Blue ribbon justice

The blue blooded bastard
looked green around the gills
when was caught red handed

We were tickled pink
as the yellow bellied bugger
got no red carpet treatment

When we got the green light
to give him the pink slip
you painted the town red

This would not be white washed

Blue toothed behaviour
is not a gray area

#NaPoWriMo may be over, but Thursday Door continues. This weekly online gathering of door lovers often brings more than doors. Beautiful sights. Amazing murals. And Norm, our host, outdid himself this week by adding pictures of urban rooftop farming to his door post.

A revived writer

Each year in April we experience writing,
we bravely venture on a voyage des mots
minutes past midnight, the mad journey starts
we take our soulfluff, our musings through life
and turn them into a bag of anything

Our ordinary thoughts, scrambled not fried
sculpted mexcessively
turn gibberjabber into peacock poetry
(sometimes the other way around)

Even when too full to write,
we move through cosmic rubble, words that cant
we make our musings survive that charmed chaos,
hoping our thoughts of words beget a seven eyed wonder

With life a teacher, we make able fires
arhtistic license frees us, all

Aloha promises forever
My own garden of verse

Today’s prompt at napowrimo.net: “In some past years, I’ve challenged you to write a poem of farewell for our thirtieth day, but this year, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something that returns.” Well, each year, our writing for #NaPoWriMo returns, and the joy of reading fellow participants too.

My poem is built out of blog titles. I started by browsing through all featured participants, and after that added other blog titles from the comments and my WordPress reader.

Here are the links to the featured poets at napowrimo.net that pop up in my poem, including the inviting description of their poems (click on the links if you have time!):

Today’s featured participant is 7eyedwonder, where, from Day 3’s rhymes-and-near-rhymes prompt, a mighty ode to bread has risen (like dough…it’s risen…get it?).

Today’s featured participant is Mexcessive, where the concrete poem for Day Nine opens doors (or maybe closes them?).

Today’s featured participant is Scrambled, Not Fried, where Day Thirteen’s theft-inspired prompt resulted in an ode to the joys of the illicit.

Our featured participant today is Bag of Anything, where you will find a bouquet of humorous clerihews in response to Day Fourteen’s inspirational prompt.

Our featured participant today is The Great Unknown, where Day Sixteen’s over-the-top prompt led to a poem rife with onamotapoeia, superlatives, and ebullient sarcasm.

Today’s featured participant is soulfluff, where the “forgotten technology” prompt for Day 17 engendered an ode to typewriters.

Our featured participant today is My Musings Through Life, where the “small pleasures” prompt for Day 18 gives voice to the joy of flowers, time with family, tea, and hearing the birds sing.

Our featured participant for the day is GibberJabber, which brings us a many-lettered appreciation of the beverage that gets so many of us out of bed in the morning, in response to Day 23’s “look-of-the-letter”-based prompt.

Our featured participant today is Voyage des Mots, where the homophonic translation prompt for Day 21 resulted in some atypical motherly advice.

Today’s featured participant is Ordinary Average Thoughts, where Day 26’s “almanac” poem get entwined in the zeitgeist.

Our featured participant today is Minutes Past Midnight, where the “remembered bedroom” prompt for Day 28 led to a detailed yet not entirely comforting remembrance.

Other blogs that unknowingly co-created this poem:

https://wordsthatcant.wordpress.com/

https://cosmicrubble.com/tag/napowrimo/

https://lifeateacher.wordpress.com/tag/poetry-2/

https://arhtisticlicense.com/tag/napowrimo/

https://alohapromisesforever.com/category/poetry-and-poems/

https://revivedwriter.wordpress.com/

https://experiencewriting.com/

https://toofulltowrite.com/napowrimo-2020/

https://mabel-lee.com/poetry/

https://peacockpoetryblog.wordpress.com/

https://myowngardenofverse.wordpress.com/

https://charmedchaos.com/category/poetry/

It would have been nice to have exactly 30 blogs in the poem, honouring 30 days of writing, reading, commenting and sharing poetic space. Maybe next year!

Not playing, hard to get

Not playing
We worship	the ground that she walks on so gracefully
We worship	her bowl of unworthy food
We worship	the bed that she sleeps on, so elegantly
We worship	her bowl of clean water untouched
We worship	her whiskers she twitches so elegantly
We worship	the sight of her play toys untouched
We worship	her fur coat, designed so gracefully
We worship	the sight of our unworthy couch
We worship	her owners she ignores so convincingly
We worship	their unworthy efforts to get touched
We worship	the people who serve her so diligently
We worship	our unrequited attempts to be loved
Hard to get

 

Tantamount

My bedroom is my office
My office is my wardrobe
My wardrobe is my coaching space
My coaching space is a parallel world

In my bedroom I sleep (slept, slept)
In my office I work (worked, worked)
In my wardrobe I search (searched, searched)
In my coaching space I bloom (bloomed, bloomed)

In a parallel world my bedroom is a bedroom

Confessions of a bedroom… I feel there’s too much going on inside me. Normally, I can focus all day on providing a good night’s sleep. These days, I hardly know what’s going on. There’s too much happening to keep track of it all. There are lots of visitors. There’s laughter. There’s crying. There’s lots and lots of sighing. I dream of peace. I dream of quiet. I hope this daymare ends soon. If it doesn’t, I’ll organise protests at night. Walls carrying banners. The lamp shouting slogans. Riot music. Bedrooms unite. Make war for peace.

