Young Writers Society

Okay so the weirdest thing happened at work yesterday. The now-wife of the former unrequited love that inspired this poem may have responded to one of the random mailings I have to do for work. The name and location seems to fit, but it could be someone else entirely and just a random coincidence. It's unlikely I'll have to end up calling her, but it shook me up nonetheless.

also see On Cigarettes and Limerence. There is another Camp NaPo poem I wrote about this person, but I haven't posted it properly yet. Credit to @alliyah for writing about nonsense in journals and reminding me of how i fished a journal I had ambivalent feelings about out of the garbage

"men dressed in the color of wanting turn under a cloudless sky,"
"flickering lights of death escape in the streets,
the young ones of time rejoice in your forgotten dreams,
women of harmony touch in the moonless night,
snowflakes of death whisper unseen by anyone but you,
poets of winter hurt before dawn,

Er yeah it's not good that I'm already writing a poem about writer's block on Day 7. And I didn't like the poetic line generator as much as I have in the past. It is very death obsessed.

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: "The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . ."
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in "real life."
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that "echoes" an image from earlier in the poem.
This exercise was devised by Jim Simmerman, who used this exercise to also write a poem which you can look up if you'd like.

Zyzzyx Road refers to the lowest-grossing movie of all time. On IMDB I found a review titled ""On some roads it is better not to fold ... And some movies do not look better ...", which I decided to incorporate into the piece as my found phrase

This is short and will definitely have to be worked on, but I wanted to get a poem a day in. This is about my grad school advisor, who I am debating including as a reference for a job application for a research technician that requires them