Welcome to my April 2026 Great and Powerful Blogging from A to Z Challenge!

I’ve revealed my theme (A poem a day…maybe even with pictures), and of course, I am unashamedly blogging my theme letters on the fly.  So, here goes nothing!

So, without further ado, C is for … Can’t help but go dark. I don’t know why, but this poem went to a more horror place than I was expecting. The prompt was a “Ghost Line” where you use a given line from a poem as your first line, then write your poem jumping off that line and go back and delete the line you started with. And this is what happened today:

Listen

We all do it, we can’t help
walking on bones, creaking
over skulls crushed
into earth’s soil, enriching loam.

Thousands lie buried beneath
cities, towns, streets, houses,
mouths open in silent screams
help us rest, yet we stride above

heedless among unmarked graves,
pulling life from death to feed wiggling
worms, stroking roots in a passion
of ghostly ardor. We pause,

in the silence, tilt ear to ground,
strain to hear the slithering
spirits whisper, we are here;
We will wait.

Thanks for visiting my 2026 A to Z Challenge – Letter C.

Welcome to my April 2026 Great and Powerful Blogging from A to Z Challenge!

I’ve revealed my theme (A poem a day…maybe even with pictures), and of course, I am unashamedly blogging my theme letters on the fly.  So, here goes nothing!

So, without further ado, B is for … Begin Again

This is a “begin again” poem…

Begin Again
(After Phillip Levine and Major Jackson)

Let me begin again
as a nightmare in your dreams
holding you captive under storm clouds
and dust.
Let me begin again
as thickened tendrils of seaweed
pulling you down into a swamp
covered in slime.
This time let me
find you where I wish you to be,
trapped in a darkened closet
sinking in the corner
by the locked door.
Let this time let me be the one
pushing fear into your heart
as I turn my back and walk
into the sunshine.

Thanks for visiting my 2026 A to Z Challenge – Letter B.

Welcome to my April 2026 Great and Powerful Blogging from A to Z Challenge!

I’ve revealed my theme (A poem a day…maybe even with pictures), and of course, I am unashamedly blogging my theme letters on the fly.  So, here goes nothing!

So, without further ado, A is for Abstraction in Prose. 

Ok, so I am going to be playing hard and fast with these A to Z “rules” this time around because I am taking a 30 poems in 30 days course and only want to have to write one poem a day, not more. So today’s assignment was to describe “a universe” of some kind. I did so, in a prose format which created an abstract view of procrastination. Well, maybe better to say took the abstract concept of procrastination and tried to create an image of it. Anyway, Abstraction it is, in a very draft prose poem.

How Procrastination Came to Be

My universe of procrastination is carefully crafted from the finest bright green and red silken threads of worry and doubt, woven into cloth of the deep purples of distraction, overlaid with gilt of guilt, not the smooth lying guilt of not meeting commitments and promises, but the ridged rigid guilt of not caring, the guilt of not feeling guilty as you have been taught. This craft is deeply embedded in my soul, over 61 years of practice, fingers no longer bleed when pricked by the sharp needles trying to hold it all together, but now callused and hardened by cynicism at a world that once promised to change and be better, but somehow keeps turning back to those times we all thought were past us for good. All I can patch together, all I can control, is how I bring cloth and threads and gilt together in patterns that once represented hope and instead pulls me into an unreality of novellas and Netflix. Never finished, but after all these years, I can flip my silken cape over my shoulders as if I were a superhero, or wizard, or wizened crone (and I am all these things in my imagination, or is it a real world waiting for me to finally admit myself?) and huddle on the couch, eyes closed, covered in the vast emptiness I have created.

Thanks for visiting my 2026 A to Z Challenge – Letter A.