As threatened, here's a poem from start to finish. The only thing I was given was a prompt, the following word:

palter

You can follow the link for the definition yourself. Whatever I write next is the result of thinking--just thinking--about the word and its definitions. I may think for ten seconds, or ten minutes (actual thinking time varies. see your poetry owner's manual for more details.)

---

We're a buildup, a seven-year wax coating. Seventy-seven years of dust turned to mud. Seven thousand years of targeted history. Seven million years of evolution, mere survival.

I'm fishing with old bait. It's Tuesday, and I'm taking a morning off, at Winton Lake, casting but not catching. For an hour, the cork has orbited a one foot square area, as if it skirted a black hole, or guarded the perimeter of some undersea nation. My interruptions are birds, cars, mothers and runners. The reel is left-handed...a habit from my dad who saw no point is switching hands from cast to crank.

Sometimes I hear mothers or fathers. They tell their kids to behave. They threaten them with starvation, with bruises. And they tell them how things are, but their facts are all wrong, aren't facts at all. Parents can't be wrong--that's what parents think--so they lie hundreds of times a year. They lie by omission. Carelessness.

I'm lying now. My bait hangs like an siren calling the bass and catfish.

---

Whew. That really sucks. This is one of those poems that doesn't come out easily. Nothing might be salvaged from the above. We'll see tomorrow. I have to finish this by Tuesday night.

When I presented the first draft of the poem to the group, one member said, "You must be in love." And, sadly, I said, "No."

But I think I know what love is. Or pretty close, at least. In this final draft, I'm not changing much. Just looking at line breaks, maybe some word choice. But let's not underestimate line breaks. I'm interested in two things. Do the breaks cause the reader to pause where it makes sense for the poem? Are there natural rhymes that might enhance the poem?

As it turns out, I've only made one change.


Before You Slept

On Mondays, we always ate baked gravy rolls, which are
brown gravy ladled over day-old rolls, with pepper,
baked at 350 for twenty minutes.

It was our only fasting, after weekends of excess, of wild turtle
soup, and sweet potatoes stuffed with cinnamon-fried turkey, and
sauteed rosemary shrimp, and garlic wheat buns, and Spanish reds,
and Spanish whites, and...afterward...Spanish aperitifs,

which we would sip while spooning mint sorbet from metal bowls,
and watch the red sunset, or listen to rain pelt the tree leaves,
when you'd say, "I loved the first dark chocolate you gave me,"
and I'd say, "It had half melted," and you'd say, "I loved
the other half."

We would finish our sherry and kiss while our lips were still wet and numb.
You would always say, "I love you more than strawberries, more than
a perfect London broil, more than juniper custard." And I'd say,
"I always look forward to tomorrow, to remembering you like this."

And then we'd let the glasses rest, and find the bed. You'd be my
furnace, while you slept, your breath making waves on the pillow.

Reading a poem aloud can reveal problems that aren't obvious on the page. For example, "baked at 350 for fifteen minutes." looks fine, but reads clunky because of "fifty for fifteen." So, I'll make it twenty minutes.

The second and third stanzas have lots of "you'd say" "I'd say", etc. It's mostly fine, but I'm going to remove the contraction at the beginning of the third stanza.

Does breath make waves in a pillow? Or on a pillow. Let's change it and see. I'm still not sure about the last line. "furnace" seems a little out of place, and "making waves" seems tame.

What colors are prevalent? Brown, black, orange, red, white, green. Is this too many? Too much of one color? Or should something be emphasized? The only oddball is the mint sorbet. Should it be something else? I like the suddenness of mint, the immediate taste. Leave it for now.

Tomorrow will be working on line breaks. Here's the revision. Not many changes, but the make a good difference.


Before You Slept

On Mondays, we always ate baked gravy rolls, which are
brown gravy ladled over day-old rolls, with pepper,
baked at 350 for twenty minutes.

It was our only fasting, after weekends of excess, of wild turtle
soup, and sweet potatoes stuffed with cinnamon-fried turkey, and
sauteed rosemary shrimp, and garlic wheat buns, and Spanish reds,
and Spanish whites, and...afterward...Spanish aperitifs,

which we would sip while spooning mint sorbet from metal bowls,
and watch the red sunset, or listen to rain pelt the tree leaves,
when you'd say, "I loved the first dark chocolate you gave me,"
and I'd say, "It had half melted," and you'd say,
"I loved the other half."

