NaPoWriMo Day 8: "Take My Advice"

Today's poem is another mashup, although a pretty loose one.

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt:  "I’d like to challenge you to think about the argot of a particular job or profession, and see how you can incorporate it into a metaphor that governs or drives your poem."

Today's PAD Challenge prompt: "Write a lucky number poem."

I was coming up blank for professional argot I knew and felt entitled to use or interested in making the basis for a poem. A poem about academic lingo seemed pretty awful, but then I thought of a particular bit of slang that I characteristically use in professional contexts, and always take pleasure in.

The resulting poem feels like the weirdest thing I've ever written. I don't take it very seriously, but I had fun writing it and it was feels like a good exercise at letting myself get loose. I'm pretty damn proud of that colon image, anyway.

For the record, my lucky number is 72, for no meaningful reason at all. I chose it as a favorite number when I was a child and it stuck.

Take My Advice

And sex up the title.

That’s what I tell students

and colleagues too.

I’ve been in the game a while,

I know these things;
trust me on this one.

First you need one at all, of course.

The undergrads send essays

off into the world like orphans

without so much as a name.

Or perhaps with merely

a phrase that darts by

like an unidentified fish,

or the name of what they’ve written on,

a monster wrapped in another’s skin.

Or with a drab description,

say, “Scene Analysis Essay,”

sadly trudging from the workhouse

to the assembly line

with a host of others

wearing washed-out uniforms.

My colleagues write titles,

but they're sallow sometimes,

workaday and gray

as the faces of people

who have sat for decades

in committee meetings,

drinking bad coffee and fake creamer

under fluorescent lights,

crafting elaborate plans

that will get scrapped the next year.

Sex it up, verily I say unto you.

Let your essay be a bird

in brilliant mating plumage.

Let it lock eyes with the reader

luring them with its confident smirk.

Let it declare itself

and boldly ask, How you doin’?

Let your title shimmy

onto the dance floor

or whirl around the pole

shaking the headlamps

of its tasseled colon.
Let it thrust its hip.

Let it belly up

to the table of argument

like a gambler, mouth wet

with anticipation,

stroking the rabbit’s foot

hidden in its pants,

sure that today, today, today

its lucky number will strike.