Last night I wrote Poetry on Demand at the SAFE Haven for Cats’ Tuxedo Cat Ball with four of my fellow Living Poets. PoD is kinda like selling your art at a street festival except you haven’t drawn or painted it yet. We sit behind a table and convince innocent bystanders that they need to buy a poem. They offer a word as a prompt and anywhere from $1 to $5 and we write the poem there and then. It’s an interesting exercise, good practice and lots of fun. All told, we earned almost $200 for the cats.

Our words included non-profit, forever home, kind, memory, obfuscate, two auctioneers, New York, wife’s birthday, love, birthday,  twins, poets, brisk, monotony, voluptuous, Guinness, forever mine and inappropriate urination. (We each wrote a poem to that!)

Since I don’t have an event tonight, here’s my poem-a-day.

For today’s prompt, write a panic poem. There are any number of things a person can panic about, including severe weather, military invasions, or what to wear to an event. And while some may be more life or death than others, that feeling of panic is just as real for a person who has to get up and speak in front of a crowd of smiling strangers as it is for a person hiding in the basement of their house as a tornado approaches.

Poetry on Demand

Last night I dreamt poetry.
Really, it was a nightmare.
I was writing Poetry on Demand
alone, in my underwear
and all my customers
were women offering prompts
like childbirth, parenting
and happy marriage.
All things I am unqualified
to write about unironically.

Wouldn’t you prefer
a nice cat poem instead?