We would finish our sherry and kiss while our lips were still wet and numb.
You would always say, "I love you more than strawberries, more than
a perfect London broil, more than juniper custard." And I'd say,
"I always look forward to tomorrow, to remembering you like this."

And then we'd let the glasses rest, and find the bed. You'd be my
furnace, while you slept, your breath making waves on the pillow.

When several people comment, positively or negatively, about the same thing then that's a pretty sure sign. In this poem, no one liked "sun becoming a low pomegranate." The best explanation was that, after the literal lists of food, a food metaphor seemed contrived. So, I can just remove it for now. But if I can replace it with a simple, strong description that would be better. What did the sunset really look like? That's the question I always ask. What really happened? Tell the precise truth.

It took an hour, and I'm not sure I like it. Along the way, I typed and deleted a lot of ideas, and finally just wrote whatever I was thinking, trying to be in the same place as the couple in the poem. That looked like this.

if it rained, we would set outside to catch the rain, or catch the
sunset on clear nights, the breeze coming through the screen like a
sieve, touching our cheeks and forearms, blanketing our skin, the sunset
rolling over the ground, the red sky becoming black, reflecting off the
trees, matching the color of their trunks until they become invisible,
as if the dark were poured into the air. We sip and watch the sky become
the color of leaves. It's as if we breathed out the sunset. On nights
when it rained, we set our cups out to rinse. watching the night cover
the trees, watching the trees absorb the sunset. yuck. until the sun gave
up. Until the trees hid the sun. all the colors going black. leting the
sun become red, then black. and watch the red sunset, or listen to the
rain pelt tree leaves.

And I ended up using the last thing I wrote. So, this is the revision.

Before You Slept

On Mondays, we always ate baked gravy rolls, which are
brown gravy ladeled over day-old rolls, with pepper,
baked at 350 for fifteen minutes.

It was our only fasting, after weekends of excess, of wild turtle
soup, and sweet potatoes stuffed with cinnamon-fried turkey, and
sauteed rosemary shrimp, and garlic wheat buns, and Spanish reds,
and Spanish whites, and...afterward...Spanish aperitifs,

which we would sip while spooning mint sorbet from metal bowls,
and watch the red sunset, or listen to rain pelt the tree leaves,
when you'd say, "I loved the first dark chocolate you gave me,"
and I'd say, "It had half melted," and you'd say,
"I loved the other half."

We'd finish our sherry and kiss while our lips were still wet and numb.
You would always say, "I love you more than strawberries, more than
a perfect London broil, more than juniper custard." And I'd say,
"I always look forward to tomorrow, to remembering you like this."

And then we'd let the glasses rest, and find the bed. You'd be my
furnace, while you slept, your breath making waves in the pillow.

Ever wanted to see a poem go through revisions? Always figured those words just came out in their final form? Or pretty close?

Writing software is, for me, a lot like writing poetry or fiction or music. Which is why, though I agree with and appreciate techniques like test-driven development, I don't often use them because they are against my lifelong way of creating. I like drafting and fixing after the fact. But that's another topic.

Here's an early draft of a poem I wrote for my poetry group. It was a "challenge" assignment, the challenge in this case being inspired by an odd, overheard phrase we were given. Mine was "Does it look a little browner and thicker now?" Below is the draft I presented. Tomorrow I'll revise it, and include comments the other poets made.


Before You Slept

On Mondays, we always ate baked gravy rolls, which are
brown gravy ladled over day-old rolls, with pepper,
baked at 350 for fifteen minutes.

It was our only fasting, after weekends of excess, of wild turtle
soup, and sweet potatoes stuffed with cinnamon-fried turkey, and
sauteed rosemary shrimp, and garlic wheat buns, and Spanish reds,
and Spanish whites, and...afterward...Spanish aperitifs,

which we would sip while spooning mint sorbet, staring out the window
at the sun becoming a low pomegranate, when you'd say, "I loved
the first dark chocolate you gave me," and I'd say, "It had half melted,"
and you'd say, "I loved the other half."

We'd finish our sherry and kiss while our lips were still wet and numb.
You would always say, "I love you more than strawberries, more than
a perfect London broil, more than juniper custard." And I'd say,
"I always look forward to tomorrow, to remembering you like this."

And then we'd let the glasses rest, and find the bed. You'd be my
furnace, while you slept, your breath making waves in the pillow.