via Daily Prompt: Reservation 

Ok, maybe that’s a bit melodramatic but I do have a reservation about The Daily Prompt, because as I write this I should be writing something else. What happened to the posts I was going to write about Courtney Barnett, about Death Cab for Cutie? What about the poems I should finish and submit to a magazine? What about getting a collection of poems together? What about facing the fact that I may not have enough good poems to warrant a collection? What about those song lyrics sitting around waiting for a collaborator? What about “The Lad Poetry Project Revival” ? Instead I am thinking about a daily prompt from a week or two back –“meager”- which didn’t inspire me at the time but then this emerged:

Edgar

Meaghan loved her job,
the compensation was meager
but that didn’t bother her
what bothered her
was her relationship with Edgar;
she felt beleaguered.
“What the hell is wrong with you”,
Edgar raged, on a regular basis,
and all she could think of was:
Isn’t “raged”
an anagram of Edgar?

Then there are the endless revisions. I usually like to let a poem sit for a while, sometimes years, but The Daily Prompt requires an immediate response which invariably means I am rarely satisfied with the poems generated. Take “Confess” for example, I was moderately pleased with one image in the poem but the rest seemed a bit ad hoc, so here is the revised poem, so I can forget about it and move on.

Confess

a sliding hatch
a priest’s profile
through a wire mesh screen
forgiveness, absolution;
will I do it again?
absolutely.