You’re perfect in anything
I will never not love you
Fried, mashed, baked or chipped
Or tossed into a stew
Seasoned and dressed
In any way will do
Despite any diet
We’re never quite through
I can never say no
And will never be untrue.
Ah… yes, my darling?
A truth you pursue?
Would I choose you or potatoes?
…If only you knew.
First poem of the poetry challenge! Stayed up to midnight to play with it and get a head start. It’s choppy as fuck! Deal with it! 😛
We’re all April fools, fools for spring,
fiends for brighter dawnings,
higher hopes, warmer nights,
renewal and delight.
Winter’s crispness bows to boughs,
swaying blossoms cover ground,
petrichor hangs in the air,
birds sing, love dares.
The atmosphere leaves us reeling,
giddy, silly, full of feeling.
The world is green, it all seems new:
But beware – the world tricks you.
A few simple ones this week. The sidequests were to go to bed early or sleep in the next day, to meditate for 10 minutes, and to spend 5 minutes alone.
Thursday night I crashed early and slept quite awhile.
It was actually quite nice to get a lot of rest, though I still felt a bit tired the next day because I probably overshot and slept way too much. And then proceeded to not sleep much the next few nights. Oops.
Being alone for 5 minutes is easy – I live alone. I do live with three cats, but I can isolate myself in my office area and be really alone for a full 5 minutes.
I don’t meditate often, but when I do I find it fairly refreshing. I like guided meditations, specifically the ones in the Headspace app (the guy’s voice is incredibly calming, not sure if it’s the accent or how he speaks), but I try not to keep too many subscriptions rolling at once, so I haven’t had that on in awhile. However, I decided to splurge for a yearly subscription just for this year to see how that plays out. I’m sure there are probably a few more “meditation” cards in one of the decks, and it’s not a bad practice to try semi-regularly.
The particular one I chose was one of the sleep meditations for getting comfortable and in the right headspace (heh) to fall asleep easily. I’m usually out like a light when following it. I wouldn’t take that as endorsement to how well it works though, just on the fact that I always fall asleep quite easily when I clear my mind and focus on resting. Usually when I stay up very late it’s less due to insomnia and more because I chose to be easily distractible.
My sidequests for this week were to set a timer and clean for 15 minutes, clean or wash my vehicle, and to purge my closet and donate the clothes.
I will usually do a bit of basic cleaning daily and then do a deeper clean every weekend, and I know that takes longer than 15 minutes. Out of curiousity, I decided to set a timer to see how long it did take me rather than counting down to make sure I did at least 15 minutes. Cleaning the entire house took me about an 1 hour and 45 minutes – that does not include finishing out the remainder of the laundry that I started either, but that’s mostly a waiting game and then a bit of folding, which takes less than 15 minutes.
So that’s one card out of the way.
The other two were things that I have been overdue in handling. I’ve been telling myself I need to clean my car for months. It’s not that it gets bad – most people that get into my car always immediately say that it’s really clean. But there are some things that I haven’t done in awhile that need to be done.
So, after sorting through some clothes and dropping them off at Goodwill, along with a few other items I no longer use, I dropped by the car wash. I washed the outside of the car there, and then returned home to vacuum and wipe down the insides, and clean the windows really well.
So now my car is nice and shiny, I don’t have clothes sitting in my closet that I’ll never wear, and the house is clean. It’s a successful weekend.
I’ve always been rather fond of Stephen Crane’s poetry, most especially “A Man Said to the Universe,” “I Saw a Man Pursuing the Horizon,” “In The Desert,” and “Should the Wide World Roll Away.” There is something in each of them that really encapsulates my world view to some degree, and of all of his poems they’re the ones I come back to again and again. Perhaps it is how succint they are – I do like my poetry to be shorter.
I’m also fond of a few of ee cummings love poems, specifically “since feeling is first” – and I would be remiss to not mention Emily Dickinson, since my overuse of dashes is entirely her fault. Shel Silverstein is fun to read in general, but I keep Masks on my phone as a reminder to always shamelessly be myself.
Even some of the cheesy instagram poetry hits just right at times, most especially a particular one by Beau Taplin.
Well, the month of April is also National Poetry Month. The friend that I did the 2023 Writing Challenge with is going to join me in another, much shorter challenge – we’re going to write a poem for every day of April.
The rules are as follows for the 2024 April Poetry Challenge:
So starting April 1st and going until April 30th, we’ll see how we do with daily poetry updates! If we do create any lee-way poetry as a buffer, we will post those after the 30th. This also coincides with the ends of our 2023 Writing Challenge stories, and give us a break from thinking about those before we settle into rewrites.
mehryment 