Poetry Friday--What Are You Doing Instead?

Regularly writing poetry is a hard routine for me to maintain. I did well for nearly two years then fell off. Now, if I write it's generally on the weekend. I'm not sure what's gone, but something has left the building.

Grace Paley tells us what she has done instead of writing a poem;

The Poet's Occasional Alternative

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead        it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft        a poem would have had some
distance to go        days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it        many friends
will say        why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable
sadnesses I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership        I do not
want to wait a week        a year        a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

[I tried to preserve, as best I could, the spacing between words. An odd use of space and no punctuation! It does, however, make it more interesting since I have to wonder why she chose to lay out the poem this way?]

What do you do instead of writing poems? Can you write a poem about not writing a poem? Give it a shot! Here's one from me:

Sunday Alternative

With skies clear
a passel of sparrows
swooping past the open
window singing, the
frenzy of one fat
cat invalidates proposed
phrases of pastoral
beauty. Nothing now
but to watch life
unfold before my eyes.

© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved

Spend the morning at A Year of Reading where Mary Lee is gathering armsful of poems for this week.