Dog Birthday

A LONG TIME AGO
by April Halprin Wayland

a long time ago
i chewed you out
for chewing my shoe

well.

the other day
you leaped in the backseat
i rolled down the back window
you leaned out, singing, all the way to the dog park

well.

today
you s—t—r—e—t—c—h   out   on   the    rug
like an abused slinky
snoring
while i click clack these keys

well.

well, well, well.

happy birthday, baby dog.
you’ve grown on me.
you’ve grown up.

you’ve grown
all over
me.

lucky, lucky
me.

Poetry Prompt:

Sometimes I don’t want to make sense.  I don’t want to capitalize.  I don’t want you to understand me, not completely.  Fine, fine!  Poems are about making rules, breaking rules, howling at the moon, and not necessarily capitalizing the word “I.”

The Poetry Foundation’s page on e.e.cummings says: “No one else,” Randall Jarrell claimed,”has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader.”…Between the ages of eight and twenty-two, he wrote a poem a day, exploring many traditional poetic forms. By the time he was in Harvard in 1916, modern poetry had caught his interest. He began to write avant-garde poems in which conventional punctuation and syntax were ignored in favor of a dynamic use of language. Cummings also experimented with poems as visual objects on the page.

I love his poem,  [in Just-]

It’s your turn.  Play with word placement, let your words, their sounds and their meanings do the funky chicken on your paper.  Write with joy ~