Poetry Exercise #4

Ingredients:

1. Something that could be used (but is not meant for) digging.

2. A person you had almost completely forgotten about, until now.

3. A routine chore.

4. The person, place or thing nobody warned you about.


While digging/scraping/carving/mining/piercing/slitting(#1), whatever, find the forgotten person(#2)inside. Discover how all that he/she does is the one chore(#3) all day long. And beautifully. Why?

Discover the one thing they could have warned you about(#4), had you remembered them. Don't fiddle too much with details, instead, write how you live your life differently, now that you remember this person. Now that you know they knew what you didn't know, until now. Oh, and make sure you only find them once. Also, make sure you continue to try to find them again, but never do. Really, these prompts are just that - prompts. Small literary or non-literary nudges to get you to write. You might not follow all of the directions in this, and that's okay. I write the poems for these as I go, and I rarely follow my own directions. How can I expect YOU to do so? I ain't your mother. But be sure to follow this one thing: write all of this in the third-person.


- - -

(My Poem is in Progress)


_________________________


(This poetry exercise was inspired by Stephen Dobyns' poem "To Pull Into Oneself As Into A Locked Room" from Velocities: New & Selected Poems, one of my very most favoritest books of poetry EVER.)