OctPoWriMo 2023:Facing Our Fears
Fear of Not Being Good Enough: Is one of your poems from earlier this month haunting you? Choose one of your poems from the beginning of the month and revise it. Choose the best line and start a new poem with it, or start with the last line and write from there, or choose a different form you think would work better.
I did a series of posts on poetry revision if you want to look at some other revision ideas: Revising Poetry – A Demonstration
Here’s a poem I wrote for haunted last year:
Sudden Losses
Cold dinners in dying candlelight, wax dripped over handmade tablecloths swept smooth over milk-crate tables, worried waiting extinguishing imagined intimacy, the cruelty of equations with passion over time unequal in each lover’s mind.
The second time, there were no instruments to take, only sentimental value and fear remained, and the new alarm that startled them to leave the pillow case containing the disappointments of violating rummaging.
Another argument on the way home, after feeling the ecstasy of camaraderie,
beauty and elegance of shared glamor, the delusional comfort of acceptance when told “you can ask me anything,” prying a bit too far, picking a scab never healed, crashing painfully into the barrier.
The replacements never lived up to what was taken, not that the original possessions were of better quality or held more value. They were of then, of there. He said it was good they were gone. They would lose their hold. But he was wrong.
Writober 2023
Today’s image prompt, “Lunar Wind” by Alex Andreev, could be an entity arriving or departing. Where are we? Where did that hole come from and what’s on the other side?
Halloween Photography Challenge
Please link to your creations in the comments. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
Experience Writing 
Laura De Bernardi, I redrafted this one, hoping to bring more fear to the close.
The News in California
after Ginsberg, Saturday 7 October 2023
Texas can’t take care of its own, dumps its indigents in California, where they will stumble across you, Allen Ginsberg, howling in parks
The air so thick with meth and cocaine, they say you can get high just breathing
Where Australians feed the poor, an hour per night, security on stand-by, good old Aussie mateship to the rescue, far from home, why we wonder, helping there and not here, where there’s more than enough misery to go round?
In the Land of Oz, we’re ticking all the boxes, it’s all the way with the USA
A $368 billion dollar deal for your subs, paying for your shipyards too, you’re great wheelers and dealers, some of us secretly pleased, 51st state and all, your B52s making the air dance in our Darwin
We grew up with your Coyote, laughing when he fell splat, even though we’d never seen one, and had only Skippy the Kangaroo to play with, that was our own, plucky, yes, hardly the stuff of legend
Some saw the greater possibility, “from deserts the prophets come,” it wasn’t all possums and gladioli and suburb hating cross-dressing mega-stars crooning in Las Vegas.
Americans like Australians now, finding in us vestiges of your happy go lucky selves, more of y’all relocating to the land downunder, where Mickey is dead and Bluey is king
Where the supermarkets are smaller, harder to get lost in, with lots of ice cream, just not acres of the stuff, still enough to rot your guts if that’s your trip
We’re getting fatter, we take after you in that, and worse, the diabetes curses, sugar is king, or for more tricks and treats, so you feel at home, Halloween will find you in the lingo of our children’s laughter, knocking at the door, hoping to spook
You can’t escape yourselves, not here, not anywhere, while we become more like you every day, skeletons and spider’s webs in our gardens, killing our insects and birdlife, as if we weren’t already capable of our own unique extinctions.
We had our own writers once, Patrick White scambling for salvific clues in the outback, our only winner of the Nobel, who hated the middle class worst in us, now become the simpering intelligentsia as cocky as yours and just as oppressive
Did he see the stars and stripes streaming in the Aussie wind?
His tree of man, his granite hearts of spirit decency, not even Kaufman screaming in his jail cell can resurrect them now
It’s all dissolving, as we race to the bottom in your wake, too drugged up to know or even care, big pharma, here too, cringing, our minds blasted by your drugs, as your warships patrol our seas, and we know High Noon’s no movie, not with China to our north, and your bases on our soil, making us easy targets for anybody willing to take a shot, Pine Gap first to go, kapow!
There’s some trembling bitterness for you, so much for your exceptionalism, for so much come to a dread nothing. California dreaming, we had such happy summers together once.
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