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Apr 27
Boo! 😉
Almost 4 solid weeks of writing poetry have passed, now!
“Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a “duplex.” A “duplex” is a variation on the sonnet, developed by the poet Jericho Brown. Here’s one of his first “Duplex” poems, and here is a duplex written by the poet I.S. Jones. Like a typical sonnet, a duplex has fourteen lines. It’s organized into seven, two-line stanzas. The second line of the first stanza is echoed by (but not identical to) the first line of the second stanza, the second line of the second stanza is echoed by (but not identical to) the first line of the third stanza, and so on. The last line of the poem is the same as the first.” [from Day Twenty-Seven (napowrimo.net)]
Having looked into a few more of Brown’s poems, I see that he doesn’t always keep his line at the end identical to the first – see this poem. But, within that poem, he does make the repeated lines identical! So I decided to keep 10 syllables to each line, incorporate rough repeating lines, and make the last line pretty close to the first… 😉
So: what if I’d the sense to be so brave:
Not hatched some beautiful children at all?
Children I love enough to stem beauty
Filtering through me; unbidden, flowing.
My filtered flow would delight readership,
Of strangers – thousands unhugged by my arms;
Arms now stripped of hug hanker by Covid
Only filled by the children I have spawned,
Childish toys, now, my ring of makeshift friends,
Marooned upon an island flecked with gold.
My golden years a way off, green behind;
These settling, middling, comfy-restless days.
My unsettling, and beautiful, entwined!
I’m wondering: in which sense that’s not brave…?
This is definitely not the easiest of poetic forms! I’ve tweaked and tampered a lot with this one since I started it just after lunch. It was not a 15-minute wonder, that’s for sure. I’m posting it before midnight so that I don’t keep myself awake tapping at it into the small hours!
Only 3 more days of NaPo to go! Meet you here tomorrow 😉
Monty X
[pic is from here]
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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!
Apr 12
Hi! 😊
Yesterday, I challenged you to write a poem about a very large thing. Today, I’d like you to invert your inspiration, and write a poem about a very small thing. [Day Twelve (napowrimo.net)]
What I came up with was also smaller in length than some of my other poems!
I try to quell the eddies
When they start:
Smile a little brighter,
Ask another question
Of the extroverted ones.
Stuff a cake in my mouth
While others take their foot out of theirs.
Good China can rattle too loudly,
It draws attention.
Annnnd, onwards to Day 13!!
Take care 🙂
Monty X
[pic is from here]
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Copyright © 2022 Montaffera All Rights Reserved
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!
Apr 02
Hi!
The prompt from napowrimo.net for Day 2 said:
Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on a word featured in a tweet from Haggard Hawks, an account devoted to obscure and interesting English words.
So I chose from the below:
and wrote –
I glocidate
To educate,
(I cluck to underline)
My care of you’s
Sincere and true;
I’m so glad you are ‘mine’.
See you on Day 3! 😉
Monty X
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Copyright © 2022 Montaffera All Rights Reserved
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!
Apr 26
Coo-eee!
Welcome back, and have a wee virtual hug from me 🙂
I was tasked with writing a parody today:
Besides being fun, writing parodies can be a great way to hone your poetic skills – particularly your sense of rhyme and sound, as you try to mimic the form of an existing poem while changing the content. Just find a poem – or a song – that has always annoyed you, and write an altered, silly version of it.
[from napowrimo.net]
Well, the song I chose doesn’t annoy me as such, it just has been parodied a lot and gets earwormy after a while 😉 I chose “Let It Go” from the Disney film Frozen. Here is a version with the original lyrics if you want to follow along with my take on it in a different tab or something.
Hubby did suggest that I uploaded a clip of me singing the below, but I doubt I’d get through it without laughing as I attempted to hit some of the ambitious notes 😉
I’m out of fight and I’m holding him tight,
Eldest’s bunny is a dream;
Our friend through all isolations
Cutest face you’ve ever seen.
My mind is howling like a twister got inside
Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I’ve tried…
Don’t let them in,
Don’t let them see,
Eat secret choc’late in the lavatory;
Banana peels,
Oh heaven knows
This mess just blows…
Feeling low?
