O children of our thoughtless world, Rise up to claim your prize. We've left you worthless baubles, We've left what you despise. In times long past, when 'things were good' Rewards fell in our lap. We now disdain your plaintive cries that All we've left seems crap. Times get easy, times get tough, It's not our fault we won— We cashed those chips that came to us As we think you'd have done. Wonder not why we don't hear Your cries for fairness' sake. All we want lies in our graves Where we'll be when things break. We know deep down your reckoning Will come as in life's past. You'll wonder as you're winning why Your children stare aghast.
21/100
Perhaps not everyone will agree with me on this one. Should you disagree, we can discuss in the comments.
20/100 I’m writing a poem a day (sometimes two), and now I’m 20% there. It’s causing me to rethink poetry and my approach to it, when and how I’ve written it in the past.
I’ve heard a writer should never apologize for his work. If I didn’t feel the compulsion to put a poem up here, I would work on this more. As may be: like a little boy who’s never quite clean enough for company, “it’ll do.”
for fifty years plus five or six he carried words he wrote. they traveled in one banker's box: to everywhere he'd stay. they seldom saw much light.
he carried dreams for less than that— they died in his mid-life. he feared his will, lost hope, discerned no path. life handed him ways he found weird, brought a future bright.
throughout bright hopeless times he wrote to capture what he felt. his prose earned bread but poems' notes sustained his soul—it is what kept dull paths away.
electrons now contain his thoughts, self-published at his whim. without his dreams he found he'd bought release from what trapped him. dreams died but words found day.
One to conceptualize it, Three to interpret it (in three different ways), Five to be too busy composing, and One food-poet to cook the meal.
How many poets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Two to perform scansion of each turn of the bulb (and argue about it), One to comment on bringing light to the darkness, One to rail against Man's innate desire to alter reality, Five to demonstrate ignorance of basic threaded objects, and One mechanical-poet to screw it in.
How many cooks and janitors does it take to describe grief as relayed in the robin's song at dawn which promises another empty day? How many paint their pain with words, plain for all persons to see? How many read to the last line of a silly poem about cooking dinners and changing lightbulbs?
16/100
Today I discovered I had numbered two poems #9. Yay! This so-called 15th poem is the 16th!
I had thought the poems I dragged out of notebooks and polished would garner more comments and better ‘reviews’ than those dashed out on the fly, but this isn’t the case. For the record, poems 1 and 2 were openly declared as poems written in June while traveling in Scotland, Wales, and England. I just hadn’t got around to posting before I started this 100-day challenge. Poem #3, “Business Poetry 101,” was written approximately 2004 or 2005, edited moderately and posted. Poem #7, “Between the Boards,” also received moderate editing; the biggest change occurred when I moved the final lines down one to signify they occurred at the same spacing as the boldfaced ones above them, and eventually they became boldfaced as they composed a new set of boundaries. The haiku written as #9 but in reality was #10 sprang from an opening line to a haiku which I then re-wrote for lines two and three. The most recent recycle job was #11,”Dova,” which had a final, three-line stanza added to it. I’m pretty sure I’ve run out of poems worthy of being recycled, 16% of the way into this challenge, the training wheels come off, the water wings disappear, and I need to keep the plates spinning by myself now. After that my next biggest challenge will be in two weeks when I need to write a poem each day while on a two-week vacation. (I might just stockpile them.)
Nighttime scribbles. Wish I could remember what that great title goes with.
One: did words just pop into your head? Dressed for success? Silently shouting, "Look. At. Me." Well? What will you write in response?
Two: did last night's "Tah-dah!" moment, captured scribblingly, profess any worth when illuminated by morning sun? Or did beer think itself scholarly? Well?
Three: has this image squatted in your mind, vagrantly occupying your attention, its presence exciting but annoying? Evict it by describing it?
Four: if Image brings her friend, Emotion, accompanying your nighttime scribbles, party troika promising trouble plus fun— you've got poetry.
Good luck, sucker, hanging on to your sense of control. See ya after your eyeballs roll back, you forget your agenda, you forget your promises.
Ghosts, slipping treelike through forests populated by people looking just like they once did. Slowly dissolving, windborne gossamer, 'til people look through them. Haunting not others, but themselves with each mirror-ward glance. Remembering when they treated ghosts similarly, in youthful vibrancy.
Angry Drunk Driving my pickup, Six-pack beside me. Timing my throws to Hit empties into the Truck bed. Blind, thinking Endless thought loops.
Years later. Angry drunk. Driving miles while still Sitting in my chair. Still timing my throws Of empty thoughts to Capture blind thinking: Endless thought loops.
More years Still angry. Still drunk. Tired of driving Mental miles worn Deeply in my mind. Emptied soul tiring Of postured thinking: Break my thought loops.
all the voices in my head 