On New Year’s Day 2026 I decided that a good way to ring in our latest solar orbit would be to develop mental memory and exercise my writing skills and so, taking prompts from the “Stoner Coffee Table Book“, I gave myself the following timed exercise:
1 – [30 seconds] – Turn to a random page and take in the subject matter, using the time to develop a nugget of an idea
2 – [5 minutes*] – Create an 8-line poem
3 – [till finished] – Create 2 pages of these poems in my poeming book
In reality I feel like *4 minutes for the writing would have been enough, but if you have a book full of random images and some time on your hands, give it a try and adjust the times and ingredients to your liking.
Here is how that went…
Book images on left – Poems on right
Like Crushed and Worthless
Cats eyes
Hopes and dreams of teams
Are capsized
When the playing has become
Politicised
And relationships have become
Weaponised
There’s a castle
On a yonder hill
Whereof ancient legends still tell
Of the gruesome kill
The entire population
And all their animals’
Blood forever spilled
Until the bloodlust of their enemy was entirely stilled
There’s an old rusty lock on the old
Rusty bolt on the door of the old shed
Down in the bottom of the garden
Where the kids don’t play anymore
Where no kids go anymore
Where devices have silenced the need to explore
And no one even knows
If there’s a key for that lock anymore
A bearded man
Looks out his window
Wondering where did the time go
Feeling like
It had only been
A year or so
Since he’d been crowned
As king
Opposing pages
Of Blue and Teal
Whose misty wooded depths
In foggy photos reveal
A tranquil forest setting
In which your soul to heal
Whose misty mysterious extent
Is soothingly concealed
And then, my favourite of the lot was also the last.
Fractals just,
Like ages of
Ever-changing stages
Of moth and man
Reveal that
The more a thing changes
The less
It can.