Feeling low!
Pick your stuff up off the floor,
Feeling low?
Feeling low!
Don’t you dare slam that door!
You’ll soon care:
Fortnite’s going away.
Let the kids rage on
They weren’t gonna get V-bucks anyway.
It’s funny how home-schooling
Makes you a big stress ball
And peers through the controller
Can drive you up the wall!
It’s time to come off that X-box
You’ve tested limits lots and lots,
For right and wrong there’s rules you see
Trust meeeeee…
Feeling low?
Feeling low!
No more emotes can you buy,
Feeling low?
Feeling low!
Now don’t you start to cry!
Here I stand
And here I’ll stay,
Let the kids rage on…
My patience fluctuates until your butt I’ll ground,
My life is spiralling, some pieces of me can’t be found;
Why are your arguments so whiney, lame and crass?
If your pal hopped off a cliff, would you follow his path?!
Feeling low?
Feeling low!
Why’d you rise at the break of dawn?!
Feeling low?
Feeling low!
Where’s all the Oatibix gone?!
Here I stand, in the light of day,
Let the kids rage oooooonnnnnn
They’re not buying more V-bucks anyway.
Obviously the above makes more sense if you live with kids who play Fortnite! V-bucks are the currency in the game that they buy things like ‘emotes’ with, and V-bucks cost real money. So basically, Epic Games (who tout Fortnite as a free-to-own game) want demented parents shelling out silly amounts of money every month due to ‘pester power’. Not too keen on that!
Don’t worry though, I try not to eat between meals so there’s no secret chocolate stash in our loo. That was just poetic licence. Honest… 😉
Well, Day 26 is now done! Take care and I’ll catch you tomorrow.
Monty X
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Copyright © 2021 Montaffera All Rights Reserved
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!
Apr 22
Hey 😊
Today I was busy with stuff in the house, so this is going to be up later than usual, but I hope you’ve all been feeling good?
The prompt said: today I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that invokes a specific object as a symbol of a particular time, era, or place. [from napowrimo.net]
Weirdly, I wrote ANOTHER rhyming poem. The syllable counts aren’t uniform, but they aren’t awful 😉
BRANCHING OUT
The toddler bed nestles
our couch-back, in parts;
I dismantled it
with an ache in my heart.
No toddlers now live here,
nor have for some time;
weight limit’s exceeded,
and this I know fine.
But memories plague me,
and tug at my hem
along with ‘near’ futures:
nest empty. Flown men.
Those dimply wee knuckles
tucked ‘neath sleeping faces
I spied through the bed guards
are gone. In their places
Are capable digits
and oft-furrowed brows
that puzzle at problems,
seem wisdom-endowed.
But that bed cushioned nightmares
and furthered kid freedom,
furnished the way for
new-grown arboretums.
There is something in my eye *fans face with her hand*.
The pic above is of Youngest from last year, with his usual myriad of fluffy friends – and his own topsy turvy take on sleeping conventions! The bed only recommended a kid of up to 50lbs slept in it, and at 8 years old Youngest has just crept over that figure.
He now has one of the single beds my mum had squirrelled away in the eves of her house, which Eldest helped me put together on Saturday. We must have done a reasonable job because that’s it stayed intact for most of a week!
Well, I’m off to watched an episode of Star Trek with the menfolk before the kids go down, so take care and I’ll catch you tomorrow 😊
Monty X
Come visit the Facebook page and follow @ComfyRestless on Twitter
Copyright © 2021 Montaffera All Rights Reserved
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!
Apr 10
Hello!
As I said yesterday, I’m now a third of the way there! It’s felt a bit strange this year, writing after so long away. It’s nice to get a post out before the day properly starts, to feel like I’ve accomplished something for me, but I don’t know…it still feels like a tug in a dangerous direction?
My prompt for today said:
It’s called “Junk Drawer Song,” and comes to us from the poet Hoa Nguyen.
