The Napowrimo.net prompt for Day 20 is ‘to write a poem that involves rebellion in some way.’ Since part of my writing practice is to regularly find ways to rebel against my own natural tendencies, this required some extra thought.

What I came up with is to take a poem I recently wrote (but haven’t posted anywhere) and simply list all its words in alphabetical order, with each new letter of the alphabet starting on a new line. I’m referring to this version of the poem (in this case, Bookstore Poem #220) as the ‘build-it-yourself’ version—but really you can approach it in a couple of different ways. One is on its own merits (as such) as an oddball poem that may or may not make sense. The other is to treat it as though it were a piece of build-it-yourself furniture, with all the available parts (words) listed; from those parts (words), you can build your own poem.

Let the weirdness begin!

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