Cherri Doesn't Dance

A couple of years ago I took an online poetry workshop and became interested in poetry forms that required counting--you know, like meter and syllabus and those kinds of things one counts when one writes a form-y poem.

I am terrible at anything that involves counting or keeping time--knitting, aerobics, dancing are all challenging activities for me. I sometimes count ceiling tiles, or stairs, or the slats in wainscoting out of boredom, but I always have to restart as I lose my place. When I was in high school, aerobics was one of the gym class options. As my friends can attest, I had to stand in the back row at the end, because my mistakes in footwork and direction would muck the whole room up otherwise.

So, in keeping with my general klutziness, I thought I'd start small, with Haiku. As one learns quickly, Haiku is far more complicated than it seems. I like reading the more concrete Haikus, but the idea of how to write one that didn't sound like a child's poem about the seasons escaped me, then and still. This is what I came up with after a lot of agonizing:

say not to anyone

call me crazy because they

most certainly will

Haiku isn't completely about counting syllabus though, which led me to the American interpretation of it: American Sentences, which are 17 syllable sentence poems. That sounded like something I could handle--HA! Here are the ones I wrote. Apparently, I'm obsessed with skin and hair.

New plan: pluck my sinewy goat hairs for saving in specimen jars.

No one warned me about ingrown hairs and it’s gross I’m telling you.

What’s with adult acne and skin things? Warning: never google skin things.

I am so practiced at clenching my jaw my teeth don’t touch nor my knees.

And, a couplet

I am struggling with the life lesson wherein I learn the first things.

Until fed, all of my poems being with want's greedy mouths.