- First, find a song with which you are familiar – it could be a favorite song of yours, or one that just evokes memories of your past. Listen to the song and take notes as you do, without overthinking it or worrying about your notes making sense.
- Next, rifle through the objects in your junk drawer – or wherever you keep loose odds and ends that don’t have a place otherwise. (Mine contains picture-hanging wire, stamps, rubber bands, and two unfinished wooden spoons I started whittling four years ago after taking a spoon-making class). On a separate page from your song-notes page, write about the objects in the drawer, for as long as you care to.
- Now, bring your two pages of notes together and write a poem that weaves together your ideas and observations from both pages. [From napowrimo.net]
Well, I chose “The Beautiful People” by Marylin Manson 😉 because who doesn’t need some industrial/alternative metal to listen to before 7am?! This song was one I was introduced to around the time I decided to go do a University Access Course (at the age of 20). I was hanging around with some 2nd year students that were friends with a flatmate that the letting agency had thrown into my life. They signed me into the student union before I even got my own card, and there were glorious rock nights!
This song brings them all back, and that feeling of being in a bubble from life where we circulated thoughts and theories and dress rules were broken, but it was ok because we were young and intelligent and could write/speak our way out of most things…
It’s weird to me that there are so many milestones that I haven’t recorded about my own life. I really should be my intrepid biographer, using this so-called love I have for writing to document my time on this planet. But it wasn’t until I ‘had a Google’ that I re-learned that my graduation day was the 3rd of July 2003. As I had spent the best part of 5 years prior to that aiming for it (not to mention the 13 years of schooling 1982-95), you would think I would be smiling at that date every time it appeared on my calendar.
But no.
I had an inkling by then that my intended launch from it into High School teaching wasn’t for me, and I kind of slunk through it all in my head, feeling adrift again. Like I had, in reality, failed.
The associations with the groups of friends I had accumulated dulled afterwards because it was as if I had broken the covenant that was between us: that we would talk trash and pretend we could be this way forever, but still emerge with degrees and take our places in society with growing modicums of respectability, etc etc.
But hey, the song also reminds me of the early days with Hubby, whom I met on 27th of March 2005, less than two years after I graduated. We listen to a lot of rock in the car even now. Plus we’ve made two cool little people, and weathered all the ups and downs before and after, so there’s that 😉
Anyway, I have taken a pic of our kitchen junk drawer and I’m sure, if you look hard enough, you can see how heavily my poem is based on its contents!
IT AIN’T JUNK
Let’s cut up a dance floor
with our bag of bands –
from rock, to cheese, and back
we’ll measure out our alcohol trips.
Stick our photos in albums,
string our past along with us
through permanent mistakes
and marked successes.
The best days of our lives
form on us like lint
whenever life tries to brush us off.
We’ve no instructions, but
our memories are beautiful.
It’s getting late and the kids are wanting to watch something with me (I’ve wandered away from this write-up loads and Hubby has returned from his Saturday morning foodshop already) so I’m offsky til tomorrow…take care of yourselves 🙂
Monty X
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Copyright © 2021 Montaffera All Rights Reserved
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!
Apr 05
Happy Easter Monday!
This prompt challenges you to find a poem, and then write a new poem that has the shape of the original, and in which every line starts with the first letter of the corresponding line in the original poem… [from here]
I had a Google, and ended up choosing this poem:
[above should be a picture of Wilder’s poem that starts “some things are left unsaid” from her collection entitled Nocturnal]
I first found this picture on Pinterest, and then followed it back to Instagram. I really love the poet’s style and all the art that goes with her poems. She has notebooks and journals out too, I feel I am going to have to investigate if I can buy some of her merch on the UK Amazon…!
Wilder’s poem has 8 lines and follows a 6,8,7,8,5,5,7,7 syllable pattern. As it was in the prompt to reuse the first letter of each line, I took it as an excuse to incorporate alliterative play 😉
Sequestered suppressed slice
languishes listlessly; leaving
worryful whispers winding
behind baleful banality.
Time tendrils taughten.
Masks, make-up, make-do
leeching lustre, lessening.
