random word generator

Oracle

Open the word list; allow the words to
roll around in your mind for awhile.  Pay
attention to the ones that jump out, that
correspond to intuition.  Observe;
listen; rearrange.  Coherence can be
encouraged, but best to follow Her lead.

Colleen asked us to write a syllabic acrostic for Tanka Tuesday from a list which included the word oracle. I have regular conversations with several of Her manifestations. And as Kate recently asked me to clarify what to do with the Random Word Generator (aka Oracle 2) that I post on Sundays, I decided to use my acrostic to give some general instructions. But really there are no rules.

The top collage uses the Collage Box Oracle, which is just a box of words I’ve cut out of various places that I pull out and arrange in a similar fashion to the Magnetic Poetry Oracle (seen in the second collage and here on Saturdays). For my acrostic I’ve used words from this week’s Random Word Generator as inspiration.

Our surroundings are always singing to us–all we need to do sometimes is be still and take the time to listen.

what do we really know?
the emptiness of space
the rhythm of light

Ossified

fold/transform/mold–
sunny April
afternoon, now
cold, shivered, closed

part of the heart
on the edge of
your atmosphere
not weeping but

paused in because—
disillusioned–
tiny box of
lies and last straws—

hard tuneless chord–
this life in a
bottle—unsung,
wordless, cleft, scarred

I wanted to do Punam’s music prompt earlier this week, but I always have trouble making random song titles sound natural in a poem. I was also intrigued by Sangeetha’s DoReMiDo nonce form on Muri’s April Scavenger Hunt list, but uncertain how to make it work. My solution was to attempt to combine the two.

I did slant the rhymes, but managed to merge both into a somewhat coherent form, incorporating one song title into the middle of each stanza of the poem. This week’s Random Word List also helped out.

For dVerse OLN, hosted by Grace, and NaPoWriMo–two days to go!

This is the music under my embroidery, above.

Abstracted and Possessed

Abaft of my vision,
blurred yet somehow still, I feel the presence of
cats, tense with
delight as they
edge along the shadow and
furtively slither through the hallway,
gracefully falling into a nonchalant
humdrum sprawl in a patch of sun.
Indulge us, they seem to say–
Join us
K.  Leave your word
lines behind and
migrate into this lazy light.

No calamities will
occur if you
pet us, pay attention to our
quiet majesty.
Really.  If we make you
sneeze, you can brew
tea, and you will be fine.  Our fur will not
upset your respiratory tract.  Though usually
vigorous in my avoidance, I
walk right into their trap,
xactly as they knew, in their
youthful, smirking,
zen superiority, that I would.

The NaPoWriMo prompt today was to write to write an abecedarian poem–not something I would normally do, since it feels like you are forcing some of the letters (like x) to work somehow. But when I looked at the Random Word List from Sunday, the word cats jumped out at me, and also the fact that most of the letters of the alphabet were represented among the words. Almost all the beginning line words in my poem are from the list, and I just fudged the x word.

I really am allergic to cats, which I discovered when my roommate moved to Pittsburg with her boyfriend and his dog and left her kitten behind. We had never given him a name, calling him Mr. Kitten, which became, appropriately, Mr. K. I had to give him away when my asthma got too bad and I ended up in the hospital, something that still fills me with sadness.

But I’m still an easy mark for a cat.