I just came across your challenge today. I’m already participating in NaPo, any chance I can sign up now or is it too late to be counted?

You’ll want to repost your poems in the comments of the Day 2 prompt post so everyone participating can see it!

Thanks for sharing!

Groundwater aquifers are parched and disappointed from numerous empty promises. “Get your water here!” Shouts heard from the Cracker Jack seller at a local ball park. $2.00, $5.00, $7.50, when will it stop? Water is a free natural resource yet corporations beg, buy, and swindle their hands into pockets of every American brainwashing minds to think as they do, ‘Bottled water is best’. This won’t last long for the purest springs are running dry yet we waste, waste, waste, hundreds of gallons a day on frivilous activities when third world countries barely have drops to wash away the impoverished dirt from their bones. This substance that is necessary to sustain life has taken on the role of precious commodity…we need a new plan of action.

hope the line breaks are right, this time, for some reason it changed them in the posting. sorry

The boy wanted to know what electricity was,
peered into sockets to see currents flow
hot as blood, or cool rivers of neon, fluid
as faces, spilled as milk.
But even his father didn’t know how it looked,
a man who could fix anything with a screw,
every sound of the house connected
to his coiled grin, a twitch at the corner of lips wired to a switch in his hands
and a Danger: High Voltage sign in his eyes.
The boy looked for trails of electric
but saw only white pour into the night,
the colours of day fuse into one nuclear blur. All he saw were instruments of power’s presence,
lamps off and on/ flicked quick as moods:
an eggshell skirt shudder and cling
to her legs as father comes home, opens
the fridge. No one explains it, how something not visible is still there,the light
of the fridge goes on, then out
the way mother closes a door on small sparks,
brilliant parts of herself she keeps in the dark.

I never get it right the first time and then one site made me go to my email to verify it and, really, is it necessary? I just get discouraged.

Thanks!

Seattle, ‘73:
instead of rainy day blues,
it is 103.
I bake inside a cheap motel
room sans breeze and a/c,
as “Ain’t Misbehavin” seeps
in through the slats of blinds
glinting in nickel-plated sunlight.

Piano jingle and teletype leads into the news–
the all Elvis news,
the newly-deceased Elvis news.

I surrender to memory:
his voice, like the inside of a windowless
padded room, stuffy, overheated,
slightly adenoidal.
His Brylcreem hair a topiary atop
a head full of boundary issues.
Girls screaming, throwing undies
rarely seen in his heyday.

Shocking to die old at his age.
My redemption?
Now I’m hotter than Elvis.

(Mine were Seattle, Redemption, Rainy Day Blues, Surrender, Ain’t Misbehavin’)

“Each post will be labeled “NaPoWriMo” with a number (1, 2, 3, etc.) that indicates the day of the month. That post is both your prompt for the day, and the place where you will leave your link that day. Each post will show up just below this one — scroll down and you will see those posts. For example, today is April 1, and the “NaPoWriMo #1″ post appears just below this post.”

Read the guidelines for inclusion in the anthology — linked from the sticky post at the top of the page — to see the requirements for inclusion. They include, among other things, writing at least half your poems in response to the prompts here. All the details are covered in that post.

to be included, is it necessary to write on that prompt? or is it enough to write any poem on the day?

Thanks,

I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble figuring out how to participate here, but I am. I would really like to participate. Please explain it another way for those of us who seem to navigate with a different part of our brain. I thank you in advance for your patience and understanding. I really do.