April is National Poetry Month. Writer’s Digest has a Poem A Day challenge, which I’m going to participate in. A few of those poems will end up here. Check out the link if you want to try the challenge, too.
The challenge for the 3rd is to write a message poem.
Digitally Altered
I wanted to tell you how much I care
so I started with
—I miss you so much sometimes—
But I didn’t want to fill you with guilt and so
no matter how I wish to contract the space
between you
and me
I deleted those words of need
and began again
—I hope you’re doing well over there—
fell flat
because my tangle of hopes can’t be
conveyed when I don’t even know
what I want to say
So I wrote instead
—I love you—
because it is true
but it looked so lonely, laid bare
on the white screen that
I added a little sideways smiley face
and hoped you could read
between the lines
I love this! I like the use of dashes as well, makes it so much clearer to imagine to persona’s emotions
If you check out the Writer’s Digest PAD contest, you’ll see that italics are somehow possible, but tricky. So I figured the dashes would set off the ‘message.’
No messing with HTML formatting for me! 🙂