The horrendous overtopping greed

And craven doltishness

The shit we can’t get over

Why can’t we see

When pollies, pretty pollies,

And the uncomely ones

Act like

Kindergarten kids nicking each others’ sandwiches

Only to put a mellifluous spin on

The situation in the papers

Or is it that the journalists, who surely see

Preternatural beings

In their Mirrors, their Suns, shining sublime

Out of their own nether-regions

They pick their way daintily

Over the susurrating mess of a political landscape

Or the physical one

A bleached reef, an abandoned open-cut mine, a melting pole

All value and pulchritude

Sacrificed to their loquaciousness

One barely notices

A haze of sassafras

Creeping over the terrain

Like a persistent 9.15 train

Trying to make amends

While we hang our wet washing

And throw away old receipts

For plastic things bought, discarded already

Paramount in the moment

As those fucking politicians who

We merely moan over

On Facebook and

Pen poems to zero effect

And I think I need an egg this morning

Because it’s one perfect thing contained

Until it’s broken of course, fractured

In servitude to my greed

 

Today’s National/Global Poetry Writing Month prompt/challenge was to write a list of overly poetic words – words that you think just sound too high-flown to really be used by anyone in everyday speech. Then make a list of words that you might use or hear every day, but which seem too boring or quotidian to be in a poem. Now mix and match examples from both of your lists into a single poem.

I feel like I often blend the mundane with the maudlin and florid so this wasn’t a huge stretch for me, although I did enjoy slapping out the thesaurus (mental and physical) to use some ridiculously overblown language.