Upon waking up from the dream in which I’m running around the house honking like Felix Ungar, scaring away the beautiful woman in the Morticia Addams dress in the process (a poem)

The January 22nd prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to write a two-line poem with no more than thirteen syllables in each line, then give it a title that is either really long or just one word.

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Grandpa’s pipe (a poem)

The January 21st prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to ‘focus on taste, hearing, scent, and touch’ instead of on sight. I diverged from the prompt after that, going back to a childhood memory instead of noting things throughout my day…

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Running on empty (a poem)

The January 14th prompt in The Daily Poet, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to write a poem that consists of one run-on sentence—commas okay, but no colons or semi-colons. I hate run-on sentences, but I figured I’d give this one a shot.

I ended up, more or less, with a prose poem. I don’t like prose poems, but breaking this one up into lines and stanzas didn’t make sense, so I will just let it be…

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The Reading (a poem)

The January 10th prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to pick a letter of the alphabet, and accumulate a list of at least 25 words starting with that letter, then ‘use at least 15 in a poem about something that does not start with that letter.’ Since I did not write anything on Saturday, and today’s prompt did not spark my interest, I tackled this one today.

The list of words I came up with: temptation, text, tunnel, therapist, talk, tears, tarot, train, table, TV, thermostat, tape, tree, today, Tuesday, twin, thermos, telephone, throw, theatre, tombstone, testify, Thursday, trapped, three, Texas, there, talent, truth, think, trumpet, thunder, trap, travel, time, tradition, transit, together, triangle, thought.

I mixed things up further by writing about my experience at a poetry reading on Sunday.

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Urban pillow fort (a poem)

The January 6th prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to ‘[w]rite a poem that begins with the image of a stone, then add at least five of these words to it: kamikaze, landslide, spill, bridge, vaccine, read, red, hollow, mismatch, tilt, freeway, pillow, harmonica, fairy shrimp.’ (I skipped the ‘extra credit’ part, which involved ending with ‘a soup image’.)

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Meatloaf and crackers (a poem)

I was trying to follow the January 3rd prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell-Agodon and Martha Silano, which says to use fifteen words that you don’t normally use in your poems. I opted to grab several books and pick random words. Unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied with the results I was getting, probably because I was still choosing the words—and they tended to be the kinds of words I would choose, whether or not I had used them before. So, I ended up with a tanka.

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I want to be more like the color red (a poem)

The December 23rd prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, didn’t interest me—so I went to the December 24th prompt, which provided a few possible first lines for a poem. I chose I want to be more like the color red

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The endless journey (a poem)

The December 21st prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to write a poem beginning with the line 96% of the universe is made up of the dark and unknown. I modified that ever-so-slightly…

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Saturday morning (a poem)

Now back to some regular poeting…

The November 29th prompt in The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano, is to ‘[w]rite a poem that begins with the next thing anyone says to you.’ If nobody else is around, it suggests calling somebody up, or turning on the TV or radio, and using the first thing you hear. Of course, with my luck, the first thing I encountered was a commercial that opened with somebody asking ‘What’s up?’ Meh. I kept watching, in case the program to follow, The Dick Van Dyke Show, offered something better. The episode opened with Mary Tyler Moore asking ‘What’s this?’ Okay, okay…

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