Any Excuse to Write

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It’s Poetry Month! I am accepting the challenge to write one-bad-poem a day for 30 days.  Well, the challenge is to write a poem, but calling it “one bad poem” makes me feel better about offering whatever I happen to come up with. If you’d like to play along, you can find prompts all over the Internet. I picked up mine from POETRY IS EVERYTHING. The prompt for today was harlequin. 

You thought the fool a fine tarot for marriage
framed the print to hang in our first kitchen
by then too late for me to read the signs
queen of cups capable of anything as I well knew
hidden the next 30 years. A friend dared me
to have my cards read and I never told you
knowing you would disapprove, would frown and
gyrate, put the red hat on and dance
not like finding the money spent, like even less
my fondness for what you call rubbish
and there’s that fool still presiding in our kitchen
the harlequin nose turned up, jangle
of spangled arms at everything I’m cooking up.

Writing Anyway

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What’s your excuse not to write?

Usually, my excuse is that I’m busy. I have three daughters! I have a mother who needs me, friends who depend on me, a husband who likes to have his share of attention! Shopping to do!

With my ankle broken, all of these excuses have fallen away. Yes, I can still stumble up and down the steps to do laundry. I have one extra kid of late (Annie is home for spring break). I have managed to drive the car (it’s the left ankle) and I even made it to see The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug at our local discount theatre. But for the most part, for most hours of the day, I’m sitting in this chair or surrounded by books and notebooks on my bed (or napping; I seem to need about twice as much sleep as usual). My excuses are greatly, GREATLY reduced. Most of the time I’m sitting in this chair with my leg propped up, or it’s propped up in my bed, where I’m surrounded by books and notebooks. So, do I write?

What I’ve discovered is that I still have excuses, and that they are specially tailored for this situation. I’m exhausted (what’s with all the napping?) My leg hurts. My 20-year-olds keep invading my space and turning on the television. (Not to mention the novels I read instead of writing…)

Here’s the thing. We all have excuses. All of the time. If we’re lucky, we also have moments of consciousness in which we can make a conscious choice to face our excuses, to let our dreams (mine=writing) be greater than our excuses.

If Bilbo Baggins can face down a dragon, surely you can face down your excuses.

Try to flip it around. Use any excuse TO WRITE.

The Percheron in the Tunnel

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“I want to enlarge my knowledge of the world because the world is such a staggering and uncanny and heartbreaking place.” -Jim Shepherd

Yesterday I came across a video lecture by writer Jim Shepherd that profoundly moved me. I dreamed about it — that Percheron in the coal mine. You can read it here; at the bottom of the article (from the Williams College site) you’ll find a link to the video.

 

Photo by DS stories: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-notebook-with-a-broken-pencil-on-scattered-white-papers-6991503/

Where Do You Work?

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Lately I have felt like a one-woman tutoring center, helping to write English papers — one, notably, at midnight — and Political Science papers and Northwest History papers, graphing sunspots for Physical Science (that was interesting), and running through index cards of Spanish vocabulary. But my two oldest daughters are — finally — on spring break. Which leaves Emma, whose teachers seem to have ganged up on the assignments. Out of six classes, she has homework in four of them tonight. So we have decamped to Barnes & Noble (first time since my ankle injury). Emma is drinking a Hazelnut Mocha Frappuccino (did I spell that right?) and I’m having a Chai Tea Latte (stomach wonky from taking pain meds). Annie came along, ostensibly to drive, but she’s drinking a Vanilla Bean Frappuccino (no coffee in hers either) and doing something or other on her laptop.

One would think it would be more efficient and cheaper (at the very least) to work at home. But sometime back in the years of the Annie-and-Pearl high school circus, it became apparent that I had to do something different if I was going to get my non-academic kids to actually focus on their work. It must have something to do with my own background as a waitress, that the whoosh of coffee machines and clatter of dishes, not to mention people talking at the table behind us, helps me ignore the clutter in my own head and concentrate on a bit of work. My kids do not have restaurant backgrounds, and it works for them, too. A miracle, of sorts.

Just for good measure, here’s an old poem (one of mine).

English Café

The hostess greets us with a simile, waves
her oversized thesis like a shield.
Will you have regular verbs?
My friend orders braised clause

with a side of apostrophes.
I want only articles and prepositions.
Our waitress prompts, No dative?
No genitive? She offers Shakespeare

or D. H. Lawrence for dessert.
We sip from snifters of Strunk & White,
trade adverbs as coordinating
conjunctions rise languidly to dance.

(Between parentheses, a gerund
cracks jokes.) Our repast now
past tense, we pay in participles, tip
a metaphor. As we slip

through a semicolon’s swinging door,
our waitress calls after us, You’ve forgotten
your predicate, dangling
a ring of modifiers on circle of nouns.