Blind Date

Apr3

Frumptart meets Trumptard: it’s bliss forever!

Rainbow twins make pink Indian Summer

Poke your hontas, indigenous lover,

Till Twitter-dumb gets Twittering-dumber.

Having had my fill of a noxious brew

(Militant Marxist Genderqueer free verse),

My soul now seeks a less venomous view:

Write more poetry! Dispel this global curse.

Today’s prompt asked me to do what I always do when I attempt a poem:

PROMPT #3: Today’s optional prompt asks you to make a list of ten words. You can generate this list however you’d like – pull a book off the shelf and find ten words you like, name ten things you can see from where you’re sitting, etc. Now, for each word, use Rhymezone to identify two to four similar-sounding or rhyming words.

A rousing hymn to techno-spring.
Please kneel for social distancing.
(Consider what you’re worshiping.)

New strains infect the melody:
A chord of biochemistry
Invading imperceptibly . . .

No longer dim or vague, but viral
Airborne fears begin to spiral.
Breath: a pulmonary trial.

Parties perish. Nations sigh.
Decrees are ordered from on high
Intending to demystify.

Our faces pushed to lifeless screens
Seeking solace from machines,
Placing faith in new vaccines . . .

Breaking news appears satanic:
Lemmings, in Pavlovian panic
Render rulers megalomanic.

City-dwellers bought the farm;
Chinese numbers quell alarm,
Mother Nature to disarm.

Bureaucrats drone on. World health:
A strategy of Marxist stealth
To siphon off our nation’s wealth.

Consolidating more control,
A cashless one-world rule their goal.
Read your Bible. Guard your soul.

Nicean Barks

Apr2

Such transports as true poetry provides

In raptures of the soul, and lyric rides,

May carry one beyond the lofty heights

In chariots of sun on drunken nights.

Whether true odyssey or shorter trip,

Homeric craft or humbler sort of ship,

The poet’s chosen stowaway rides free;

The ticket paid for literarily.

And afterward, the traveler comes home

Enriched by distant sights and worlds unknown.

PROMPT #2: write a poem about a specific place . . .

April: La Coronada

Mar30

Huddled in your castles like Prospero’s doomed revelers, sighing in the springtime of contagion, you evade and avoid the obvious. But the Muse has entered, unseen, and stands among you in her mask of elegiac splendor. She smiles as you mock her presence. She laughs quietly to herself as her influence wafts upon the very air, inspiring and infecting all concerned. You try to protect yourselves from the lyric epidemic, nonetheless her viral poetic molecules go forth, regroup, mutate, and attach themselves to the souls of her detractors. Her spores hang upon the very droplets of the mist, a suspended Parnassian miasma. The first tremors of poetic sickness begin to shudder deep within and among the most reluctant revelers. They try to dispel their fears; they brag and congratulate themselves, chattering about the uselessness of poetry, listing all they ways in which they have successfully barricaded themselves from her pestilential presence. But the Muse has entered and none can ensure her departure. Poetry will have her way and resistance is futile. Some will survive, but others will meet her as their avenging angel of the plague, and neither Egyptian magic nor sanitizing legerdemain shall deter the blossoming vector of her influence. Fear, oh unpoetic readers, this sudden lyrical acceleration, this verdant celebration:

our poetic coronation.

A M U S E

Hello Poetry Top Ten

Mar27

As a poetry site I really like Hello Poetry. It is user-friendly and uncluttered. It is easy to comment and message other poets. It’s a sort of lyrical Facebook without the bells and whistles. A nice feature they provide is a count of how many views a poem gets over time. In this day and age, one never knows if these stats are truthful, algorithmic hype or fake, but accepting the bean counters at face value, here are my ten most-read poems since I began posting at the site in 2015. They range, top to bottom (if one believes the stats), from 29K+ views down to 13K+ views. Strangely enough, John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snow-bound which I posted there in its entirety, came in at number nine with 14K+ views. I wonder: are people actually reading these ?