Rachel's Repository of Prompt Poetry

accidentally wrote a poem in twitter. more of a pun, really. but so true.

2010-09-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

i wonder if i quit taking the pill, would i regain the ability to conceive -- of the existence of good in the world?

ENVERSIONING

2010-09-02T17:21:00.001-07:00

my friend challenged me to write a story about a typo. this is more of a stream-of-consciousness prose poem. i gave up a little too quickly.

It can go one of any number of ways. That's the thing about time. That's the thing about things.

You get up in the morning. It's the 21st century. It's dumb like that. Things occur to you like "I'm going to create my day. I'm going to manifest my desires. I'm going to nurture my artist. I'm going to make him express himself. hey Hey Hey Hey." But it never turns out like that. Every day is the same, in its own unique way. Every day you fail to do this thing.

But it could change. It could change right now.

Imagine, for instance, that insterad of sitting here the way you are sitting, halfheartedly vaguely interacting with a page of wordsk and who knows what they mean or whether they're worth your trouble, you are in fact on a great big clippers hip, sailing from this town to that, in a sailor suit and hat. Seriouisly. Other people have better lieves than you, that's what made them great. They didn't dream it, they be'd it.

Inagine, for instance, that instead of sitting here you are running up that road, running up that hill running up that building running up that electrid bill.

You see, you can't even genuinely put yourself in that picture. You're stuck in the hopelessly quotidian lonely little details of your own personality. You know what you're going to do next? You're going to go buy a tub of ice cream and a bag oc cheetos and go watch Project Runway by yourself. You call that romance?

But it could go any number of ways. You're swerving on an attomic level. You're headed towards Dreamtime. You've got potential. You've come a long way, baby.

So make of it what you will. This tissue of lies.

Thus Spake Biggus Dickus

2010-08-20T22:48:00.001-07:00

prompt: Write a poem using only words that start with "s" (duh)

and having done so, can't help thinking of that scene in Life Of Brian where they make fun of people with speech impediments.

Surely science swerved

sunday's sermon

somewhere southern.

Superman salvo

sleeps sans shuddering,

so saith sage serpents.

Sudden shame?

Seek several suggestive shapes

subconsciously severed.

2010-07-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

wow, i'd
better post something
so my new comments
settings can take
effect

no more porn
spammers
here

The Small Misfortune Of A Rum And Coke

2010-07-06T19:54:00.000-07:00

Sometimes one thing
insufficient in itself
is not improved by addition
of a second thing

noxious rum
in a glass of ice

a person
seeking love

This is a such an evening, my friend
so sit by me
in the dimmest light we can find
and drink.

nothing prompted me today but the desire to produce something. well, and this rum and coke i have here, and a sense of melancholy. and, yes, the unsettling but gratifying knowledge that somebody's actually reading this damn thing. though, knowing this, i have also had to ask myself if i shouldn't be trying harder to write something that might actually be edifying to read...oh well! clearly i have resisted the impulse, so, no need to worry. :)

raw

2010-06-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

and this is it. typos and all.
(don't let it scare you. it is possible to generate worthwhile writing with this tool, i just wanted to try out the Publish feature.)

"Write Or Die Poem 6/40/10

Lack of focus or experimental mood
decidedly disollute and like
i saw a firefly dying on my bathroom floor
i couldn't get it to fly away or glow
and i took this as a bad omen

cause where else am i supposed to look for love
having paved every alley
in weird silk and succeeded
in never feeling much for my sex partners

but what if

and what the fuck

so there's me and my paper sack
full of the things i should be doing
and all i can muster is this self-disgust
and the lonely bare bulb of a mind

too scared to go down any imaginative uncertainties
unbelieving
and unsatiable like
a kid who only eats saltines but will not
by any means stop eating

how can you be so hungry for this d unnourishing

we might well ask

and yet this is the right age for it
in all ways, look around

No it's not true it's
a world, still,
and it's full

not hungry

full of reality. and i am within it
one of many tiny moving bits of data
to be processed
and then gone"

Good News For Me!

2010-05-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

I recently found out that I'm getting a poem published, in an upcoming anthology of Nebraska women poets, called The Untidy Season. Gonna be released next spring. What's another few months?

This is pretty great news for me. First acceptance in my adult life, and I can't help thinking it'll be ever so slightly easier now that I've got my name in a book. Onward and upward!

My secret? Get on etsy and buy an Oscar Wilde prayer candle, and fucking bribe him with money.

