Music Lover Poetry

This week I couldn’t resist the Music Lover_{(assoc. link)} magnetic poetry kit. Here’s a poem I wrote with it.

The Prompts

NaPoWriMo: write a poem that focuses on a single color

PAD Challenge: write a trope poem

Today’s Poem

Bad Guys Who Can’t Aim

How do you know who
the bad guy is when
they’re all wearing black?
Who is the villain
in the dead of night
or when everyone
is standing in the shadows?
Who is the miscreant
in the blackness
of space?
Who are the scoundrels
as the seas rise in a cave?

The ones who miss.
The ones whose bullets veer.
The ones with machine guns
that never run out but,
never reach their target.
The ones who hold their guns
at their waists and spray
bullets in every direction
but can’t find the one man
standing in the open.

Those black, black hearts
of such pure evil
must create a black hole
with its own gravity
that sucks the bullets
away from their target:
that noble do-gooder
who will always
save the day
even dressed in black
in the middle of the night.
They never really have a chance.

Poetry MFA Week 3 Review

Writing: This week flew by and yet it feels like last Sunday was a really long time ago. I continued my daily writing in my journal, but didn’t write at night as I had wanted to. Guess it can’t be the most productive time for me to write, if I don’t write at that time. So in a way my question of best writing time has been answered: I write in the morning. I’m looking forward to reading through those journal entries, digging for poetry nuggets.

I workshopped one of the poems I wrote last week for Douglas Kearney’s assignments on Coursera, and it went really well. I feel like this month’s intensive poetry immersion is helping me dig deeper, and bring my ideas to a new level as I had hoped.

Reading: I was happy to find a physical copy of Sharks in the Rivers by Ada Limón on the shelf in my local library. The text of the poem was the same on the page, but the reading experience was different. I had a serendipitous experience this week where a prompt led me to a poem that I felt spoke to the poem I was studying. In the poem “Sharks in the Rivers,” Limón wrote:

“I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

It is a short walkway—
into another bedroom.”

The dVerse prompt from Tuesday led me to “Threshold” by Maggie Smith. Smith writes:

“You want a door you can be

            on both sides of at once. “
. . .

“imagine yourself passing from

            and into. Passing through

                       doorway after

            doorway after doorway.”

It was a new and enjoyable experience to be studying one poem and come across another that seemed to speak to the first.

I’ll talk about the week four MFA instructions and expectations tomorrow.

Here we are approaching the last full week of the challenges. How’s your NaPoWriMo and/or A to Z Blogging Challenge going? Did you have a good week? Any signs of burn out? My A to Z challenge began to feel like a lot of work. I couldn’t get ahead though I tried. But I also feel like I’m getting a lot out of it. I hope you’re still having fun.

Happy Poetry Month!
See you tomorrow