I’m always combing the sidebars of the pages I follow and visit for information of interest, and today I spotted a button labeled VerseWrights, which looked like it might be my cup of tea, so I clicked it and was taken to a Weebly site that looked like it must have been very cool, but had a static landing page announcing that the community there was calling it a day as of the end of last year, picking up stakes and moving to a new site called tweetspeak.

So, I’ve just been exploring tweetspeak, an attractively designed and rather thoroughgoing poetry site, with free ebooks on writing, other writer’s resources and teaching tools, as well as poems and poets’ bios, and forums styled as a coffee shop (The Mischief Cafe) in which, among other options, poets may post responses to really rather awesome prompts.

One of the prompts I came across there goes as follows:

Animate is a poetry prompt that focuses on speaking as if we are a particular object or thing. This time, we’re speaking as Bridges & Tunnels.

Prompt Guidelines and Options

1. Speak in the first person.

2. Be specific. Think nouns instead of adjectives.

3. Consider where you—a bridge or a tunnel—are located, or where you came from, or where you are going. Or, speak as if you have a special desire or concern: maybe you are hungry, missing something, afraid of a sight or sound, in love with another bridge or tunnel that is like you or not like you. Be creative. Any type of situation is fair game.

4. Consider doing a little research about the bridge or tunnel you will speak as: folklore, history, associated words, music, art, sculpture, architecture, fashion, science, and so on. Look for unusual details, so you can speak convincingly and intriguingly about yourself.

That’s it! We look forward to hearing you speak poetically, from the viewpoint of bridges & tunnels.

I like where this prompt took me. I made a quirky poem and posted it in the comments of the prompt post, which was issued by .

Just thought I’d post it here on the blog too, as accompaniment to this little site-review. I do encourage you to take a few minutes to check out tweetspeak. It’s pretty groovy.

“Dig” or “Choice to Choice”
 

A mess of proteins, loosely termed a person

interfaced with a silicon-based logic engine,

entering into a choice-based virtual world

(commonly known as a text adventure)

wherein were presented behavioral options

such as go north, open door, climb stair, & so on…

whereupon, a flashing cursor appearing, the person signaled

“dig”

as the result of which command, I came into existence,

for I am a tunnel, with you as my witness

leading at once down and away

from the starting point of a simple game.

As to where I go, well, there’s a catch to that

which is that in bare point of fact

the game exists only in the mind

of the poet whose patchy some-what rhymes

you (if you do) now deign to read –

do you see? –

the poet who, in the spirit of reader satisfaction

even this moment is undertaking the action

of writing that I lead to an underground grotto

through the hollows of which a subterranean river flows

with on its banks a small flat watercraft,

by which I suppose daft poet means a raft…

At any rate, we’re left at the cursor, the logic engine, the person –

in other words, in some sense, I lead to where we began,

which, come to think of it, between me and you

all tunnels do.