Spoken Word Poetry

Sunday 25 April 2021

Appointment With an Epidemic

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Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

The rat ran and she chased, the plague chased and she ran

kisses can serve as vectors for
disease and more
love is a rat
caught in a trap

kisses can spread disease, you know
the way things go
heavens above
the worst is love

bubonic plague can cause a scare
but can't compare
to betrayal
of hearts so frail

I fell too easily under the spell of his
long eyelashes and Bohemian rhapsody
his naughty rhymes raised in me the deepest desire
only to plummet me to the depths of despair

my specious attraction to his colorful way
made me act reckless and flit about like a fly
he prowled like a jaguar to my home each night
he was a rat who addicted me like powder

I clung onto his arm like a tattoo design
feared his desire would flicker like a dying flame
he would drift away from my hearth when spring blew in
he was a virus infecting my wounded soul

pressure to maintain impossible perfection
always drove me to hate my flawed self even more
he only saw women as collapsible dolls
why the hell did it take me so long to say no?

I suffered so long trying to make him love me
but he hadn't an inkling of love in his mind
better off with him gone to try and recover
the last tattered vestiges of my self-respect

I now see my mistakes made a lot of mistakes
did your dick fall out of your pants when you cheated?
gravity made you fall on me when you raped me?
oops, I was clumsy, I walked into a door

abusive men are worse than rats or viruses
I should no longer insult rats and viruses
by comparing them to my abusive partners
the way I was treated makes COVID look pretty

~cie~



Day 23: Write an "Appointment" poem

Day 24: Write a question poem.

The question is, why did I allow myself to be abused by horrible men? 
This poem isn't about one specific man or relationship. It is about the string of abusive relationships that I was involved in over the years.


Write a poem using anapestic tetrameter.
https://dversepoets.com/2021/04/22/mtb-hopscotch-with-anapestic-tetrameter/

we have two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed. da-da-DAM.
you can do it with rhymes or without. You can break up your 12 syllable lines, and add little flaws. It can be funny or stark, but listen to the hopscotch rhythm and after a while you’ll be hooked.

I honestly don't feel like I did very well with the meter aspect. I tried, but my brain started to twist around itself. I did adhere to the 12-syllable line rule, except for the three eight-syllable lines.


First Line Friday: The rat ran and he chased. 

I changed "he" to "she."

Wordle

Kiss

Eyelashes

Long

Bohemian

Raise

Deepest

Plummet

Reckless

Jaguar

Specious- superficially plausible, but actually wrong

Collapsible

Colorful


Write a "minute" poem.

The Minute Poem is rhyming verse form consisting of 12 lines of 60 syllables written in strict iambic meter. The poem is formatted into 3 stanzas of 8,4,4,4; 8,4,4,4; 8,4,4,4 syllables. The rhyme scheme is as follows: aabb, ccdd, eeff.

I incorporated the Minute Poem into the metered free-verse poem.


Day 23: 

write a poem that responds, in some way, to another. This could be as simple as using a line or image from another poem as a jumping-off point, or it could be a more formal poetic response to the argument or ideas raised in another poem. 

This poem is a response to the collective prompts.

Day 24:

Today’s (optional) prompt is a fun one. Find a factual article about an animal. A Wikipedia article or something from National Geographic would do nicely – just make sure it repeats the name of the animal a lot. Now, go back through the text and replace the name of the animal with something else – it could be something very abstract, like “sadness” or “my heart,” or something more concrete, like “the streetlight outside my window that won’t stop blinking.” You should wind up with some very funny and even touching combinations, which you can then rearrange and edit into a poem.

I sort of did this. The animal I used was a rat.



https://lindaghill.com/2021/04/23/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-24-2021/

Use the sound "oop" somewhere in your work.




arm
design
drift
flicker
fly
hearth
night
powder
pressure
prowl
spring
virus


https://pensitivity101.wordpress.com/2021/04/24/three-things-challenge-578/

GONE
HAND
NO

I used this prompt, but they prefer family-friendly posts and mine went in a sweary direction, so I'm not going to share this poem with them.

The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)


Creative Commons License


This work is the intellectual property of Naughty Netherworld Press/Poetry of the Netherworld.

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