From yesterday, there isn't much I like, so this may be another round of writing and thinking. But it's late, so I'll have to write quickly. Sometimes that's a good idea.

I like:
My bait hangs like ... calling the bass and catfish
...as if it...guarded the perimeter of some undersea nation.

Hmm. That's it. OK, let's just write some stuff. And I have to remember, the word is palter. To talk/act insincerely. To trifle with.

I knew a woman who said, "I wouldn't divorce
unless there was physical abuse." And I almost said,
"But what if he said, every day, 'I sure wish
you were a little prettier.'?"

Three hundred sixty-five utterances a year. Paltering
to his wife, wearing her down like throwing pebbles
against a tree trunk. Smirking at his friends afterward,
drinking his beer that she just brought.

There's no harm, she thinks, he's just teasing. But
each day she becomes an old newspaper. She dresses
in pale blue. When she talks to you, she reminds you
of a lab hamster always expecting the needle.

Well, there're a couple of good things there. A theme's emerging. I really like "she becomes an old newspaper." I hope I can keep that.

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.