Lift up your feet and put them on the ground
The trees were taller (when you were young)

Roxy Music

You know it is true: everything,

sound, smell and color were more intense.

The music of every sunset meant

life imagined in future tense.

Furtive fun with the neighbor girl:

getting naked in her closet.

Animal life held fascination—

experience was not yet composite.

Childhood was made easy for us;

grown-ups could do everything.

Friends and cousins joined the chorus

Singing winter into spring—

until it turned to dry routine:

money, taxes, the hours restless . . .

times arrived where dreams were absent;

sleep eludes, and food is tasteless.

Over-analysis tends to destroy

what childhood was able to enjoy.

PROMPT # 29:

compare your everyday present life with your past self,
use specific details to conjure your past and present in the reader’s mind.

PROMPT 28:

Victoria Chang’s poem, “The Lovers,” is short and somewhat shocking, bringing us quickly from a near-hallucinatory descriptive statement to a strange sort of question, before ending on the very direct statement of a “truth.” Six lines, three sentences, and to top it off, a title that I think works for the poem but is only obliquely related to its text. Today, try writing a poem that follows the same beats: three sentences, six lines: statement, question, conclusion.

Rupi Cowers

The silly poem
asks a non-question:

Is contemporary verse vapid,
or have we been dumbed-down?

The proof is in the poem,
so the answer is yes.

Gong Show: ¡CHANGggg!

Modern verse
is known for glibness, superficiality.

Must mannered obfuscation
override any/every message?

Truth is: one could
crank these out all day long.

V. Chang OBIT