The St. Louis Poetry Center partnered with Inktober this year, so there have been a series of one word prompts that show up on my social media feeds. Now Inktober is a drawing centric “do a thing a day”, and there is a lot of interpretation that can happen when it come to visualizing an a concrete concept like “apple” or an an abstract concept like “rescue.” As such, it makes sense that those same prompts can be used as inspiration for a writing exercise. And I’m in the need of something to harness my errant free energy now that the SLICE 2026 trailer is done being coordinated.

So, I have taken a slightly different approach to Inktober largely because I’m not sure I actually have the wherewithal to do a whole “do a thing a day”, but by the same virtue, I am incredibly bad at doing nothing. So I have 31 tabs in a Google doc titled with their respective words and so far I’ve just been taking scattershots, and so far, only two of my attempts have actually produced poems, although a third has giving me an idea for another, so this entirely process has been a raging success.

Still, I think all of this is just relearning how to be public facing again and getting ready to wear a proverbial mask to share the proverbial face underneath.

I wouldn’t call myself an open book, but I am certainly not one who invites a reader, and I guess I’m trying to be better about it.

Still, I will leave you with my favorite lines that I have written during this third of October.

…8 - My least part about writing list poems is the format feels like a repetitive recursion in the era of listicles.

9 - My favorite part about writing lists poems is purposefully eschewing base 10. It really is

A - Feature, not a bug, that language has the malleability of a clever cleaver.

B - Aware that this actually a list in hexadecimal…