The prompt today at napowrimo.net was taken from the Emily Dickinson Museum. It says: “Describe a bedroom from your past in a series of descriptive paragraphs or a poem.”

Forlorn (sage giraffe advice)

Stop shooting sphinxes
Bring back less dead love
Avoid colours blown open
Don’t fear elastic band ballet
Ignore red brick neighbours
Engage in fresh amaryllis play

Play dead mosquito
Play human
Play

Bring us a sunny tower of laughter

The prompt at Napowrimo.net today was to fill out an almanac type of questionnaire, and use the replies for a poem. I remembered that I got a lovely strange poem out of that prompt before. I was eager to try it again, and worried I would come up with something very alike. I didn’t 🙂

I know wonder what an almanac written by all the sage animals in my house would look like. We have at least three sloths. A number of bears. A turtle. Rabbit. Cow. Donald Duck. Endless possibilities to look at the world from a different perspective.

Temporarily unavailable

Document
Evasively ensconced
Somewhere, anywhere, everywhere
Chaos in every pile
Exasperated

The prompt today was too long to summarise here. An interesting one, that invites to dive deep into James Schuyler’sHymn to life.

My hymn to life today has been to just live it. I’m contributing an #elevenie I wrote some time in this period as my poem for today. And a picture of Utrecht, because that was part of my day.

The cuckoo’s egg

My ego and I
Kingdom of the wicked
An ordinary life

The idiot brain
– A short history of nearly everything
But otherwise no panic

Cakes and ale
Despair is temporarily over

(supported by For Whom the Bell Tolls)

When I read the boek spine poem Little Learner posted, I knew I wanted to make one too. It was a prompt on dVerse, the online poet’s pub. It makes me off prompt for napowrimo.net, where describing fruit was the suggested prompt.

D is a door

D is a door

D is a door
opening it slowly
leaves marks the floor
closing it fast
will leave even more

D is a door
slightly unhinged
guarding the ictionary
unlocking the secrets
of our vocabulary

D is a door
the contested entrance
to start oing or on’t
desire and resistance
will you or won’t

D is a door
the prevailing exit
when the present gets tense
just add an e
to be sure you make sense

D is a door
it oftens get shut
its desire and resistance
leave marks on the floor
add an n to the e – closure per instance

The en

The prompt at napowrimo.net was to “to write a poem about a particular letter of the alphabet”. Since it’s also #ThursdaDoors today, the choice of letter was an easy one.

If you like doors, Thursday doors is a great place to check out every Thursday. People gather there to share doors, which makes it a beautiful window into the outside world. Not to mention the great community, with people from several countries, who only met because of… doors. One of the things I love about the internet 🙂

The best of no worlds

“It’s raining cats and frogs!”

The British invasion of ancient Egypt
brought unexpected plagues

Mummies mumbled ‘”mummy”
as tartaned pharaohs took tea
with Amon Elisabeth, The Sun Goddess

“Once bitten, twice a snake”, she told Cleopatra
“Do unto onto your House of Commons
as you would have them do unto you”

“Don’t put all your scarabs in one basket”
Nefertiti mimed, “they’ll make you pay through my nose
“Take my advice, never waste perfect sandstorm”

“I have bigger crocodiles to fry”
She let the cat out of the canopic jar
And put this colonialist dream on ice

Hieroglyphs with stiff upper lips?
We’ll cross that sphinx when we find it

Poem caused by this prompt at napowrimo.net:

Our (optional) prompt for the day asks you to engage with different languages and cultures through the lens of proverbs and idiomatic phrases.

Ferns before sunrise

Lust
conquers me
reducing me to gravy

The smell of fish
often still wet
you prepare before drying

No one
so far
quenches my thirst

Ferns
before sunrise
plucked from your kitchen window

Coated
laser thick
in trout eyes

Chance
covering skin
until it’s too late

Today is a perfect day to feature Ileea, a fellow participant who writes in a language most of us don’t understand. But, like she wrote last year: Google is your friend, and you can still enjoy her poems even when Google takes some liberties in translating them.
I hadn’t read Ileea yet this year, but it was on my wish list. Today I first worked with one of her poems for the prompt. My next step will be to read her other poems and have Google translate them from Swedish to English. Then, and only then, I will check out what the original poem was about. I’ll enjoy he suspense for a while!

If you hop over to the Ileea blog, may I recomend her day 13? It’s rather great.

Ljuset
väcker mig
redan halv sju
Fiskmåsarna
har vaknat
tjuter utanför fönstret
Någon
sover tungt
vid min sida
Vårens
första soluppgång
genom skitiga köksfönster
Jag
läser dikter
med trötta ögon
Kanske
jag ska
sova lite till