POEM | FREE VERSE | WRITING

I’ll Tell You What Written Media I Am

A response to a poetry challenge

I’m the New York Times and Washington Post combined, clipping headlines in strips, taping ransom notes with tar and feathers.

I’m a Rod Serling script, memorizing lines in dimensions of sight, sound, and mind, skipping the thirteenth floor in The Twilight Zone.

I’m an old Playboy magazine from the seventies with scratch and sniff centerfolds, exposing secrets, my sweet side hiding in the hard pit of a cherry.

I’m a car manual, repairing my brain’s hinges that echo like the clunk from a rusty Buick door with sloppy steering, broken down in a field of overgrown weeds.

I’m a Betty Crocker cookbook with masking tape bracing my spine, baking bourbon into voodoo bullets, tweaking every tested disaster’s recipe.

I’m a five-year-old girl’s diary, plucking slivers from memories, steeping tea bags in my mind’s plague on pages framed in silver.

I’m the inside sleeve of a Rolling Stones album cover, choking on ghosts and bones, scratching lines and lyrics with needles.

I’m an FBI wanted poster plastered with blood spatter, ripping rewards with fingerprints, chasing my public enemy.

I’m a hardcover book collecting dust, interpreting Dali’s melting clocks and Munch’s The Scream, converting captions to weapons.

I’m a notepad on my phone, random thoughts and images digitized, fighting to escape the shackles of this straitjacket.

I’m an eighties milk carton, my face streaked in black and white, a curdled child missing but never forgotten.

I’m a little bit of everything and all over the place, ideas shredded with blades to confetti and ticker tape, raining on parades.

American writer

Thank you, Logophobic, for inviting me to the poetry challenge that answers the “What written media are you?” question.

I tapped into some of my past sources of inspiration for poetry. If anyone ever scrolls through the disorganized notepad in my phone, they’ll think I’m off my rocker.