Terry Wolverton produced the following fevered writing based on four prompts provided by this month’s collaborating poet, Jessica Ceballos.
Medium brown girl in a dark blue world there is no happy medium we want to be extreme we want to live on the edge and jump into the sky instead we wait on this earth plane and if we’re lucky it’s just medium bad, though for many it’s much worse than that and for a few it’s just peachy that must be their karma to never have to confront their unfulfilled desires to never have to run through the streets screaming with madness no medium anything for them except maybe medium rare
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
One can do or one can be done to and that’s the whole problem—there’s no space to be and all of our interactions are based on this doing/done to model where is the space to simply breathe and dream, no one needing to prove anything, we could just look at one another and exsit and I don’t need to criticize you or I don’t need to get you to love me or I don’t need to win the argument or I don’t need to get you to do whatever it is you said you would do and we could be more like the dog and the cat
Less is more they say, but doesn’t that go against all the principles of mathematics, not to say economics? What if those who have more are just trying to convince the rest of us that they really have less, or trying to convince us that we’re luckier to have less because, after all, it is more. They keep us so tangled up in our lust for a new refrigerator or the latest gadget that we can’t see we have been robbed blind. Look at the beggar; isn’t he better off with only his bowl to worry about?
Two Days, One Night
It used to be we’d have a night for each day, but now time has speeded up and there’s no room for all that sleeping. Now we get one night for every two days and we just have to make do with that. Each of us needs to ensure we’re completing the correct number of units of production and that can’t happen while we’re horizontal on the bed. It’s been suggested we really only need one night per week, but the mattress makers got up in arms about that, as did the purveyors of cocktails.
Readers are encouraged to write your own poems inspired by the prompts or the fevered writing and post them to comments. The best poem we receive this month will be awarded a $25 prize.
dis•articulations 2015 