Of course the real secret is supposed to be perseverance, so, I guess we should all really just keep sending out the submissions. If this publication thing is really so important..

I recommend this, hugely

2010-04-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

Write or Die by Dr Wicked

so cool; i know many of us have been dreaming of ways to be forced to write. you sure as hell can't take a break to check facebook without this program noticing. and i cannot overstate the helpfulness of that. damn facebook.

2010-04-11T10:02:00.000-07:00

I had sort of quit posting here because I wanted to save my best work to submit to the magazines, and at some point I had realized that some of them considered material published on blogs as 'previously published material.'

But in light of certain sentiments expressed on my other blog, it seems appropriate to relax a bit and come back to this. Doing good work is more important than getting published, innit? So since I've found the prompts and stuff helpful in the past, and since, honestly, more people are seeing what I post here than what I post to various editors, well, The Repository is officially re-opened. Besides, I'll totally console myself by putting all these into a book myself.

Though unfortunately it looks like a lot of the blogs I'd been following for prompts have sort of slowed down with the updating. Oh well, soldier on!

2010-04-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

I gather a deck
of self-concepts
and choose one
and go up to you.

Have you seen this person?

Your face is hard to read.
I go home to consult
my records, check my thinking.

Who was I?
Who can support this story?

Surely I didn't just
ask you, just like that.

for/from poetry instigator?

The Blue Overalls

2009-10-29T16:53:00.000-07:00

In the midst of a tedious day's
cleaning, I get
a defiant sense

of the luxury of ugly things.

I find a pair of overalls,
not even old, just blue--
naive, unvariegated blue--

as fashion statement,
useless,
and irrelevant to my lifestyle.

On no occasion
would I wear these overalls.
This fact gives me unaccountable joy
and I rush to try them on.

These elements, unacceptable,
are therefore mine, all mine.

for Poetry Instigator - Neruda & The Mundane

2009-10-14T14:59:00.000-07:00

Let no philosophy be
analogous to clothes shopping.
I don't wear fashions
as feelings, or vice versa. My life
is poorly stitched by hand
from the scraps of those ideas,
not from whole cloth.

prompt from Matthew Zapruder @ Poetry Instigator:
"...pick a sentence from a book at random. Then, figure out the action or principle underlying the sentence, and begin the poem by saying you (or someone) is NOT doing that action or doesn’t believe in that principle, thereby negating the premise."

This particular li'l poem(above) is more of a fragment and I don't even know for sure what it means, but the prompt was dashed intriguing.

My sentence is from What Color Is Your Parachute? which is the only book of prose I had on hand. For a moment I despaired of finding anything I wanted to negate in this book of positiveness, but this was a pretty good prompt and I managed to grab hold of something.

The sentence: "It is exactly analogous to your going to a clothing store and trying on different suits (or dresses)"

Ardipithecus

2009-10-12T12:17:00.000-07:00

Scientists still can't see
the evolutionary advantage
in bipedalism

wish they still had
grasping feet

are on the verge of admitting
it really was God.

Nature's mistakes
don't flourish.

for read write poem

Body of Work

2009-10-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

Where is it done?
Is it located in the nerves,
in the back,
in the strength of the thigh
to walk and climb and do
whatever is necessary?

Probably the shoulders
are the seat of the Will
at its most godly--
the origin
of the muscles of embrace,
shoring up all things.

for read write poem

Coverage

2009-10-10T09:44:00.001-07:00

We need health care
to stay pretty for you,
Senators.

A sick woman
is an unsightly woman.
(unless of course
we're talking
consumption)

for read write poem

Doctor's Office Diagrams IV

2009-10-09T23:20:00.000-07:00

I always conceived
the uterus
to be huge,

also the heart.

Each, I am told,
about the size
of a fist.

for read write poem
yeah a bit slapdash and probably been said before, sorry about that. gotta keep on truckin'.

Doctor's Office Diagrams III

2009-10-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

The exemplary human head is drawn
with the hairstyle of an American politician

for the small fraction of humanity
who might find this face reassuring.

for read write poem

Doctor's Office Diagrams II

2009-10-07T22:43:00.000-07:00

There's no witchcraft in blood.
It's shaped like nothing,
like practicality, a modified sphere.

Experience is unpainterly.
The beauty of it always lost
to the body that lost the blood.

