A Space Opera Poem

     For those of you who maybe haven't been getting enough of my wacky rhymes with all the assorted falderal sloshing about in my Plague Year Poems, well, here's another one you can look at!

     It started out life as something written over 48 hours for one of the poetry contests on the Writeoff site last November where it won 1st place. I then reworked it, cleaned it up, and submitted it to John Mannone at Silver Blade: he's been really supportive of my stuff--this is the fifth of my poems they've published--and they pay pretty good for poetry, too.

     This current one's called "The Wreck of the Vigilance," and any resemblance to "The Wreck of the Hesperus" is, I assure you, purely coincidental.

     I mean, seriously. Had this Longfellow guy ever heard of keeping to a proper rhyme-n-rhythm scheme? That Hersperus thing's totally all over the map!

                    Mike

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Scent's Assent

Image
He saunters, not a hint of awkwardness About his movements, flowing sweet as fire. Dolores, trying not to stare, selects A protein bar, a heated argument Among her schoolmates raising ruffled fur And growls. The guy's a feline, after all. The student body's ninety-eight percent canine. The whole school's aware. He hears them, Casey does, their yips and all Alive with bitter scents of awkwardness. Remaining smooth, he doesn't look, the fur Beneath his shirt on edge, a tickling fire He knows. It follows matching arguments From other schools his science course selects. Universities should be more universal. "Should" is the key word. In class, Dolores carefully selects A seat in back of Casey, watching all The rest digress, off-topic arguments Concerning species, full of awkwardness. The room of canines almost seems on fire With ears and whiskers folded close to fur. Students of science should be— There's that "should" again. Stupid subjunc
Read more

Folks Letting Me Blather

Image
I've known Greta Boris :      For more then five years now but not as many as ten years, I think, ever since she joined the OC Fictionaires, the writing group that I've been a member of for something like twenty years. She writes mostly mystery novels, some of which are pretty funny, some of which are pretty suspenseful, and some of which are pretty much both at the same time. She and another author, Megan Haskell , also run a website called The Author Wheel where they do podcasts and offer writing courses and share their experiences with the wide world of publishing. As they put, "We've made the mistakes so you don't have to!"      As part of their podcast series, they wanted to talk about the value of critique groups, so Greta asked me if I'd be willing to make various noises on that topic. I agreed, and the episode they put together from our conversation, " Staying True to Your Creativity With Mike Payne ," is now available for your
Read more