Day 1: Two lunes - #NaPoWriMo #NationalPoetryMonth

Backyard cherry blossoms on this gorgeous April Fool's Day

It's April again–the month when this fool engages in public acts of exhibitionism. Beware! I like to skinny-dip in pools of words.

I'm daring myself to write at least one poem draft a day and am inspired by a private writing challenge and safe forum that poetess Jennifer Givhan has offered up. (I recommend you keep an eye out for her upcoming poetry collection, Landscape with Headless Mama.) The poems I work on there will remain secrets. Rough-hewn on the edges, I will tumble and polish them to my liking before I decide whether to share them.

For now, I think I'll stick to amusing myself with fun form challenges such as this one from Maureen Thorson's generous

NaPoWriMo /30 Poems in 30 Days site. Her prompt today is as follows: 

"And now, our prompt (optional, as always). Today, I challenge you to write a lune. This is a sort of English-language haiku. While the haiku is a three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable count, the lune is a three-line poem with a 5-3-5 syllable count. There’s also a variant based on word-count, instead of syllable count, where the poem still has three lines, but the first line has five words, the second line has three words, and the third line has five words again. Either kind will do, and you can write a one-lune poem, or write a poem consisting of multiple stanzas of lunes. Happy writing!"

Here are my two attempts, both inspired by my view outside today:

cherries blossom and

petals bloom

too high for my grasp

and

clumps of flowers advertise health

summon the bees

dead branches obscured in lichen

Want to join me? Post your poems in the comments!

Stalker's Lament—sonnet #NationalPoetryMonth

"I Want You," the ballad of a creep, first debuted on this album.

Has anyone ever shown way too much interest in you? Has anyone ever treated you as an object rather than as a human?  Without going into the particulars, I can tell you that one such hollow manchild wanted me for his trinket. On a campus of thousands, he invaded my real estate. He routinely followed me into the dining hall and sat down next to me uninvited. He waited for me in the corridor to the restroom I used after Philosophy 101 each Tuesday and Thursday. Once, he crept out of some laurel hedges near the gym to surprise me. He crawled into the corner of my eye.

One night, while listening to the original Napoleon Dynamite in my (locked) dorm room,  "I Want You" came on for the millionth time. But I heard it for the first time.

Somehow this time I understood the desperate nature of the lyrics and how they eerily applied to this creepy dude. It finally clicked that his attentions were not indicative of affection. In fact, they were 180 degrees shy of respect and headed due north for danger. Stunned, I tried to shake him.

Remembering this, I imagined what the thoughts of today's paranoid obsessive freshman might look like in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet.* I don't know why. It just seemed like the thing to do.

Stalker's Lament

Why do I think to text you every day?
It is because you really should be here.
When I return, I'll make sure you will stay.
To lose you once again would tweak my fear.
Your face appears with every bud I smoke.
Your scent pervades each room like piny wood
you said goodbye 'for good' when we last spoke
you needed space and 'hoped I understood.'
I'll grasp the slippery string of your balloon
give up heart and soul as weights for ballast
Don't float away; I'll pluck you from the moon
and claw you back to Earth with fingers calloused.
You disappeared as quickly as a dream.
I'll capture you in videos I stream.

*Shakespearean sonnets are insanely fun to write (not only when writing from the vantage point of a disturbed mind!)  14 lines composed of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. Iambic pentameter. The couplet often serves as an epiphany. It usually arrives in the form of a conclusion, amplification, or even refutation of the previous three stanzas. Write one and pretend you're the Bard himself.