In Which I REALLY Wanted to Write a New Poem

Mesa Verde

The cliffs were hazardous enough even with the ladders
built for tourists not quite fit enough
to haul themselves hand over hand
using crevices in the rock.

I can't imagine the ancient people, content
in their mud-plastered city of pale yellow,
their elderly clambering up the vertical walls
still spry, or left to die.

Now the hazards include the road at the top
cars passing, blind to the once-city
directly below, and we're told to look carefully
or "boom! no more grandma!"

The canyon below is a strip of life
cutting through the arid flatness
its green bottom mocking
those thirsty people above.

Poem:
I used a prompt for this one, since I was struggling for ideas. The prompt was rather specific: Gather four distinct sets of details about an occasion and use one in each of four stanzas, each with four lines. I wrote about a guided tour at Mesa Verde, where we had to climb huge wooden ladders to even gain access to the cliff cities. I still have the tour guides "boom! no more grandma!" written down in my notebook. It was hilarious at the time, but I tried to make it a little more insightful in the poem itself. All in all, I liked the exercise.

Observation:
I made some rice a while ago, and the leftovers were in the refrigerator daring me to use them to make something delicious. Little did they know I had recently acquired a bottle of soy sauce. So I had rice, sunflower seeds, and soy sauce, and it was delicious. The observation part of this story has to do with the soy sauce. Now, I already knew soy sauce was basically just liquefied salt, but I made sure to get the one that said it had less sodium just in case that made a difference. That's what the bottle said: "Less Sodium." This is, of course, in contrast to "low sodium," which is a label found on many other foods. To put that label on soy sauce would be to say "not soy sauce." So they went with "less." Now, less apparently means that the amount of sodium has been reduced by 34% from the normal amount. Which is significant. But there's still 25% of your daily value of sodium in on tablespoon of the stuff. So while there is "less," I would have loved to see them try and get away with "low."

Exercise:
"Down into the Cellar"
The ancient door creaked open and from the darkness she caught of a whiff of something like old apples. She pulled the string to the lightbulb; the stairwell remained dark. "Bulb's dead," he said.
Write on!

The ancient door creaked open and from the darkness she caught of a whiff of something like old apples. She pulled the string to the lightbulb; the stairwell remained dark. "Bulb's dead," he said.
"Of course it is," she replied. "Nothing about this place seems to function as it should."
"It is beautiful, though." He stumbled over some old equipment on his way to the only window before letting some light through. He opened the shutter, and through the cloud of dust that billowed inward, the sun shone bright. The brick walls surrounding them seemed to be biding their time, waiting to be extracted from the layers of cobwebs before glowing once more with the warmth of being lived in.

Me:
I have terrible hygiene. It's no secret to the people that know me. But this has finally come around to interfere in my life directly. It was inevitable, really. Here's what happened: I got the hot and cold taps of the shower mixed up. Apparently I take showers so infrequently I can't even remember how to control the temperature. And it hurt, since I was trying to make it colder. And because I'm so insensitive, after I turned up the hot water I just thought I must not have turned it enough to make it colder, so I turned it up more before figuring it out. And then I felt really dumb and vowed never to make that mistake again. And I figure the best way to avoid making the mistake is to just never shower again. Seems logical.