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
