My brain is a jigsaw puzzle, with
gangly termites jigging on the pieces.
I saw it with my own ears! So puzzling.
Fred Astaire and the six jiggers.
Tap shoes on high volume,
jackhammer cane dance on my
frontal lobe.

Ginger Rogers on the sidelines, 
drinking Jack Daniel’s from a 
Texas-sized jigger.
“Mon Dieu,” Her voice the soft breeze of innocence. 
“Tastes like circles. Gnarly, to say the least.”
“Smells like ginger,” responds the jigger.

“Looks like a talking jigger.” 
Fred slides up the bannister to join them.
“Cut!” shouts the director. 
“What evs,” says Fred.
He peels a banana.
Did he turn off the coffee pot this morning?

My brain is a satin pillow.
Every time I lay down, the door bell rings. 
[The poet pauses. What will Mags write next?] 
The sun will rise tomorrow,
wreaking havoc on my termite-jackhammered brain. 
But all’s well that starts terribly! 

Scene fades.
Fred in his tux; ginger in the jigger. 

Day Eight of National Poetry Writing Month. The writing prompt from NaPoWriMo.net is a hum dinger, and I remember it from a prior year’s NaPoWriMo.

The prompt is called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. And here are the twenty little projects themselves — the challenge is to use them all in one poem:

1.  Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

To read how I responded to the prompt in 2020, click here.