Poetry Thursday: "That One's Broken"

Liz Elayne and Lynn have declared this a sort of freestyle and/or catch-up week on Poetry Thursday, encouraging participants to post any poem they want, either as a response to a previous prompt or just something that shouts out "post me!" I love this idea! I hope this becomes a tradition to have a freestyle/catch-up week once every month or two. This week I'm choosing to revisit last week's prompt, the eavesdropping challenge. To refresh your memory, here were the instructions: "we'’re challenging you to go out into the world and listen to what people are saying. Make notes of things you hear, then shape those notes into a poem." And you may recall if you stopped by RSR last week, that I did the eavesdropping part of the challenge, taking notes on things I overheard while shopping one day (although I found I really had to concentrate because my mind often wandered - I discovered I'm not a natural eavesdropper! Who'd have guessed!). However I didn't quite get around to turning my notes into a poem. So that's what I did this week. The other participants interpreted this challenge in a variety of different ways, but I decided I wanted to try to make a poem out of ONLY what I overheard, mixing and matching sentences and phrases in whatever way I wanted and not necessarily using them all, but not adding anything. That turned out to be difficult, but interesting. I re-wrote my notes, with only one sentence or sentence fragment per line and then cut the paper apart and spent a while playing with them, almost like playing with those magnetic poetry things I'm sure you've seen. I tried to look for relationships - for phrases that sounded like they should go together somehow. I wanted to try to arrange them into something that would resemble a conversation. So here is the result, with every phrase (including the title) a direct quote of something I overheard that day, but completely mixed up into a new order. It didn't result in great poetry (Hellooooo, Understatement!!!), but I thought it was a fun exercise. Oh yeah, and given both the prompt and the fact that I had trouble keeping my mind on eavesdropping, I thought the fact that I overheard someone say the sentence that I ended up using as the last line in the poem was rather funny!

"That One's Broken"

Are you finished?

No need to remind me. He passed me up a long time ago.

Tight quarters, isn't it?

Here they are - stunning details. She thinks it's funny.

How soon can you fit me in?

It'll be a while. Your ticket's laying here.

Is that all?

Sure. Fine. People don't listen. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For today's Daily Art Thang, I'm sharing something I worked on for the Self-Portrait Challenge, but ended up rejecting because instead of looking like Pop Art I thought it just made me look like a possibly-diseased alien creature. Still, that's kind of interesting, right? RIGHT?? Plus I like my DAT on Thursdays to relate somehow to the poem and in this one I think it looks like the Weird Alien Creature formerly known as Deb is listening to the flowers. So somehow that works for me. "Self-Portrait as a StrangeBlueSpottedAlienCreature"