2020 April PAD Challenge: Day 25
Write a poem every day of April with the 2020 April Poem-A-Day Challenge. For today’s prompt, write a remix poem.
For today’s prompt, write a remix poem. That is, take one (or more) of your poems from earlier this month and remix it. Make a free verse poem into a villanelle. Or condense a sestina into a haiku or senryu. Or forget form. Just completely jumble up the words…or respond to the original poem(s). As always, have fun with it.
Remember: These prompts are just springboards; you have the freedom to jump in any direction you want. In other words, it’s more important to write a new poem than to stick to the prompt.
Here’s my attempt at a Remix Poem:
“Cento of the Stairs”
It’s not my nature to say no.
As long as I can remember,
I’ve always been a fool finding
myself unable to figure
out which way to go, breaking lines
night after night, thoughts rambling
and scrambled (lost in the forest
of no returns) before the doors
swing open and aliens crash
the party. It’s true I expect
the worst of the world, wishing I
could erase an entire day or
year, and I don’t know why I do.
If you find this note, I cannot
take for granted when we don’t say,
“I love you.” In the beginning,
when everyone already knew,
it was so easy it was bad luck.
I cannot escape that space is
relative to the light starting
to glow against the window’s blind
dogwoods blossoming before we
sheltered from the sun watching us
turn away like passengers in
lonely vessels of confinement
wandering through the windows of
our spaced out minds finding we are
both the fools who reap what we sow.
(Note on my remix: As the title suggests, I made a cento using lines and phrases from each of my previous 24 poems this month.)
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
