Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month, have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.

Topic: Write a poem based on a play, film, tv show, web series, or video game.

Form: Any

Line Requirement: At least 10

For detective somerset
the sun will never set,
each day is a new cipher and clue,
but little does David Mills know
his career was already through.

Mills racks his brains
as John Doe giggles behind his hands.
“What's in the box?!"
John Doe lets out a snicker
and claps his knee.
“What’s in the box!?!?” Mills Demands.
He pulls out a hankie and dabs at his head,
this truly is a mystery!

To choose your own adventure,
create your own character,
explore and collect rewards,
find a town and massacre
everyone with guns and swords,
then when youre bored, start over.
If you're into fantasy and lore,
then Lego games are for you!

Lessons of the Game


We think it all was candy fluff
knights, despots, dragons, language (rough)
without the slightest relevance
to anything that could advance
its watchers’ moral lives.
But did they notice villains died
though lovely, icy, prophesied
and modest men of good intent
despite small stature, death, descent,
shine when the end arrives?


Probably not.

Off To See the Wizard

Like a ritual every year
we would gather around
an old black and white Muntz TV
when the TV Guide showed
The Wizard of Oz was coming
on Sunday, right after Ed Sullivan
and the Beatles. Our only sister 
started popcorn, and all 10 of us
packed in, and prepared
to enact our favorite parts
(usually the flying monkeys).

So many years later we couldn’t
re-enact that closeness we’d felt
as we crammed into your room
at the hospital.  When the VCR
ate the tape, we recited our parts
from memory.  Clicking your heels
3 times was your part, but this time
it couldn’t bring you back home.

Anachronisms

Edith was up at 5
packing lunches.

She'd spend
all her day doing laundry
and preparing dinner
for her adult daughter
and deadbeat son-in-law
without a drop of wine
to grease her gears.

Next, her sausage roll
of a husband
would arrive home,
hang his hat,
plant his ass,
light a cigar
and stifle her
like it was a 70's sitcom.

Those were the days.

(04-05-2022, 05:49 AM)Mark A Becker Wrote:  Off To See the Wizard

Like a ritual every year
we would gather around
an old black and white Muntz TV
when the TV Guide showed
The Wizard of Oz was coming
on Sunday, right after Ed Sullivan
and the Beatles. Our only sister 
started popcorn, and all 10 of us
packed in, and prepared
to enact our favorite parts
(usually the flying monkeys).

So many years later we couldn’t
re-enact that closeness we’d felt
as we crammed into your room
at the hospital.  When the VCR
ate the tape, we recited our parts
from memory.  Clicking your heels
3 times was your part, but this time
it couldn’t bring you back home.

I just came out of a Wizard of Oz production,
me and the whole family were in it.

My ma was in charge of costume designing and props,
the production value of the whole play came up because of her.

Just like the original play 
the wicked witch caught on fire,
what are the odds?

The Refugee and Her Host


She knows why they can't watch together
Battlestar Galactica
or Stargate with its aerial bombings
though she doesn't really savour
Buffy and its deceptive attempts
to uplift her sex. She doesn't want
to watch at all, just as he's anxious
to watch the news at home, but all this
he, too, knows. What else can he do?
She's looking for a job in a foreign land
that she never had a mind to visit,
let alone live in for, what, one month? Two?
He's lost track of time, while she
refuses to keep it -- and she streams
the news about her home
from the privacy of her phone
while he picks through his Star Trek DVDs
and makes tea for two.

At 6 months
he was placed in front of the television
to quiet his crying
and TV baby was born again.
TV baby believed what he saw.
TV baby loved Zorro, and Matt Dillon,
and Lassie, and Fury.
TV baby became so hysterical
when John Wayne died in the Alamo
he had to be removed from the theatre.
TV baby wanted to be Taras Bulba’s son
and in third grade, dreamt that a horde of Cossacks
would ride up as he walked home from school
and he would leap on a horse 
and ride away from a troubled family.
TV baby learned how to be a spy and seduce women
from Sean Connery
before he could drive a car.
TV baby watched the rise and fall of the Third Reich
and had his mother sew him a swastika armband
that he wore while playing Risk.
TV baby saw Khartoum fall to the Mahdi in 3-D
and sang Men of Harlech with the Welshmen
who held Rorke’s Drift against the Zulu hordes.
TV baby watched Viet Nam and the Watergate hearings 
on the nightly news.
TV baby believed everything he saw,
and thought he was seeing everything.
God stuck him with a pin and said,
“You’re just dreaming”.
TV baby spent 50 years living down the dreams.
Poor TV baby.