NaPoWriMo Day Three: Alex Blustin – Love

Regular NaPoWriMo contributor Alex Blustin returns with a familiar topic for today’s prompt. In fact it’s a little too familiar. Alex offers ways to take an original approach to that most common theme of poetry – Love.

Alex says: The prompt is Love. Oh dear – yet another love poem is required – are you by any chance running out of ideas? Try imagining a hapless engineer designing love from scratch. How would it work? What tragic errors would they make in their design, and is any of it funny enough to inspire a poem?

Here’s my attempt, first published in Issue 64 of Lighten Up Online.

Venus design failure

Love, being poorly designed,
Strikes even the best of us blind –
You can’t get enough,
Then the going gets tough;
They’re scratchy, the deep ties that bind.

No sooner proposed than declined –
Why should love be tricky to find?
Terrains of the heart
Are a bad place to start,
Unstable and usually mined.

First published by Lighten Up Online, Issue 64, Dec 2023:
https://www.lightenup-online.co.uk/index.php/issue-64-december-2023/interval-three-ten-eights-and-three-tens

Alexander Blustin’s light verse has previously appeared in Lighten Up Online, Light Quarterly, The Bell and in audio form on the Poetry Non-Stop blog. His heavier verse has appeared in Popshot and elsewhere. From October 2012 to July 2014 he ran a weekly poetry stall on Cambridge Market (UK), with a particular focus on work from local Modernist and experimental publishers.

For more NaPoWriMo tips and writing prompts check out the book Poetry Non-Stop.

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