently, pulling at my hair, yelling at Dorothy to shut up her barking.

                By the first day of the fifth grade, my bangs had grown over my left eye and I was ready. The night before, I had laid out my clothes on the floor. There were two outfits: a long dress with a crepe paper rose my mom had help me sew on and a set of “hobo clothes” (oversized pant and jacket, and a jaunty hat that was once my dad’s). In the morning, I had so much trouble deciding which to wear, that I missed my school bus. My mom was pretty annoyed and I fiddled with the rose and stayed quiet as she drove me.

                When I walked in to the school, in that dress, with that hair, I really felt like Veronica Lake. I had perfect posture and held my head high. I only spoke with quotes from the movie. Nobody really knew what to say back to me and some of the kids looked at me weird. Also it was a little hard to see out of my left eye.

None of this deterred me, though. I found other fires to stoke my imagination. My homeroom teacher, Mister Melbein had a big chin and a bulbous nose and was just handsome enough that sometimes I pretended he was Joel McCrea.

             He’d call on me during math:

            “Nicole, could you come up and show us the next number in the series?”

“Why, Mr. Smearcase, aren’t you getting a little familiar?”

“Um.”

The semester drew to a close. I averaged a “Meets Expectations” on my report card, Mr. Melbein commenting that I showed promise but was “often distracted.”

I spent spring break at my cousins’ house. Carrie was obsessed with High School Musical. We spent most of our time there in her room that smelled like her stupid cat. We watched the movie twelve times in eight days.

                When I got back to my house, the night before the first day back at school, I noticed that my hair had grown longer. I hadn't looked in the mirror in over a week. I let Dorothy* sleep in my bed that night.

                May came, unseasonably warm, purple lilacs opening, and I was looking more and more like Veronica Lake. But it was too hot for my long dress or my hobo clothes, so most days I wore T-shirts and shorts to school.

One day, during our section on Greek Myths, Mister Melbein was telling us the story of how Odysseus stabbed poor Polyphemus in the eye and there was a picture of them fighting each other in our book of myths (it was a book for kids). All of a sudden, Jennifer Rosen blurted out, “It’s Nicole!” and obviously she meant the Cyclops and everyone laughed, even Mister Melbein. Then he stopped laughing and took Jennifer outside the class.

That evening I asked my mom to take me to the hairdresser on Saturday. She put down her book and asked me in an even voice, “Are you sure?”

On Saturday, I sat in the swivel chair and mumbled a goodbye to each clump of blond hair as it hit the linoleum floor. Walking out the door, I watched with both my eyes as the clumps were all swept away to mix with the dark curls and brown strands and on and on – all of the hair that had collected that day.

April 23rd - Pokemon

Two of Clubs - Pokemon

Electric Type

I caught you
Rare as you are
One improbable day
And now
You learn from experience
You fight my battles
You sleep in my pocket

Don't evolve
Not yet