For today’s images, I wanted to build on yesterday’s fun discovery. The eye photo from yesterday makes me think of an oracle. Then I thought of a magic 8 ball. I used to have one and really liked it.I found an online 8 Ball, but it just wasn’t the same. The physical holding and shaking of the ball, watching the words rise to the surface, how could I capture the feeling and experience? I thought of the joy of Erica Baum’s photographs of clever found text in the world. I have a triangle bokeh filter.
Then I looked at the theme for today’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday which is “cam.” When asked to think of a word with cam in it, of course I think of camera, then camera, then camera, so I put cam in a search and got “campfire.” I haven’t had a fire yet this yea,r and I had a small dry log and some kindling in the fireplace from a photoshoot I did in October, so I decided to light that up as my background. Not exactly a campfire, but though it is not supposed to rain again until tonight, the world outside is way too wet, so the fact that I have one small dry log is in fact “lucky.”
With fire as my backdrop for my oracle, I needed to figure out how I wanted to gather my questions and my answers. How would my oracle answer yes or no questions? I wanted to find the text on things around me, but how to get the words in my triangle, in front of the fire?
The classic 8 ball had 20 answers: 10 affirmative, 5 maybe, and 5 no. I started taking pictures of text I thought would make good answers. Then I saw my word jars on the mantel and thought, what could be more found-text oracle than randomly pulling nouns from a jar to represent yes, no, or maybe? So I pulled out 20 nouns and got to work.
November PAD Chapbook Challenge
Today’s prompt is to write a luck poem.
Feeling Lucky?
I must be
the luckiest person:
I went to the oracle
and the oracle said
Only Yes or No questions
so I asked: Will I
meet my soulmate?
They answered: nest
Which is exactly
what I needed to hear
It makes sense that I
should make a home,
a comfortable place,
for love to be drawn to
Then I asked: Have I
found my purpose?
They answered: smoke
which confirms that
life is fleeting and I
need to follow
my heart, so I asked
the question burning
inside: Will I
be remembered?
They said: flavor
And I knew I
would leave
good taste
in the world.
I must be
the unluckiest person:
I went to the oracle
who said ask only
Yes or No questions
so I asked: Will I
ever find love? and
they answered: sneeze
which only confirms
that I sneeze funny
and it puts people off
I asked: Do I
have a purpose?
They said: poison
Which is what I’ve been
dreading; I’ll have to
quit my job before
that go-getter poisons them
against me. He probably
has already, so I
asked: Will anyone notice
if I am gone?
They answered: key
Exactly as I expected.
No one will miss me unless
I don’t turn in my keys.
NaNoWriMo
Last night I did 20 minute word sprints with my ML (municipal liaison) and the part of my story that had me a little stuck opened up in a new direction. It really is amazing to me how just knowing that someone else is out there doing timed writings “with” you does actually make a difference. Strange human mental gymnastics, but whatever works. I’ll be trying the zoom write-in today and see if that works as well.
Experience Writing 
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What a fascinating poem! Great write.
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Thank you.
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