April Poem-A-Day Challenge   Day 30


prompt: finished/never finished

It's only when I think
I'm doomed to die
tomorrow that I regret
the unfinished memoirs,
the poems never discovered
in others' conversations
the paper that clogs every
drawer, shelf, table top.

Luckily, my diagnoses
are refuted by the doctor
highly qualified and 
unquestionably right.
I continue squirelling away
my precious impressions
against another
hungry-for-a-future day.

April Poem-A-Day Challenge   Day 29

prompt: a line from a previous poem

Massive explosion
(after the collapse of a garment factory)

In a country of twenty-three million
how do we count twenty-five hundred
survivors, refugees from corporate
greed country? There are the dead
of course, almost twice as many
as we lost to fire that apocalyptic summer.
The numbers, the numbers, represent
families without food or water, without
a future. We are living in an era
of unimaginable explosive potential.

April Poem-A-Day Challenge   Day 28

prompt: a shadorma
(syllables: 3 - 5 - 3 - 3 - 7 - 5)

Totally
sick of her coughing
I eat fast
remind her
the doctor's appointment is
tomorrow at one.

April Poem-A-Day Challenge  Day 27

prompt: mechanical

The fault is
no longer
in physical
universe or net
but somehow
in a cloud.

Who fixes
the laptop
now must be
a pilot 
or space
traveller

April Poem-A-Day Challenge  Day 26

prompt: casting

The Die is Cast

The wind has been
casting around
for a victim all day.

Meanwhile, cottonwool clouds
turn to fish-tails, grey.

I slap at what could be
a mosquito, too fast to see.

The garden tosses
its tresses. A haircut please?
I have to agree.

I feel myself sway.
I've been writing all day.

Tomorrow I'll submit
to secateur
and weedkiller spray.

There's so much to do
I'll be down on my knees.

The wind sighs and frets.
I'll come back next week, OK?

April Poem-A-Day Challenge Day 25

prompt: "Everyone ..."

Everyone knows

Everyone knows that you cannot wear
blue with green. red with pink

and yet I match my outfits to avoid
the necessity to think

just as I write my poetry, with
an empty heartless mind

so do I churn out words, one rule:
to not be unkind

and dress with discovery, that rules
and eyes can be otherwise blind.

April Poem-A-Day Challenge  Day 24

prompt: "auto"

Automatically, I want to write
Autumn, the season when, in
some countries, leaves 

auto-destruct, bled of all green
and shed from trees like scurf.
This Autumn we remember

boys who were used as
automatons, with machinery
that ought not to have been

invented, since it resembles
the death rattle, and caused
the dead to rain, cold, upon

country now turned into
memorial green, or seemingly
untouched, under autobahns.