The Wind in the Willows

This week’s assignment at the LJ community “Writing 101” was to use at least 7 of the following 10 words (alphabetical, chaos, tool belt, bloviate, crux, sinner, marshmallow, dramatic, tissue, sympathetic) in a piece of writing. Seems like a very strange set of words, but here’s what I came up with:

I can bloviate with the best of them,
strike a sympathetic chord now and then
by appealing to the soul’s great chaos
with dramatic gusts of clever wordplay;

but the poet’s tool belt also includes
a set of pruning shears, for brevity
often leads much more quickly to the crux,
cutting through the soft marshmallow tissue

of the sinner’s world (burnt and hard outside,
but jellied and spineless on the inside)
with the turn of an alphabetical
blade; and this small incision can make all

the difference. Sometimes, even a small fragment
is the most dangerous part of a storm.

18 FEB 2003

Please follow and like us:
Pin Share

Share This:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.