Three Hundred Words in Search Of a Meaning

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15 Minute Timed Writing
(300 Words in Search of a Meaning)

One-a-minute two-a-minute three-a-minute four—
big bad minute police waiting at my door.
If I take a minute more, I know they’ll somehow know.
so thinking about what I say is gonna bring me low!

They’re gonna crash my firewall and take me off to jail.
So with no other bloggers here to get me out on bail,
I’ll get on with my writing. Write about anything—
not about-a-nothing, and the words they gotta sing.

Time is of the essence ‘cause there ain’t no other clue.
Topical-type bloggers won’t know what to do.
Don’t know why with time limits I’m lacking all my grammar.
It’s like my words are nails but that I’m lacking any hammer.

With no topic they all lie here, looking for a wall.
There’s no sense to any of it. No. No sense at all.
I’m sure a question’s out there, but nobody’s gonna ask it,
and all these words just roll on by like eggs without a basket.

Purpose keeps eluding me. I know I’ll never find it.
Somehow though I’m running, I stay too far behind it.
I once said that I never know  what I will be writing.
From line to line, I follow words and hope they’ll be inciting

a thought, a theory or a theme somewhere along the way.
I always hope it will be soon, ‘cause I don’t have all day
to do the kind of writing that I like to do,
for when I look, I see the time—9:15:52!

I know that is impossible. I’m sure that there have been
fewer minutes since I started—only nine or ten!
Yet the clock says fifteen minutes and  seconds more as well.
So though I’ve met the challenge, It seems I’ve missed the bell!!

I drew a blank on today’s prompt so this is a rewrite of a poem from three years ago. The prompt today is theory.

11 thoughts on “Three Hundred Words in Search Of a Meaning”

  4. Anton Wills-Eve

    Judy, Do you realise what you’ve done? Seriously! By just constructing rhyming couplets for 15 minutes, and making them scan, if not make sense, you have demonstrated perfectly the art of versifying. There are people, myself included, who can hold conversations in rhyming couplets without even knowing what they are going to say before they say it. Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes just sounds clever but is actually rubbish. But the important thing is that one can make lines rhyme and scan and at speed. That is the key to really enjoyable versifying which, at its best, eventually may become good poetry. It is not something you can teach , it is a natural gift with which you are born, your genius if you like, and goes a long way towards explaining why so much of your poetry is so apposite, amusing and really well written. It would be great to have a chat with you entirely in rhyme and see who gave up first. But I bet that most of your best works include many examples of this speed rhyming which must have just happened to you, and then really gave you a kick when you read it back to yourself after editing it into sensible thoughts and descriptions. A wonderful eye-opener for lovers of the inexplicable like me. 🙂 Thanks. Anton

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    1. lifelessons Post author

      You and I and Shakespeare, but I think he was at the head of the class by far. My mother could do this as well. She burned her rhymed diary before her death, I’m so sorry to say, but she wrote 2 plays, one of which I still have–all in rhymed and metered verse.

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