Today the NaPoWriMo website provided a seemingly random list of words, challenging us to incorporate five of them into a poem. I used all twenty-eight words on the list. And I used them in the exact order they appeared on that list, which worked surprisingly well! I didn’t know them all–I had to look several of them up, which was fun. And I’m pretty sure that I used them all correctly in the following little surrealistic thing. Do you know what a quahog is? It’s a clam. How about rodomontade? That’s a boastful speech or rant. Try them out on your friends. And the only other thing I’d like to brag about is that I used the word cheese as a verb. Here’s my 20th poem for National Poetry Writing Month:
Owl and Cyclops
Owl sits perched upon the
generator
outside.
I’m afraid he’ll abscond
upwind with the thing,
squander his power, smoke
clove cigarettes, wax
miraculous
against the dunderhead
Cyclops
standing around in that whole area,
willowy,
mercurial,
breath like seaweed
gutter-mouth,
nonpareil monstrosity.
The hoot-hooting is the bird’s only artillery,
but those claws might be sufficient, a
salt
wound
to curl
the monster’s ego, enough to perhaps
prevent or at least curtail the
rodomontade
sure to follow.
Cyclops knows Owl to be elusive,
twice
the ghost of any god,
its sole purpose to cheese and offend the one-eyed,
a
cowbird
truffle, hated generally by all the night creatures.
But Owl, svelte, with enormous eyes, carries off my generator,
feasts on quahog, while Cyclops,
bilious and pissed,
rages into the nothingness.
michael jarmer 