When All Becomes Too Much — a poem

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

A guy walks into a bank
of fog and disappears
from himself – the harvest
of many nights unclothed
by sleep.

                       What happens
when too many prompts
spoil the ode? Sonnet-
interruptus? Haiku-ka-chu?

Not halfway through
the cruelest month one
goes cold-stone cummings;
jabber-walking parapets
of meter and tone – iamb-
steps through muddied sound.

 

*   *   *

Those who follow me know I don’t always play fair with poetry prompts. Today is no exception. I took, ran with, tripped over a rock or a rut, and twisted three potentially perfectly fine prompts: 

Write a poem about a lost thing; write a poem made up of one-liner style jokes/sentiments; or write a poem about the moment something is harvested.

Instead of “or,” I read it to mean “and.”

My one-liner is actually the first line of a Rodney Dangerfield joke. My wife and I use it as a code. When one of us sends it, we know something has gone amiss. Feel free to look up the joke.