Can’t hack the prompt today.

The prompt is called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman.
And here are the twenty little projects themselves — the challenge is to use them all in one poem:

1.  Begin the poem with a metaphor.

2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.

3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.

4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).

5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.

6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.

7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.

8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.

9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.

10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).

11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”

12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.

13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”

14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.

15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.

16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.

17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.

18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.

19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).

20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

Really Jim, this is a silly post-modernist formula that can only result in a silly post-modernist poem. But I forgive you. Because it’s Easter.

PROMPT #7

Start by reading James Tate’s poem “The List of Famous Hats.” 
Now, write a poem that plays with the idea of a list.

TATE, man, Tate—you’re not a poet . . .
And your silly work will show it.
You confirm what poetry feared
When your muses disappeared:
Tawdry prose and rambling verbiage
Must get thrown out with the garbage.
Modern muses shirk their duty,
Trampling, thus, on lyric beauty.
Such non-verse causes one to say:
You’re why Poetry sucks today.

Seriously, that boring paragraph by Tate doesn’t even pass for a poem.
It’s a dull and frivolous paragraph about NOTHING.

Here’s my offering for Day 7:

Smoke Rings

With a host of furious fancies
Whereof  I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.

Tom O’Bedlam

Born of tobacco, borne on air,
Heeding the piper’s fragrant call,
Rising, as they lose their form
Circles waft aloft then fall 
Shimmering ghosts of dead ideals
Magnificent in their demise
(Unlike most human enterprise.)

Wraiths emerge, phantasms form, mutating, dissipating; organic ephemera swirl and dissolve, interpenetrate in airborne Eros, a pas de deux to the power of three, wherein polylectic philosophy is revealed as a dissolving circle:

Rings must rise. There are fires to stoke:
An unnameable emotion
Mutability in motion…
Pipe enthroned in seraphic smoke.
The glowing altar: an abyss
As coals illuminate the dark
The wicked burn: a smoldering spark
Below the briar’s rim, a hiss . . .
Omniscience, celebrated, burns
To send forth children on the air
While grace eternally returns
Specifically to . . .  everywhere.
Exhaled, philosophy’s sad ghosts
Bow down before the Lord of Hosts.