“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” – Andre Gide
I was working on this poem when the W3 prompt arrived to write about silence and I have somewhat jammed my poem into it, so it doesn’t quite fully meet the criteria but here it is anyway. Above, formatted as desired and below is what WordPress decides to display it like.
Written for the W3 weekly prompt #172 using the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Énouement n.
the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out but being unable to tell your past self.
French énouer, to pluck defective bits from a stretch of cloth + dénouement, the final part of a story, in which all the threads of the plot are drawn together and everything is explained. Pronounced “ey-noo-mahn.”
Written for the GloPoWriMo Day 8 prompt:
write a ghazal that takes the form of a love song.
8th Aug 2025 – Shared with W3 #171
I recently listened to the No Dogs In Space podcast’s four-part series on the band Joy Division and though this poem is shared for the W3 prompt of ‘scape’, I couldn’t get away from the word ‘escape’. The first line popped into my head (in reference to lead singer Ian Curtis’ suicide) and then Joy Division song titles flowed forth to fill in much of the rest of the poem. The title is taken from the second and final Joy Division album of the same name and can be understood in either way, to be near something or the end of something.
A huitain shared with W3 prompt – seeds
Shared with W3 prompt #164 – a quadrille about ‘what remains’.
Captured above to maintain format.
The poem above was written for the first part of the W3 prompt #163. I was also inspired by Reena’s Xploration Challenge #385 using the phrase ‘word collector’.
The line ‘How I would bake bread in my safe European home’ is a reference to a time when I was about 12 and, with the help of my mother, I started baking bread. As I was obsessed with the Clash at the time I baked some bread rolls that spelled out the letters C-L-A-S-H, ‘Safe European Home’ being a song from their second album.
The line ‘I never flew Hurricanes in Greece’ is a reference to Roald Dahl and his book ‘Going Solo’ about his time as a fighter pilot in WWII. I just finished reading his book today. The mention of Proust is because I will start reading ‘In Search of Lost Time’ soon.
This poem is about not knowing what to write, knowing what to write, knowing what is important and the futility in sharing a few words with a few people.
The second part involves running it through the N+7 machine, where I have taken the following extracts to recompose, revise and make this new poem:
Captured above to maintain format.
Written for W3 Prompt #160:
Pick a single abstract noun that carries weight, mystery, or tension for you—something like liberty, danger, truth, love, exile, justice, forgiveness, joy, grief, silence…
Don’t use it until your poem’s final line.
Start each line with a description or action that leads us toward the noun, not from it. This is called left-branching syntax—it means delaying the main subject or verb.
You’re working with delay, accumulation, and unfolding. The noun you’ve chosen arrives only at the end. Until then, build around it, toward it, beneath it. Let readers feel its shape before they hear its name.
From Deepseek:
The word “opia” is a fascinating and relatively obscure abstract noun that captures a very specific, almost paradoxical feeling. It refers to the ambiguous intensity of eye contact—that unsettling, electric sensation when you lock eyes with someone, and the moment feels both intimate and invasive, vulnerable and powerful.
Shared with W3 – The Pararhyme Paradox around the theme of incompleteness.
A waltz wave and forced erasure poem. I wrote the original poem (below) for this prompt at W3 Prompt #158:
• Form: Waltz Wave;
* A single, unrhymed stanza of 19 lines;
* Syllabic: 1–2–1–2–3–2–1–2–3–4–3–2–1–2–3–2–1–2–1;
Theme: ‘Strength and vulnerability’
While thinking about formatting, I felt like an erasure poem would be interesting, but how? I made it so with a little help from Deepseek.
1994ever 