I'll give you a topic.

I just came across a site called the Random Poem Idea Generator.  Here are some of the suggestions it gave me:

Boldly advance wrong opinions about eagles saying everything twice but phrased differently

Throw a friendly arm around gophers in a cocktail dress (Are the gophers wearing the cocktail dress or are you?)

Indicate your preference for Michigan entirely in overheard dialogue (This just makes me think of Sufjan Stevens, so I would probably end up inadvertently plagiarizing him.)

Levy taxes on tigers in the form of an invoice (There's a Charlie Sheen joke in there somewhere.)

Plagiarize every line of a poem about the Midwest in the style of Dickinson (Look, I don't condone plagiarism, okay?)

Here is the result.  I sort of combined all the suggestions:

Animals in America

How many gophers to fill out a cocktail dress?
They wear it to sneak up on eagles.
Eagles are cowards.
They should be more like tigers
Attn: Eagles, you owe tiger tax.
What do you think of the Midwest?
Michigan wins America.
And yet he wandered through the heartland alone . . .

(That last line was borrowed from Edward Hirsch's "In the Midwest.")

Is there a twelve-step program for this?

At one point in my life I felt confident enough to make a sweeping generalization about short stories.  Basically, I hated them.  My argument was, by the time I get invested in one, it's over.  There were only ever a few short stories I really liked.  A lot of them were Poe's.  And ironically for me (because I dislike James Joyce so intensely), certain ones from Dubliners.  Maybe if I'm on an airplane for five hours and have only the New Yorker to read, then I might give another short story a chance.

But . . . I'm about to share a secret with you.  I think some of my short story loathing was born out of jealousy of short story writers.  See, it takes a real talent to be able to create characters the reader cares about, a mood, a theme and a message all in under 10,000 words.  I don't think I have that capability.  It's why I like TV shows- they go on and on and on and you have seasons to develop your stories and characters (unless you get canceled).

Once I was able to pinpoint my major issues with short stories, I was able to work through them.  I mean, I like children's stories.  They're easy to swallow.  They often don't have many layers.  And consider a poem.  Is a poem that much different from a short story?  Poets are trying to convey something in an even shorter amount of space.  My thing with poetry, though, is that much of the time you're really only investing in a page or two.  Whatever effort you put into understanding it, it's rare that you feel ripped from the world when you finish reading a poem. 

All that aside, I decided to make an effort to put some short story elements into a poem.  Maybe if I could marry the two, I could be more accepting.  This is my attempt at a poem in three parts, connected by a common theme:

 Knowledge Is Power

I.
Mom used to say
she had eyes in the back of her head.
I wonder when I will grow mine.

II.
Would I recognize myself on the street
if I was walking five steps behind,
my back half,
my other half
and I
never properly introduced?

III.
When did we give up our fascination
with the backs of cereal boxes?
Or did cereal boxes
become too unwieldy
because we buy them Costco-size?

Bad poetry, or What I will do for money

I saw an ad on Craigslist for a card company that was looking for fresh poems for greeting and holiday cards.  There was a whole submission process involved.  It did seem to pay pretty well, so I went to their website to check out what kinds of poems made it onto their cards.  You can probably imagine the sappy verses about love feeling like the sun on your face, cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudel.  But they said they wanted something new and different from what they had.  I wasn't sure how to proceed. 

Do I give them my best work?  Really put forth an effort?  I know you're supposed to try your best at everything you do, but I wasn't sure I wanted to give up ownership of something I was proud of.  As a friend of mine who did some ghost writing put it, "I wrote the scene and then I thought, wow, that's pretty good.  That may be the best scene I've ever written.  I don't want this guy to put his name on my best scene.  So I scaled it down a bit.  And then I scaled it down again."  Or something like that.  I didn't write it down when he was talking to me.

So that's what I decided to do.  I took some ideas that could turn into pretty decent poems, and I turned the volume waaaaaaay down.

Example (on love):
If you were a season,
you'd be the first day of summer.
If you were a city,
you'd be Paris in the spring.
If you were a holiday,
you'd be Christmas morning.
If you were a dream,
You'd be the one that came true.

I was pretty embarrassed by that, so I tempered it with this one (for encouragement):

Hero's Low

This is the part of the movie
when the hero can't see a way out.
His back is against the wall,
surrounded on all sides.
This is the point where he thinks
maybe I won't win the fight.
What if I give up, surrender?
Will it really be so bad?
But maybe the hero doesn't realize
all the people back home still believe in him.
They know he has a purpose.
All he has to do is steel himself,
and come out, guns blazing.
The cavalry is just over the ridge.

I didn't mind that one so much.  Then I tried a Christmas poem:


I imagine coming home this Christmas,
turning down the block
and passing houses, brightly lit.
It is night.  The street is silent,
the shopping over, the presents nestled
beneath the pine.
A wind stirs, prompting my excitement.
It swirls between the chimneys,
knocking snow to the white, pillowed ground.
I hum a carol as I walk up the pathway.
The smell of Christmas dinner in the air.
I move to ring the bell--
a delighted cry rings out.
Peering through the window,
there you all are,
gathered round the table,
piled high with the day's festivities.
I see your expressions of joy
and I long to hug you.
Though I cannot be there this year,
you are here with me,
in my mind and in my heart.

Yeah.  Can we just pretend that we never talked about this?