photo credit: jchessma

I’ve been taking a creative writing course in order to help me broaden my writing skills and to move beyond writing only non-fiction. One of our assignments was to create a “Personal Universe Deck”. We were to make a list of 100 words - 80 words of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste (16 of each), 10 words of motion, 3 words of abstractions, and 7 miscellaneous words such as parts of the body, times of the day, places in the universe, hero &/or heroine, animals, birds, colors, invented words, and foreign words. We then took 100 blank index cards, and wrote each word on one index card. We were to shuffle the cards and randomly select 10 cards from the deck. Using those ten words, we were to write a poem. It was a fun exercise, and I was quite pleased with what I came up with, as silly as it may be.

The ten words I pulled from my deck were: sigh, buzz, hawk, flavor, sour, dark, shove, siesta, shake, and whisper. Here are the results:

Far, far up in the dark blue sky,

I see a hawk, then let out a sigh.

In my mouth, a sour taste.

The flavor of my life, oh what a waste.

My ears are ringing, I hear a buzz.

Yet I lay here, just because.

First a shake, then a shove -

A looming face appears above.

Then a whisper, I know that voice.

You need to move now, you have no choice.

The siesta is over, time to go.

How much I drank, I don’t want to know.

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