At best, taboo
or disgust;
at worst, bare fact.

for read write poem

Doctor's Office Diagrams I

2009-10-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

Larynx, phonation

The color pallette
has been reduced, and dried
in order to avoid triggering
a too-vibrant self-knowledge

Larynx, inspiration

for october poetry mini-challenge @ Read Write Poem

Women On The Beach

2009-09-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

You're pretending
moments of happiness change something.

You're posing for pictures,
a smile on your face.

The beach is real, and the surf,
but we can't know for sure
if it's loving us back,

if this will save us,
this one day,
with salt crusting our hair,
stripping our studied dignities.

Your laughter
doesn't echo here.

Are you writing this down?
Wouldn't this make
a good story?

--when the day has dried, when
you're alone again,

hoping there was a reason,
hoping
you did well--

for easystreet prompts #660.

Slowly, He Turned...

2009-09-06T13:34:00.000-07:00

I've never seen a man change.

Ask him to reconsider.
Ask a pear orchard in winter
to feed you now.

The cycles are baffling
to short-lived, hungry things
like love.

Staring upward
through the placid limbs
I waited for flowers to bloom.

By now, who knows?
He may be on a hillside
in Provence,

sharing everything, smiling at the sky.

for Totally Optional Prompts

Absence Riff

2009-09-05T14:29:00.000-07:00

1. It's A Wonderful Presence

Yes, and what if
you had been born?

with your wheels your faces your habits

If you had been born
Space would have expanded all around you
and energy would have flooded
in waves the color of you
everywhere you went
every day

The way you moved a chair
The way you spoke to that waitress

In your wake, an ever-widening causality

How is it
with so many people in the world
that time and space are not ajumble
with the wreckage from billiions and billions
of little sullen hurricanes going on and on?

How does anything
stand?

2. Without You

Occasionally one fantasizes
about the flash fame
of suicide

or bearing children

But no one ever says the truth at a funeral
that it's the dead who are most guilty
of forgetting

3. Take-Away

Convenience
is the most natural thing

Evolution only runs downhill

We get our food
from roadside stands now
and the killers and the farmers
like underpaid puppeteers
running around behind the black curtain

When the ranchlands
are pulled back under the earth

there will be no more
exotic places

We'll all be crowded onto a mountaintop
trying to be the first
to catch the raindrops as they fall

And we will eat dust and crawl on our bellies
just like in the beginning

for Poetry Instigator

(Falling in love at my age)

2009-09-03T22:01:00.000-07:00

is a knot
to be untangled
blindfold, submerged
in water

a lock to pick, a box
to splinter

only to climb
into a new one, and seal it
even tighter

just wanted to share this cause i thought i was really clever when i wrote it, i won't lie.

Risks

2009-08-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

I did not hide
sewing scissors
in the laundry

or set a bucket of water
by my screen door
to invite the rain in

I spoke of love, but did not
insist upon it, least of all
to myself

and I ran out of money
for all the extra fees
so I retrenched, literally.

I am peeping out of a hole, expecting
mortars to fall, and I think I am smiling.

I haven't gone
to the place where flowers are taught
what colors to display

but I pass that garden every day.
And there is a strict jungle of offices
and so much more that I do not know.

It's all in books. The library is the most dangerous
place in the world, and is, I think,
the door that leads in and out at the same time.

for http://totallyoptionalpromts.blogspot.com

2009-08-15T16:46:00.000-07:00

My animal's all dressed up
in frothy, languorous petticoats tonight,
in bright hard glitter and a beat of blood.
She's been to a party, she's been talking with you.

She's been leaning up against the fruit trees
in the garden out back, full of coarse stars.
Give me, give me, she says.

She hitches homeward
from the night of tossed-up crinolines
eyelashes and bare arms--

She comes home with hot coals,
to me.

I fall into bed, disconnnect
the fiery diodes,
play my heart with a spoon,
chew on foil--

waiting, shiny with the fanaticism
of a new affair.

for http://readwritepoem.org

Intro

2009-08-09T12:16:00.000-07:00

I'm Rachel, I blog irregularly at http://improbableenjoyment.blogspot.com on topics of general/no interest.

I've decided I need a spin-off blog for when I want to participate in poetry prompts hosted by various communities such as

http://readwritepoem.org
http://totallyoptionalprompts.blogspot.com

and whatever else I find, without spending too much time at Improbable Enjoyments just talking about my own work, since that was not the idea behind starting that blog. If it can be said to have a theme, well, it's not that.

So I don't know if there will be much here or not, but I need all the help I can get when it comes to writing and god knows I have so much time on my hands that I'm sure managing two blogs will be a snap.