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Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Shadow Poem Prose

For english at Armstrong High, we are studying poems and writing them. We are writing shadow poems, which are copies of another poem in our own words. I can't explain this really well, so here's an example:

Her laugh was a bell,
Beautiful and hard to tell,
When angel gets it's wings.

Okay... not the best I imagine, but I made it up in 30 seconds, so don't mock me!

Shadow poem:

His scowl was a stain,
Hideous and none too plain,
Were the thoughts that hid within.

Again, not the best example of anything, and especially not a good shadow. I'll try to upload a decent one asap.

To put it brief, a shadow poem is supposed to be an exact copy of the previous poem using different words. ex: "He stared at the dog" which is a pronoun, verb, preposition, article, and a noun. You basically just copy that and insert your own words: "She slept on the couch." still a pronoun, verb, preposition, article, and a noun. It also has the same amount of syllables: five

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I will also upload my shadow poem asap.
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The second assignment was to turn our shadow poem into prose. Prose is ordinary writing that is not verse ( poems, plays, or anything else related). Here's mine, it's in short story/essay format. Let me know if you think of a good title for it! And if you have any editing ideas for me! :)

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Finally, after years of putting it off, I clean my room. For this job I’m going to need something special, preferably a hazmat suit. I think as I survey the wreckage that was clean, once upon a time. It is all ancient history now. As I look around the nuclear wasteland that I call my bedroom, I know why it is so messy. I can already see the cycle that I go through every day:

I walk into my room after a long day of school. Collapsing on the one clean corner of my bed, I proceed to dump all of my work into an ever growing heap of stuff. The mounds of clothing, papers and other materials that cluttered my floor have begun to make it hard to walk. I now have to do an odd little hopping dance over the many different piles of junk just to get to my own closet. Not that this is necessary, because it would be completely pointless to go through all the trouble to get there. My closet is completely bare. All of the hangers and clothing are scattered in monstrous hills around my room. I guess this kind of defeats the logic of having a closet in the first place.

On the rare chance that I do my homework, I sit on the one livable corner of my bed and scribble on notebook paper. When it becomes dirty, I simply throw it away and get a new one. This all amounts into a massive mountain of paper, books, erasers, and other school related junk. I then go to bed and repeat the same cycle the next day.

Surveying my room once again, I’m suddenly not so keen on the idea of cleaning up this mess. This is going to take a very long time, I think to myself. As I trudge through masses of refuse I see that my room is like a mini time capsule. The farther back into you go, the older and dustier the debris gets. A yo-yo from when I was five, my favorite stuffed animal that I have been looking for seven years, a school project that was due three months ago, the list goes on and on. Goodness, even a cockroach wouldn’t be able to survive in here, I think as I trip over yet another useless pile of junk. I look down at the dinky garbage bag that I brought in to help me clean and decide that I need something bigger, much bigger, preferably the size of a garbage truck.

With a restrained groan, I shovel buckets of filth into a bag. This isn’t just a nuclear wasteland, I think bitterly, it’s the Battle of Armageddon! I slog through leftover sludge, hacking at any grime that prostrates itself before me. I leave nothing but clean items in my wake. It feels like eons later that I’m packing the last of my dusty trash into a bag. I look at my room, It has been so long since I’ve seen the floor, I think to myself, and even longer since it’s been clean. It feels good to be able to play again, in a room that was previously unlivable.

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I apologize if that was really long. Remember that I haven't blogged in a bit and my words tend to goosh out when they've been bottled up for a while. :P

someone somewhere somehow somebody at sometime will read this post
invisigirl

1 comment:

  1. Nice poem, it is great that you finally cleaned your room.

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