I have been at the random word generators again, but this time I liked the words that Randomlists gave me so much that I used them two days in a row! The result was a poem and a story, which are below. Enjoy!
(As a quick note on the poem, ‘greet’ can mean ‘to cry’ in Scots)
He would always wave to greet them before sticking out his thumb. Sometimes he knew who the driver would be, he’d been doing this so long, but not always.
It would depend upon the company running the trucks, of course. There were some who had strict regulations these days about picking up extra weight, or stopping before scheduled to and so on. He described all of this as a supreme “pain in the posterior” that was damaging his way of life.
He claimed that he had travelled the whole country beside one trucker or another – worked in various places for a colourful succession of low life cheats or miserly drunks.
He sat writing what he said were songs in a beaten up notebook marinated in the vegetable soup he always ordered. The manager asked him if he could sing once, and whether his old guitar could still do a turn. He said he’d give it a go, and we made good money on the bar that night – he definitely looked the part in his shabby slept-in clothes and with that defiant twinkle to his eye.
I haven’t seen him for a few years, however. There were reports he’d struck gold somewhere doing…something…but no one I’ve talked to has what I’d call concreteknowledge of his whereabouts.
So, I continue to serve cake in this lil backwater place, give free coffee top-ups and hope he blows in again someday soon. I have made a pact with myself that I’ll tell him next time instead of making small talk awkwardly and hanging around waaay too much. Maybe he sensed trouble and that’s why he bailed? Mum has always said that’s what his father was like, too.
Maybe I’ll just have to settle into the thought of wearing this floofy pink-striped apron for at least another year? If he hopes to wait me out he’ll find I can be juuust as stubborn as him.
And that’s all for today, folks! Have you been doing any art or other creative goodness recently that you would like me to come and experience? Please post a link to your blog or website in the comments below this post 🙂
Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!
As I have no doubt mentioned a few times before, I write at least 500 words every day as part of my daily creative practice. Sometimes it is ‘just’ rambles about my day or working out a thought/feeling on the screen (or paper)…but yesterday evening I decided to revisit the Random Word Generator site and write a poem.
This extended to a total of SIX random word poems in the end, so I will share two of my favourite ones below.
Both poems are about relationships that left an impression on the speaker, and both poems use the first two generated words as a small phrase that gave me the idea for the rest of the narrative 😉 I hope you enjoy them!
(As usual I got the generator to spit out nine words for each poem, following the procedure outlined here.)
PAST LIFE LOVE?
With her lucky horseshoe smile
And kind manner
I felt my axis tip;
We all hear that life is no rehearsal
But, in that small café,
I wondered whether there were acts we just forgot we’d aced.
While her eyes were the hook
I knew I should depend upon the frisson ‘cross my skin…
Amber was the liquid of my heart
Her memory suspended there by time.
ALL THE THINGS HE SAID
It was a college confrontation
Every painter, he said, produced rubbish with a plan.
Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!
“Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that, like The Color of Pomegranates and “City That Does Not Sleep,” incorporates wild, surreal images. Try to play around with writing that doesn’t make formal sense, but which engages all the senses and involves dream-logic.”[from the NaPoWriMo site]
I got to the end of the day and once more was extremely tired, so I think I was actually dreaming when I wrote this poem! It’s a bit Enid Blyton meets nonense-y, which kind of fulfils the prompt? Anyway, it also rhymes, which I thought was impressive for my attention span after lots of Easter fun with the boys in the (sunny!!!) back garden 😉
It is reminiscent of the stuff I used to write in early high school, come to think of it. Awww, my subconscious mind is still semi-childlike (!!)
Oh, and because I was supposed to make the poem a bit weird, I enlisted the Jimpix generator’s help, too…
Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!
“Our prompt for today (optional, as always), takes its inspiration from the idea of a poem as a sort of tiny play, which can be performed dramatically….today, I’d like to challenge you to write your own dramatic monologue. It doesn’t have to be quite as serious as Browning or Shakespeare, of course, but try to create a sort of specific voice or character that can act as the “speaker” of your poem, and that could be acted by someone reciting the poem”[from the NaPoWriMo site]
I love writing the kind of poem that could be performed! I wrote this one and gave myself the idea for this blog, and I have written quite a few others over the years!
But what to make today’s ‘dramatic monologue’ about? I was really a bit stumped.
Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!
To explain: I wrote a series of 40-syllable 10-line verses (with a syllable layout of 1,2,3,4,10,10,4,3,2,1) around the theme of a story that unfolds over a long-ish time period and incorporates the words below!!
As
Always
These are her
Habitual
Army of thoughts: negative troops of pain
Hop between recollections, turning her
Neuroscience
Toxic. Her
Friendships
Stale.
