From my notebook

I go through periods of time when poetry or its seeds rise brilliantly from the mud and I begin to write spontaneously. But when I sit down with an intent write poetry - inspired by some inner tickle to say something- and the images and ideas don't coalesce into words I stop trying and take a more playful approach. Lately I've been coming up with little assignments and prompts for myself. One of my favorites involves flipping through a dictionary and writing down the last word on the page it opens to and doing a quick stream-of-consciousness writing using these words. This afternoon I flipped up a couple of really interesting lists. The first one:

bludgeon
eat
heresy
heart
locks
nostalgia
peek
rumba
superstition

And here's my free write: 
 

                   I turn to any page and my word is
                    bludgeon, something heavy and unforgiving
                    too much to eat.
                    My heresy is a heart that locks,
                    a caution my friend
                    against nostalgia, though I invite you
                    to peek as my satin hips rumba,
                    cross yourself in superstition
                    against the sin you cannot erase.

The next series of words was:

bourbon
dreadful
drama
fornicate
joker
magnify
odious
shade
spasmodic
temporal
virus

Love this list! And the free write:


            bourbon spills down to the floor
            covering ground like this dreadful drama.
            garish darkness hyenas fornicate
            and a joker howls to the moon whose light will
            magnify the odious shade of evil
            glowing in spasmodic delight,
            a temporal virus eating us alive.