Youth yields. Yesteryears yellow.
After I wrote the above (and walked down to my kitchen to meet reality, etc) I thought that maybe the poem warranted a different level of “play”. So I looked closer, and went on to write:
some creature shirks the light
like yearned dreamscapes maddeningly
waiting out unconsciousness,
but I will hearken back and feel
the world’s cruel folds and
me once razor-edged
like there could be beauty here
you wanted to return to.
I think the second one fits the prompt better? I use the whole words that the poet began with, and the lines are around the same length as Wilder’s, too. I kept the syllables straight for each line, and played a bit with her imagery, but I know there is more I could have done with running the ‘creature’ and ‘dream’ theme through the whole piece. Anyway, with all my word-wrangling, kid-soothing and keyboard-tapping it is now lunchtime, so I’d better go…
Hope you are well, and I’ll meet you here tomorrow!
Monty X
Come visit the Facebook page and follow @ComfyRestless on Twitter
Copyright © 2021 Montaffera All Rights Reserved
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!
Apr 03
Howdy-doody-oh?!
Welcome to day three, where the prompt asked me to spend quite a bit of time setting up the material for my poem:
Today, I’d like to challenge you to make a “Personal Universal Deck,” and then to write a poem using it. The idea of the “Personal Universal Deck” originated with the poet and playwright Michael McClure, who gave the project of creating such decks to his students in a 1976 lecture at Naropa University. Basically, you will need 50 index cards or small pieces of paper, and on them, you will write 100 words (one on the front and one on the back of each card/paper) using the rules found here.
If you follow the link in the quote above, you will see why the rules necessitated me getting a good chunk of time to myself. Indeed, number 11 even reads:
Select the words in isolation, preferably alone, with no distractions, in candlelight. Approximate a meditative state. Even the cat must not bother you.
Well, I don’t have a cat, but I do have an Eldest son. He could be heard rustling about in his brother’s room at 6.38am this morning. Upon being questioned (and informed of the time), he rolled his eyes and told me in a not-so-inside voice that he was searching for a book. He then proceeded to flounce back into his own room (with a few rumpled pages of a comic), complaining of a sore throat, promising that if some honey was administered, he’d go back to sleep (which he categorically did not do) and generally felt slighted that he couldn’t barge into others’ rooms whenever he chose! My morning only went downhill from there, and so here I am rushing to get my laptop free of my tappings before Youngest commandeers it for his Fortnite forays at 3pm.
How dare I try and carve out some morning quiet time to be creative?!
Having made my deck of words and roped Youngest into drawing me out 9 cards at lunchtime (Eldest was still in no mood to participate) I finally had all I needed to compose my poem.
It took me about seven minutes to write.
I wonder why…?! 😉
Violent, Breathe, Envelop, Loquacious, Connect, Geometry, Tactile, Yarn, Silky
Violent protests meet my small attempts to breathe.
We envelop them in love,
Only to suffer their loquacious assaults.
I had thought my striving to connect
Would mean they understood me, too.
(It seemed just simple geometry –
A tactile triangle of fulfilled needs?)
But my intertwining of words
Is not seen to be as worthy
As, say, my playing with yarn;
That wooly/silky/squishy/fuzzy/touchy-feely stuff
Is OBVIOUSLY good…
**Sigh**
Big hugs, and I’ll catch you tomorrow 😉
Monty X
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Copyright © 2021 Montaffera All Rights Reserved
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!
Apr 02
Hi 😊
Today’s prompt was to write a poem along the lines of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. So, I came up with this, which leaves the reader to search for any other “roads” the narrator may be alluding to:
In Plain Sight
When she met him, she was hiding:
Toying with possible futures
From inside a retail whirl.
A newly toasted slice
Of utter self-loathing
Glowed from the embers she wouldn’t sweep up.
She was good at talking:
That mouth, when properly engaged,
Could spin attractive escape ropes;
Accommodate all angles,
Run far with fantasies
Until even she forgot their falsehoods.
So, they hid together,
Worked hard and “grew up”,
Bore new people, tangled with traditional roles.