There
Was once
This lovely
Man, one kid each,
A comfortable house…but inside she
Would compare unfavourably, always
Sure happiness
Was just a
Fatal
Boast.
The
Children
Grew anxious
The man: distant.
She would judge herself harshly but still strive
To paddle against their tide; switch comfort
For perfection,
Teamwork for
Solo
Ire.
Proud
In a
Tight way (for
Failure could loom)
She stored up stories to keep them humble;
Baked and gave. Inauthentically kind.
Good manners with
Smile plastered;
Practiced
Act.
‘Grand’
Kids bore
Grander ones,
That seldom greet
This lonely figure in her scrubbed box, with
More windows than walls. She dusts their framed smiles
By the mountain
She’ll traverse
Before
Sleep.
Hopefully you like what I came up with, and it makes sense…!
Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!
Ok, we are on the second day of Global/National Poetry Writing Month!On the site, participants have been challenged to write a poem that culminates in a question.I thought it was time to face the Jimpix generator again – it always makes me enquire about the
meanings of words,
ask myself how the heck I make a cohesive narrative from the fodder it throws up,
seek interesting ways to cobble together sentences and forage for the sense in the chaos… (I have learned that ‘gewgaw’ means ‘a (particularly useless) showy thing’,which tickled me)
He showed me a new gewgaw
Auntie had seen fit to buy
(I need more tat festering
Like a large thorn in my eye)
Her ploy had worked, however:
‘Waylon cuddles’ had ensued
(He rifled through her handbag
With his free hand, which was rude)
Picking through the hovel-y mess
Past Ruscles with his bone,
I then tried to serve dinner (and
Placate my rage hormones)
Husband appeared: the magic sis
Hastening his commute.
Raucous chat over parsnips,
(A floor filthy from his boots)
This man, that boy, this avalanche
Of ‘joy’…!
My brain disjoints.
I wear this weighty wedding ring –
But wonder: what’s the point?
I got a flash of an open-plan living/dining room and a newly-wed woman with PMT trying to entertain – totally at the end of her tether and regretting tying herself into being a wife/step-mum/sister in law…
Where would you have gone with this word selection?!
Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!
The optional prompt forNaPoWriMotoday is to write instructions in a poem.
In my usual way, I have decided to consult the universe and ask it to…instruct?…me by means of a random word generator. Today I used Textfixer. It appeared to have a rather vicious agenda to begin with…!
If you want to woo me,
Don’t make each conversation a bloodsport.
Don’t escalate my voice to fever pitch,
As I bare eachtooth
And scatter my fragile jigsaw under your menacing glare.
Trying to account
For the irregular edges
Takes all my energy.
Forevermissing something,
A capsule erroneouslyopened.
This ‘white whale‘
That eludes even itself.
Tempt me in
With the fizzof your intellect;
Praise my efforts
To disguise how convertible
I know your fickle pleasure boat to be.
Does this read as instructions, or just commands?! Spot the mixed metaphors too…!
No matter: that’s the first ‘official’ April 2019 poem done and dusted! Hurrah!
Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!
Yes, I know: it’s been almost six months since I showed up here and posted some of my ramblings…there are many ‘excuses’ that spring to mind, but it all comes under the umbrella of needing a break from the expectations I was putting myself under, and a yearning to explore my creativity without constraint.
It is the start of Global/National Poetry Writing Month tomorrow, however, and I thought that this was probably a good opportunity to get back into some regular blog writing again. In the month of April, it is customary to write a poem a day and pop it up on one’s website for others to read.
I have been trying to write at least 500 words a day in a document on my computer since the 18th of February, just to see what comes out, and I have been dabbling in the odd Random Word Poem again, using one of the sites I used to frequentat the beginning of my blogging days.
It is Mother’s Day in the UK today (I live in Scotland), and the second of the two poems I wrote in my practice yesterday fits nicely with this, I feel:
“Deer mum”,
It starts, but he has to think,
So he proceeds
To insert each finger
Slowly into his ear
One at a time;
The findings examined with care.
I think about the atmosphere
I left back ‘home’.
The plane swooping through clouds.
I listen for any sign
We might be in danger,
Hope we can depend
On Ben’s silent lack of Press…
My child decides on
“I love you!!!“
To end his epistle;
Enlists a medieval knight to
Hasten it across seats.
I finished listening to the prequel of “The Oxford Tearoom Mysteries” on Friday, and I think maybe it seeped into my poem a little, too. It starts with a flight from Australia to England and hints at past lives…
I wonder what has happened between ‘Ben’ and the speaker in my poem?
Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!
Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!
Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!
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