skonen_blades

In the closing days of 2022, NYC Midnight had a rhyming story challenge that my friend Sam Dulmage signed me up for. It was a lot of fun. Each writer was given a genre and two adjectives that needed to be embodied in the poem. There were several groups of writers given lots of different themes and adjectives. The top ten from each trio of prompts would go on to the next round. Myself and Sam made the cut again in the second, making it into the top ten for the third and final round.

Here's my submission for the second round.

The second round had a word limit of 500 words.

My prompts were Drama, Pollution, and Flustered

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Loved and Lost
by Duncan Shields

A plastic water bottle bobbing sadly in the waves
Alone and used, discarded, it’s the type that no one saves
It drifts across the ocean, empty, crushed and thrown away
It’s moving with the current, inch by inch and day by day
No message nestled safe within. No hope resides inside.
Created. Shipped. Then bought. Used once. Then roughly thrown aside
Drained in but a moment of its lifespan here on earth
It briefly held the water that so briefly gave it worth

One morning the horizon clutters with some little things.
A floating shoe. Some Styrofoam. A six-pack’s empty rings.
And soon the waves are crowded with a plastic potpourri
A festival of grocery-bag and bottle-cap debris
A hundred other bottles nudge this one that has survived
It’s to The Great Pacific Garbage Patch that it’s arrived
The hubbub is tumultuous! So many of its kind!
A soup of microplastics help it to become entwined

It was a day like any other in the garbage gyre
That Bottle’s heart was smitten, quickened, fluffed, and set on fire.
Across the crowded patch of flotsam, Bottle spied a mate
It nervously considered how to ask it for a date
It willed the waves and currents there to push them both together
It hoped that they’d be unified by beneficial weather
And what exactly was this gorgeous object that it saw?
It was a used, disposable, transparent drinking straw

The ocean pushed them nearer. Nearer. Nearer. Nearer still.
Until the bottle’s flustered nerves vibrated with the thrill
Suspense and longing thrummed throughout the bottle’s singing soul
Until, at last, a wave shoved Straw into the Bottle’s hole

The times they had! It felt like they were made to meet this way!
The Straw stirred up the insides of the bottle every day.
The Bottle felt fulfilled, from bobbing bottom to its lip
And though the Straw was skinny, it filled Bottle like a ship
For months they stayed in bliss conjoined, united and as one
A gentle sliding in and out on waves beneath the sun

Recycling trawlers came to cleanse the errant garbage isle.
Their hungry mouths collected everything within a mile
Their teeth pinched Bottle’s bottom, yanked, and Bottle was collected
Upended, raised, and to its horror, Straw slid out, ejected
Then Straw plunged to the surface of the patch and slithered through
And down into the depths it sank until, in inky blue,
A passing turtle snapped it up and swam with it away
And there it still resides inside the turtle to this day
The Bottle emptied salty tears when raised up to the ship
Lamenting straw’s removal from its quivering, wet lip
It landed with the other garbage on the trawler’s deck
Awash with mourning at the feeling of its empty neck

These star-crossed lovers never met again and yet survive
One in darkness, one in light, eternally alive
Suffering the separation love can cruelly bring
Even to a lifeless, used, polluted plastic thing



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