The Poetry Marathon

Prompt for Hour Four

They came silently, the sky was glowing black
The old man was not home, the lights were off
They waited
steel gave patience company
You could see time chasing the moon
through indifferent clouds
The wood-paneled interiors
musty, overdone, cheap
They waited, and then some more
A car drives up; Keys, door, slam, steps, clatter
The room lights up, the old man sees them, nods
They shuffle, work to be done
steel brings peace
Lights off, they walk out, the night is silent
All promises kept, every score settled

Prompt for Hour Three

This day, my dear folks
We are gathered here to welcome
The forever night!

From now, no light will there be
The mornings will be forgotten
God willing, we’ll get used to the new way

The people are requested to pay their last respects
To our dear departing sun
in an orderly fashion, thank you

We will live modestly, the darkness is cozy
The lord will guide us through
Glorious forever night!

Prompt For Hour Two

She had some water, he had some sand
A toy duck chased imaginary crabs

The sea smiles from a polite distance

Prompt for Hour One

On the tip of my finger, a reddish button
A radioactive silence, a tale in Braille
Lonely shores, muted yawns
Artifacts a few, none too alive

A crystal I found, twice
A map to Lichtenstein
An ancient armored car
A driver’s frozen laugh

Just people, not gods

Hi all,

This is my second year; last year I was part of the half marathon.

A copyeditor by profession, I scribble when I can.

Here for the synaptic workout. And to enjoy the work of wordsmiths at play.

Yes, this is an intense ride. Mind-numbingly so.
Yes it is fun, loads of fun. Especially with Jacob’s wacky prompts 😉
And coffee. Lots of coffee.

Looking forward y’all 🙂

I have recently come to realize
Our commonplace human lives
Could actually be drawn as graphs

Just a few lines to mark our typical movements
These lines repeated again and again
Marking the passage of time
in days, months, years

Hundreds upon thousands of people
Living out their predictable lives
With overlapping lines of movement
Home to workplace
Friend’s place to the shopping centre

Maybe sometimes, an interstate move
In which case, new lines are drawn
Which start repeating
Over and over again

In a bid to befuddle
the human-movement-pattern cartographers,
What if we started making
new movement lines in our life-graphs?
Like going to a different store
Or meeting some new folks
Maybe taking the long route home

With some deliberation, we could ideally be making
A brand new movement line on our life-graph
Every single time we went somewhere!

Now, wouldn’t that be swell?

Ours is a blessed tribe
We believe
The reverse of our name being G-O-D
We can’t help but feel happy at the association

As the old story goes
A long time ago, we left the forest
Separating ourselves from our cousins —
The wolves, the jackals, the foxes, the coyotes
We left the wild life behind
Choosing, instead, to live with humans
Providing them with safety
and companionship

Since then, we identify ourselves
By the humans we serve
and the places we protect
For the sake of that loyalty
We often fight with our own kind
As a matter of course
As a matter of principle

What gives us great happiness
is seeing our kids play with human children
A happy child is the sign of a happy family!!

I am a face
Being a face is not your everyday business
There are a lot of responsive responsibilities involved

We serve as a primary identification
for our bearers (or carriers)
For example, my bearer-person is known to be happy
When I stretch my underlying musculature
to display the ‘smile’ expession
with situation-appropriate intensity, of course

We primarily communicate using
our lexicon of available expressions
Universally understood, yet inherently unique

What sets us apart (and brings us together) is the fact that
We can only know ourselves by reading
the expressions on one another

Facial aberrations make us unique
and serve as identification triggers
(Which is why we faces have a deep respect
for the old and wise Morgan Freeman
God bless his freckles!)
My bearer-person has an askew nose
And clumpy eyebrows
His friend has a faint wart on his jaw
When I smile at ‘Warty’, his face smiles back at me

My greatest fear is the mirror room
Like in that Bruce Lee movie
Or in those godawful changing rooms at the mall
with mirrors on every wall
I can’t bear the notion of one bearer-person having
Infinite clone faces with their features reversed

Being a face is not easy these days
There’s too much reputation at stake
You have to face things, or fear losing face
I yearn to reach the age of facial freedom
Which is when your bearer-person becomes old
And we become so wrinkled, we essentially become
Invisible and faceless

The world at large neither knows
nor cares how you feel
Yet, for reasons unknown,
it stands silently and indifferently,
Watching the spectacle
of your wanting to exist.

Were you but a lump of modeling clay
Would you have cared for your formlessness?
Or, if you were just a molecule,
Would it have made sense
if you complained
Why you were a component molecule of water?
Or, maybe a molecule in some underground mineral alloy?

Probably not.

Yet, being human, you have grown used
To the will of being You.
And unrepentant,
you keep asserting your will to be You.

Your you-ness has cost you worldly affiliation
No doubts about that
However, does it give you great joy
to be You?

The Charter of Wish Fulfillment called for a consensus
of people’s needs and wishes
In order to better understand what we want
From life, from the government, from each other

Every evening
An elected spokesperson stands on a box in the townsquare
and reads out our collected needs for the day
We need aerosol dispensers for better distribution of fine particles
We need ergonomic baby helmets to keep their brains safe and cozy
We need kevlar-reinforced sleeping bags for peaceful nights

We stand around the spokesperson’s box
and nod our agreements
We need radiation-resistant, acid-repellant tarps for schools
and daycare centres
We need more minimized-labor days annually
…
As darkness begins to fall, we return to our living quarters

At the dinner table we now keep
A pencil stub and an old sheet of paper
Just in case we remember some need we had missed before