This Week’s Assignment is…

My friend Matt has been yelling at me lately. I haven’t written much since I got out of school, and this is coming up on almost 2 years now. There was a time where I was waking up every day at 6, putting on a pot of coffee, and writing until the caffeine made my stomach lining hurt. Now – I’m lucky if I can hobble together a few lines a week. One possibility would be the toll of the working life, manifesting itself. Another possibility (and a more accurate one) is that I’ve simply gotten lazy.

I used to meet once a week with several strong writers, back in Columbus. We’d make up exercises for ourselves, placing odd restrictions like overall line length, rhyme scheme, number of syllables per line, a word that has to be in the title. It didn’t really matter WHAT the rules were… the rules helped give us a place to start. Beginnings, for any writer, are a helpful thing.

So now that we’re living in different cities, Matt and I have taken to chatting using MSN. We decided on making Friday a general deadline, with us swapping poems once a week. No critique, no pressure to comment. Just exchanging poems for no other reason than an arbitrary deadline to get us motivated and producing.

I’m spending most of today working on a portfolio redesign. But before tomorrow, I should have another poem to send off. Below is the poem I swapped with Matt, last week.