National Poetry Month – Poetic Justice

Posted on By RB

One of my favorite websites – which I discovered many, many years ago – is LanguageIsAVirus. The name comes from the writings of William S. Burroughs and the website is a cornucopia of writing prompts, inspiration, and exercises. When I feel I’m in a slump or uninspired, a visit to LanguageIsAVirus gets me back on track.

For National Poetry Month, I thought it would be fun to explore some of the poetry-focused writing games the site offers. The first one I’m going to try is Poetic Justice. The premise is to first pick a poet from the drop-down menu. This will pull a selection of random words from their works. The challenge is to then select at least five of those words and write a poem. 

So here we go.

First, I chose the aforementioned William S. Burroughs. That gave me this selection of words to work with:

Random words selected from the works of Williams S Burroughs.

And here is what I came up with. The words I used are in bold:

 

Distasteful bribes while swinging clubs

and raising dust as they plot control.

Why are they permitted these gimmicks

while chasing balls across manicured greens?

Snide looks and detours from the truth

have become habits for them.

Playing chicken with people’s lives

isn’t just distasteful, it’s wrong.

 

I’ll admit I was feeling a bit political this morning. I probably shouldn’t have read the news headlines before working on this post. 

Are you a fan of word games? If so, will you give this one a try?

RB

Creativity Poetry Writing

Comments (15)

  3. I recently watched a documentary about Dark Money on HBO and… how fitting your poem is! You might not have watched it, but somehow you nailed it like as a summary.

    Reply

    1. I haven’t seen it, but I’ll have to give it a watch soon. I think a lot of people in the U.S. are thinking this way. Thanks for stopping by!

      Reply

Please leave a comment...