Half-Healed Joke
17 April 2021 Saturday Poetry Prompt: what about the pace?
Sometimes the life is so strange (how have I come this far without being institutionalized? have I come far at all, for that matter…), nothing fits nothingfuckingfits
and every alteration exhausts in the extreme, nothing slips not even the agitation, fingered cold bottle-with-strike-to-the-head, close acquaintance with beer spilled ash spilled patio stones
and all it takes to breathe is to get up and face another round of poison, a taking nothing at face value because you lost your face, somewhere along the half-healed joke you forgot about it…
J.D. Harms 2021
Prompt:
Every writer knows about, or is familiar with the notion of how to pace a piece; you use it to convey information about how a character is feeling, or how fast/slow things are happening, unfolding. Sometimes, we get totally absorbed in a style we get comfortable with that we might slip into a rhythm of a kind of uniformed pacing across our work. For this prompt, I’d like to see you intentionally work in some elements that alter your (ordinary) pace of your piece. You can do this mechanically (italics, hyphens, etc.). Or you can use the words themselves to speed up/slowdown (longer words tend to make a reader slow down). Tag me…
