NaPoWriMo: 2

OK, I found the NaPoWriMo site, created and registered this sucky blog, and saw that the prompt for today is “a poem that tells a lie.”  I deviated a tiny bit and wrote a poem about a lie told to me recently.  Here’s what I got before I absolutely had to go to bed because I’ve got an old friend coming to visit tomorrow:

BB Gun
You tell me that you’ve tried to mail the gun:
four different UPSs, but not one
could do it.  And I think you’re lying, yet
it’s not that big of deal; I’m not upset.
Amazed you found it, cleaning, last July,
I’m pleased you’ll even send it.  If you’ll try
to get it mailed I do not mind a wait,
as I have lived already twenty-eight
long years without it.

I had such plans for this one, to which I might return at a later date.  E.g.:
*the mental calculation made to include a detail (four trips) which would render the fib more “plausible,” yet this detail is absurd: why would one continue wasting time at UPS stores after the first failure?  This whole unnecessary fib is more appropriate to a child, which could tie in with the BB gun.
*seeing starlings in the back yard today whilst I did dishes, remembering dad shooting them with his 12-guage, which I was afraid of shooting at the time.  How the finding of the BB gun last summer happened when we were cleaning out Dad’s place when he moved to assisted living.
*desire to shoot at said starlings with BB gun, for which own wife chewed out a neighbor man when we moved to the neighborhood
*childhood guilt after having killed “dicky birds” on the power line
*secret wondering if brother is stalling on the mailing because he now wants the BB gun, and how this suspicion or rival claim is also an echo of childhood.

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NaPoWriMo: 1

OK, off to a rocky start.  A couple weeks back, a friend told me about National Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo (see napowrimo.net), which encourages people to write a poem each day during April, which is National Poetry Month.  Each day, writers are given a prompt.  April 1, the prompt was to write a poem which has the same first line as another poem.  Except I’d forgotten the name NaPoWriMo and couldn’t find the prompt.  So, after spending a lot of time looking in vain for the daily prompt at poets.org, I decided I’d just write a poem anyhow, and track down the prompt on April 2.  I tried a sestina at first–I remember a friend in college wrote one and it was awesome–but it quickly became evident they’re hard to write.  So I went with haiku.  Which was also hard, but thirty-six lines shorter.  Anyhoo, here goes.  My seasonal reference is “winter” (subtle, yes?) and my kireji or cutting word is “exchange.”  It’s the first poem I’ve tried to write in twenty years.  Oh:  I got a tooth pulled in February.  I ended up really enjoying the pain pills the oral surgeon prescribed, and my two days of lazy narcotic loafing was such a relief after all the dread prior to the extraction that, looking back, I considered it a fair trade.

Molar Fifteen and the Hydrocodone
a winter exchange
all of them small, hard, and white
tooth for narcotics