For today’s prompt, do one of the following:

1. Write a goofy poem.
2. Write a serious poem.

Of course, I see the possibility for writing a seriously goofy poem and writing a serious poem with a little goofy thrown into the mix. I’m excited to see what kind of silly things may transpire the next 24 hours, and I’m interested in all the straight-faced poems as well.

What a full day. I took a few minutes this morning and wrote an especially dumb poem. I’m almost ashamed to post it. No, I AM ashamed to post it. And yet, here I go.

Shadow’s Farting:
Our
sweet
old
worried
gassy
Shadow
an
echo
in
our
wakes
our
furry
farting
sweet
old
Shadow
dumps
us
as
soon
as the
weather
breaks

For today’s prompt, pick a type of person and write a poem about him or her. To help set the scene, you may want to title your poem as who the type of person is. For instance, you could write a poem titled “Firefighter,” “Cynic,” “Optimist,” “Teacher,” “2-year-old,” etc. The list is endless.

I’m really enjoying these prompts, I’ve never tried to write like this. It’s like opening a new toy every morning and seeing if I can figure out how to play with it.

I think if I look at these poems as sketches I’m able to free myself up a bit. Think little place holders for ideas that might grow into a completed poem at some point.

If you write something, do share your poem with me. I encourage you to go to Poetics Asides and read all the other prompt poems being created and post your own words there as well!

BOO WEARS A TINFOIL HAT:
She hears my voice
but doesn’t know who’s talking.
Boo speaks in seven languages
but dreams of a silent heaven -
Erased are the buffer lines
that hold back imagination
In her head an orchestra
of TV warning crawlers
breaking news and danger talkers
She stock piles bottled water
taps her hat
and suggests I tune
my hound dog’s radio wire.

Here’s what he wrote:

Today’s prompt is to write a poem in which you imagine the world without you. Since my favorite movie (It’s a Wonderful Life) plays with this idea, I’m surprised I’ve never used this prompt before. The world could be a much worse place without you, could be pretty much the same, or I guess, it could even be better. Anyway, it’s interesting to contemplate our individual contributions to this planet in ways small and large.

I was playing with ideas for a poem earlier today but came up empty handed so far. Do I want to imagine that I was never born, or just went up in a poof of smoke yesterday…maybe something in-between? I’m thinking I’ll try imagining the world without the me that I have become. Hmmmm…

If I get lucky, I’ll have something to post before I go to bed. What do you come up with using this prompt?

Robert’s challenge reads:

For today’s prompt, write a postcard poem. Make it brief and communicate what it is like where you are. Also, make it personal. My poem is on the way, but I am having trouble producing line breaks with my smart phone. In the meantime, get poeming.

A Postcard from St. Joe’s

I wasn’t scheduled to arrive here
but the surgeon pointed me in this direction.
It will take a bit of getting used to
I’m not sure yet how to travel under
such strange and new conditions.

Your turn. Let’s see what you can do with Robert’s prompt.

This was my first domain and I named it as I asked the question “why not see if I have anything meaningful to say, lots of people write and share their ideas, why can’t I?….WhyNotRachel was born. I had just closed down my studio and was tapering down my work as a professional visual artist to test drive a dream of expressing myself through words both written and spoken.

I was a late speaker, so much so that my folks consulted experts about my silence. But I begin writing even before I knew my A B C’s. I would mimic my mother’s writing and take my scribbles to her and ask what I had written. She would pull me onto her lap and read me the amazing story I had just penned. I was a child genius!

I always have loved words, and now I talk, sometimes too much. I have, however, lost the confidence I had as that preverbal scribbler. My spelling is awful, my grammar and punctuation stunted. I write a lot but most of the words remain in notebooks, drafts and saved word documents.

This is not a revaluation or declaration post. I can’t say how much of my words will actually see the light. I just know that I want to make a place for it to happen. Like an empty room, I can put some furniture in if I find some pieces I really like.

I do know that I would enjoy having this be a place for sharing. If I have a vision at all, it is to be able to have short story and poets be able to post their work and be able to get honest, thought filled critiques on their work. The other idea I have that I just think would be a blast is to create collaborative poems using twitter tweets. #TwtPoem. See the page on this site about this idea, coming soon.

It will be dusty in here for a while as a move old stuff off the site and give this place a face lift. Empty the room.

Rae Z Cornell @ExquisiteTweetz

Did you catch last weekends Saturday Night Live’s skit spoofing Gov. David Paterson of New York State? If you didn’t see it, maybe you have been hearing all the noise that has followed in its wake.

My take is that this is good news for people with disabilities. Think about it, a blind guy is Governor of New York State …An”openly blind” guy…Governor of NY! Plus, the guy has enough cache to merit a skit on SNL. Well, we have arrived!

