The Third Story (Thursday Doors)

image by Thoughts of a Wanderer

1
Majestic, they said, but
enter at your own risk–
dogs live there–horses, too–and
insects we can’t identify.

2
The thing is, the future requires
adjustment.  Your Utopian maps
tell me nothing.  They only
impede the stitching together of time.

3
Orange looks different at
night, but I turn on the lights so the
door is visible.  You can’t miss
it.  It sits in the clouds, gaudy, towering.

4
Space is always disordered–
check all the boxes and it verifies nothing.
Interactions are not a test—what is
permissible is learned, but not necessary.

5
Like home, the gift of colour
inside our far-flung journeys replaces
needless worry with surprise–
erratic prose turns poetic, jumps into the air.

Coincidentally, this is my third poem for the May Writing Challenge at Thursday Doors. When the Random Word Generator chose door as its first word this week, I knew I would once again be referring to its list for what I wrote. Another word that jumped out at me was orange, so I knew which photo I would choose to write about as well.

The W3 challenge this week from Punam is to write an acrostic poem from a list of words she provided. I strung two of them together, meditation and discipline. Then I chose a lot of the beginning words from the random word list and wrote around what resulted, including other words from the list whenever they seemed to fit. It is an interesting method of constructing a poem.

Above is one of my orange-embellished door collages from the 1980s. And for more doors from the present, you can always visit Thursday Doors, hosted by Dan Antion.