It’s Poetry Wednesday - prompts 2
Beth Kempton prompts - 10 mins, no revision.
Hello all,
A while back
gave us a series of prompts for #tinywinterpoems. A single word, 10 mins only, and definitely no revision. Oo, that was hard. But, it made me stop and think and go more slowly, hard to do when you are under a short time limit. This week I’m posting 4 more of these poems - City, Belief, Wolf, and Nearly. I’ve not had a properly working brain for a while now, so it’s not been very successful but in the spirit of transparency I’m going to post them anyway rather than consigning them to the bin which is what some of them deserve.
City
Brights lights, dark streets,
Uneven curbs, twisted ankles.
Burger wrappers, cigarettes ends,
Rusting metal, crumbling tarmac.
Piss smelling alleys behind gaudy nightclubs
Vomit spewed up dank walls,
Hen night pink sashes ripped and abandoned.
People. People. People everywhere.
Eyes, feet, bodies.
The stench of sweat in closed spaces,
Pushed together, pushed together.
No space, no silence, no calm.
Sirens blaring, horns sounding,
Cars revving, buses grumbling.
Noise, lights, smells, all overwhelming.
Pulsing music, slamming doors,
Hailing cabs, squealing brakes.
3 stage lights, no time to cross the road,
Chewing gum plastered lamp posts.
Fear, nausea, anxiety.
City.
March 2024I don’t like cities. Never have. They are too big, too loud, too crowded. They smell. And they don’t have many trees or green spaces. I spent four of my teenage years in Manchester coming from rural Kent and I hated it. I never felt safe. My secondary school, known as the second worst school in the Greater Manchester area, had a rivalry with another school, probably the third worst school (my father taught at the worst) and there were constant fights between the two. Nights out for me in my later years at uni were inLincoln which was smaller and much more acceptable. I don’t like this one.
Next.
Belief
Old ways abandoned
Wilfully, carelessly, without thought.
New ones garnered
Wilfully, carelessly, without thought.
The red wave destroying the blue.
Democracy threatened by mistaken beliefs.
Flat worlds, personal suns, chem trails,
Q-Anon, the dark web.
The list grows and goes on and on.
Armchair socialists sigh and drink
Their free trade wine
Sitting in gentle suburbia in 100 year old houses
Belief can now be bought, traded, and swapped
On a whim.
March 2024Oh, I really, really don’t like this one at all. It took me ages to think of how to begin, and in fact I didn’t manage any kind of thought or plan before I started but I needed to start or I’d run out of time. I started out thinking more of old beliefs like Paganism etc but very quickly my brain turned to tRump and our useless government here and the populace being manipulated by main stream media. So the red wave is then republicans and the blue the democrats, whereas I should have written it m a UK view and it should be the other way around. But when you only have a couple of mins to sort your thoughts and get them down …. well, it often goes wrong, and wrong this one is.
Next.
Wolf
Scent on the air
Eyes sharp
Ears pricked
Mouth salivating
Claws ready, ground hard.
Teeth grinding, tongue licking,
Brothers gathered.
Sisters salivating.
Team together.
The hunt is on.
March 2024This is better but my brain still wasn’t working well. As I said before I struggle with one word prompts, I think due to my black and white thinking due to Autism. I’m a stickler for sticking to then10 min rule and if I can’t think of something quickly I go back to the simplest way, which is in this case just to write about wolves. It needs a good rewrite, a much longer exposé of being a wolf on a hunt.
Next.
Nearly
I nearly managed to write a decent poem
and then my brain took a holiday,
went for a wander down the road
and forgot to come back again.
I thought about rhymes and meter,
about syllables and punctuation
and then was unable to manipulate
it all into anything resembling art:
a mere discourse on an errant brain gone awol.
I nearly managed to write a decent poem
and then my wit deserted me,
strolled off down the lane
and stayed for a good, long while.
I thought about jokes and puns,
about quips and repartee
and made no-one laugh not even myself,
a stand up comic I would never be:
a mere failure of a wayward brain refusing to play.
March 2024I quite like this one. It came fairly easily and I like the much more abstract prompt that enabled me to think about the word differently. I’d been thinking about how hard it has been recently the think poems properly and so this one just tripped its way out. You could say it took more than 10 mins, but I wasn’t thinking about a poem, hadn’t looked at the prompt, didn’t know anything other than I was struggling to write with a foggy brain. It could possibly do with being longer, another verse or two maybe.
I might, at some point take some of the prompts and edit them. Some are worth it and some are not.
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„Nearly” is my favourite 🤩
You wrote four poems, which puts you ahead of me. And most of the rest of humanity. Good on you.