It’s easy to forget the fact that we have already had a disabled person in high office. Then however every effort was made to hide the fact that the President of the United States of America, FDR, could hardly walk. Somehow a disability showed weakness, so it was painstakingly hidden. Today the disability of a public servant is not hidden. We have come so far in fact, that it’s acceptable fodder for a comedy skit. Or, it should be acceptable fodder, but we still have some raw nerves it seems. Too bad.

My only beef with the skit is that it just wasn’t that funny. Funny would have been if the Governor showed up and spoofed himself.

It’s too bad that Paterson jumped right into “outrage” before consider the situation from many angles. The same goes for The Federation for the Blind and other disability advocacy organizations. We had the chance to say, it’s great that we are at a place that it’s alright to poke fun at someone specific who has a disability. His character was not being attacked, his accomplishment as a guy in the public eye was being exploited. Haven’t we been aiming for equal access? He wasn’t selling pencils on street corners in New York City, we was holding a graph on the economy upside down. It wasn’t super funny but it was not degrading.

Take the risk and express your HONEST thoughts on this. I would love to hear what you have to say.

Yesterday she wrote a blog entry that I think is an important expansion to the thoughts I shared in my last post. She picked up where my expertise leaves off. So to both introduce you to Patty (if you don’t know her already) and also share her thoughts about spouses of disabled war vets, I’m reprinting her post. Here it is:

“…If you’re married to someone learning to go after his or her dreams with a body that can’t do some of the things it could do before, it’s going to throw some new obstacles in the path to your dreams, too. People are going to treat your spouse differently now. And it’s going to affect you. Your spouse must handle many things differently now. It’s going to affect how he or she handles your relationship, too.

Expect love. It won’t — it can’t — come in the same packages as before, but it will be there. Find other ways to get the other forms of help and support you need to follow your dreams.

Assume love. Don’t jump to conclusions about the meaning of a harsh or discouraging word or a change in daily rituals. You’ve both got a lot of adjusting to do, and you’re going to overadjust a few times before you get it right.

Look for third alternatives. Honor the dreams. Respect the efforts. Don’t ever think your first idea or two is all you get to choose from. Build the new rituals, the new furniture layouts, the new traditions, the new chore-sharing arrangements that build the new life and move toward the lifelong dreams that make you both whole no matter what.”

Click HERE to visit Patty’s blog

Click HERE to visit her Website

I think this language can, and often does, cause more pain than healing. When I read words like “help veterans get back on track and put the pieces of a very shattered puzzle together again” I think, “Ummm, not likely.” Not likely for that vet who’s got one original limb left after being hammered by roadside projectiles. I say you don’t put the pieces back together; you have to build a whole new kind of puzzle. That vet is going to learn to walk and button his shirts up in a new way; that’s not an old puzzle for him, it’s a new one.

I don’t want to sound like a hardass bitch, I just want to say, what’s gone is gone, and it hurts, it sucks and it deserves to be mourned. But to think it’s going to all fit back together neatly again like it once was, that life is going to be put back on track is doing people a disservice. Not just for the returning solder either but everyone. You and me and everyone. It’s hoping for the imposable and asking someone who’s gone through hell to come home and do the impossible. What a crappy thing to do to someone. And what a crappy thing to look on in disappointment as they try and fail at “putting the pieces together again.”

These are new lives being built. Maybe even better lives, yes better even with shrapnel still lodged in someone‘s gut. You’ve just got to get that no one is going to get back to normal. NORMAL does not exist anyway; “normal” is nothing more than a setting on a washing machine, period.

I read how an event is designed to help “wounded veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan become whole again.” I’m not sure what to say to that. If you are trying to go BACK to anything, anything whatsoever, it is
just not possible. Wholeness is what you make of it in a given moment. To tell the Iraq vet that an event will help him become whole again, might sting a bit. This man is whole and remains whole three limbs down. He is as whole as he is willing to work for being. Just like everyone else. But let‘s not lie to him either. He’s going to be looked at in a new way and even maybe talked to differently. To pretend he’s the same guy he has always been is patronizing. He’s a new him, with a new puzzle to design. I’m not suggesting that he asked for this new construction of his body, I’m not, I’m saying it is what it is. Go forward from there.

The one thing that is the same for every vet that has sustained a physical injury is that they have passions that can not and were not blown away by a roadside bomb. They may think it’s been lost to despair or impossible to disability, but I full heartedly disagree. You cannot amputate a dream, and a passion is only fogged by PTSD, not lost.

The dreams of loved ones of injured vets are also still intact. You, too, might need to design those dreams so they can be expressed given the new conditions for which you will be developing them. You, like the vet, must know that those dreams remain.

Trauma does not take your dreams. Injury does not steal a goal; only thinking it is gone and no longer attainable will rob you of your deepest and best self. I’m not saying it’s going to be a cakewalk getting your dreams expressed. I am saying it is by far the most important thing for you to do.

If you want to help people feel whole, help them express their dreams. Identify and address the new challenges head on, but only as fresh obstacles to accomplishing what always has been and always will be who they really are.