Man, I hurt. My accident of three weeks ago has left me two stiff knees, broken bones in both forearms, assorted pain I think is more broken bones in my hands and wrists, and perhaps a strained tendon in the ankle which rolled. My shoulder hurts from what I suspect is bursitis, and if I told you how it occurred doing nothing you would shake your head. The minor but ever-present ache in my right hip seems almost superfluous at this point. All of this inspired this poem.
August 2026.
New pains attack daily. Old ones settle in like fringe relatives who won't leave. Memories don't fail, they crowd each other out. Challenges also pile up, sapping desire to grapple 'yet again' with those never- ending tasks which repeat.
But....
Small moments harbor poignancy unfelt in youthful years. Sunsets seem more magical, plants more interesting. Good meals sustain constant pleasure. Music, books span decades! Undoable projects, now doable. Time? Alternately your friend, your enemy.
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.)
all the voices in my head 