National Poetry Month winding down, and the twitku keep on coming! This week wasn’t as hard as last week, but I sense a diminishing quality overall. Less serious, more absurd, and the need for themes to keep rolling. You’ll see what I mean.
The following tweets were pre-recorded before a live audience.
April 20
I do not recall why I only managed to get two.peanut butter toast / lands like a drunken frat boy / face down on the floor
foxes in vineyards / should know better than to want / what they cannot have
April 21
The first is about a test in New York, the second planted a seed for later, the third just happenedpineapple & hare / race through a standardized test / but nobody wins
three cans shaving cream / ten disposable razors / five o’clock teen wolf
sitting in traffic / broken AC, windows down / fully exhausted
April 22
Earth Day, and apparently I’ve grown cynical about it. At least in haiku.oil covered birds / rainbow slick tides wash up tar / the price of cheap gas
circle of arrows / what comes around goes around / recycle and reap
1970 / cleaning beaches with trash bags / preserved in landfills
to preserve our air / close polluting factories / move them overseas
April 23
William Shakespeare’s birthday. And deathday. Some haiku revisions.updating shakespeare / let all who die in hamlet / return as zombies
imagine how great / “midsummer night” would be if / puck was a werewolf
happy ending for / Romeo and Juliet? / they’re vampires now!
gender swap the shrew / for the next 400 years / “taming the bastard”
April 24
Another theme! American historical figure biographies, in haiku! (The last one almost ended “arbor-onanist.”)benjamin franklin / prankmaster general and / closeted nudist
abraham lincoln / a stand-up comedian / who hated to shave
johnny appleseed /planting his trees everywhere / masturarborist
April 25
One of these things is not like the others. In fact, it’s total nonsense, but it works.sucking on a lemon / bright like the sun after a storm / but paper-cut tart
against the cobalt / cotton dabbed in mercury / bicycle weather
economic woes / jobs are haystacks of promise / in needle-free zones
chocolate choco / la te cho cola tech o /co late chocolate
April 26
Poem in your pocket day actually turned out to be the most poetic, traditionally speaking.reach in your pocket / where you think you have money / only a receipt
constellation beach / pebbly stars recede as / their time becomes dust
you know that feeling / before you know you’re tired / clouds shrinking away
the tip of my tongue / where everything tastes so sweet / but the words won’t come
And that’s the way it is. Or was. And there’s still a few days to go!
When I first started tweeting daily haiku during NPM four years ago (not three like I originally thought) there were a lot of people tweeting poems. Then again, if my Twitter stats are correct, four years ago Twitter had fewer people – to the tune of 95% fewer. So the audience was smaller and the messages were more… personal? Intimate? Since then there have been Twitter novels, and collections of six-word biographies, and all matter of self-promotion that have changed the face of Twitter. Which is not to say I think any of that is bad, only that there has been a decided change in Twitter’s general “vibe” and my sense is that my fellow tweeps are more interested in broadcasting than they are sharing.
In fact, the only person who has shown up in my streams with any poetic regularity has been Elinor Lipman who has been tweeting a political couplet daily and will continue to do so through the 2012 election. The Daily Beast, the online arm of Newsweek, recently collected her tweets marking the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign. Nearly a year’s worth of daily poem tweeting and counting! Can’t wait to see what happens as the actual mano-a-mano campaign begins in earnest.
So, the last Poetry Friday of National Poetry Month 2012. What is everyone else in the blogosphere up to? Tabatha over at The Opposite of Indifference has the roundup, so let’s mosey on over and see what’s what!
These are great fun. You’ve got a knack for the form that makes them comical and deeply observational.
You had me from the beginning with an actual LOL brought on by the drunken frat boy toast.
Your last one is my favorite.