Dishevelled wings fluttered from their piled laundry,
Followed her around, their offspring
Unravelling fabrics in awkward places.
Time squatted between the couple’s brows,
Encircled their smiles
And crept up their necks.
Something old and blue,
Borrowed from their intertwined histories,
Tapped at the veneer of “new normal”s.
Two prized photographs moved in –
Now reaped from the home
She’d never revisit,
From people she’d never re-hold –
Catching her on the brink of things
All set to rock her core:
The cosy coat of childhood
Still buttoned against the world…
The empty scroll of promise
Still clutched by too-thin hands…
Her older face, reflected, stared aghast,
Whilst he could see her happy, in the past.
I started writing this around 7am this morning, but made the error of going for a coffee break which alerted our eldest that I was awake, so it has taken until this afternoon to get it the way I want it and post it up here 😉 it’s so nice to wake up and know I’ve got a planned writing exercise, though! I hadn’t realised just how much I’d missed it.
Hope you are all feeling good today, leave me a link in the comments to any poems you have been posting on your websites if you’d like me to visit. Take care and I’ll be back here tomorrow, so please drop in again!
Monty X
[Pic is from here]
Come visit the Facebook page and follow @ComfyRestless on Twitter
Copyright © 2021 Montaffera All Rights Reserved
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!
Apr 15
Hello 😊
The optional prompt for today was for me to write a poem inspired by my favourite music. According to Spotify, I listened to the artist Pink the most last year, so I thought about an episode of Ellen I watched about Pink’s battle with Corona Virus; and wrote a song. Not commercially viable, of course (!) but here it is:
V1:
Covid-19 you weren’t supposed to be mean
To a 3 year old boy
That I shelter.
That helpless young frame…
And despite all my fame
They couldn’t test,
And then make him better.
Chorus:
We draw our rainbows large,
Health service supercharged;
We’re staying on the couch
None of us going out.
The horror on T.V
Could take out you or me
So we’re trying to be kind
Keeping our loved ones in mind.
V2:
Covid-19, oh tell me what does it mean
When can life be resurrected?
We spent Easter alone,
Just ghosts on a phone
Lord tell us:
How many souls are infected?
Chorus:
We draw our rainbows large,
Health service supercharged;
We’re staying on the couch
None of us going out.
The horror on T.V
Could take out you or me
So we’re trying to be kind
Keeping our loved ones in mind.
Bridge:
What’s with the hospital surge,
Then talk of flattening curves?
A pandemic, but no vaccination –
A president in a rant
About fake news, who can’t
Admit failure
Towards his own nation!
(Chorus)
Rap:
How do we fight this disease?
C’mon answer me, please?
Just out for my groceries
And masks are all I can see.
And I’m searching the skies
Massive tears in my eyes,
Lord, now please hear our cries
Before more thousands die.
Outro
Covid-19, oh tell me what does it mean
When can life be resurrected?
(Chorus to fade)
I hope you are all doing ok today?
I had Youngest out in the back garden yesterday, but Eldest didn’t want to join us. He soon regretted his decision, however, when he saw how much scope for hilarious mis-hits the sloping lawn afforded us, and also how many angles Youngest managed to shoot from that frustrated my efforts at goal keeping! Youngest even managed a spectacular chip shot that went perfectly over my head and yet landed before it was in danger of clearing the fence into the lane 😉
So Eldest had no complaints today when the garden was suggested again! The kids were giggling a lot, and once more I was suitably rubbish in goals…and also at scoring them. The sun shone for us again too, which is always a great way to lift one’s spirits.
What shenanigans have you seen kids getting up to in your neighbourhood?
We also made biscuits with the Easter cookie cutters today:
  
Later we iced them with glossy goopy wonderfulness that tasted goood. Who knew sugar, milk and golden syrup would be that much fun?!
Stay safe, and I’ll catch you soon for Day 16’s piece.
Monty X
[Stock pic is from here]
Come visit the Facebook page and follow @ComfyRestless on Twitter
Copyright © 2020 Montaffera All Rights Reserved
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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