February is the beginning of Post It Note Poetry month. Post-It Note poetry is a group of poets dedicated to writing short poetry on post-it notes, taking photos of them and sharing them across the social media platforms of Instragram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

There are really no rules to it: as long as it’s verse that fits on a post-it note, it’s a post-it note poem. Poets usually write and upload one poem per day, but you don’t have to participate that much if you can’t do it. In fact, as a college student, there are a few days where I can’t get any poetry written for it. But, I’m going to make the attempt to do at least a few every week.

My goal for Post-It note poetry this year is EXPERIMENTATION. I want to play with new ideas and new forms. Free form, or free verse, is my favorite way to approach a poem, but I’ve been known to write the traditional rhyming poems, and I even wrote a sonnet once.

Here are my offerings for the first week:

Saturday, February 1st, 2014

Things that get under my skin

—ink

—splinters

—paper cuts

—shards of glass

—you

~~

A bit of a new experimental style for me: list poetry.

Sunday, February 2nd, 2014

a taste of cherries

blood-dark, delicate and round—

sweet as a kiss and a sigh,

explode on my anxious, tingling tongue

like the skies on the 4th of July.

~~

Here’s where the benefit of Post-It Note poetry comes into play. Other poets make gentle critiques of your work. In this way, we all grow as poets. We become better writers overall. That’s a good thing. Another poet gave me a few suggestions which were great. At the time I wrote this poem, I could not come up with a decent rhyme for “tongue.” I was completely brain dead or something. My fellow poet’s suggestions helped me make my poem better. Here’s the revised version:

blood-dark taste from when I was young—

sweet as a kiss and a sigh,

explodes on my anxious, tingling tongue

like the skies on the 4th of July.

~~

Pretty neat idea, huh? We support one another and we share our work with one another and the world. Next up:

Monday, February 3rd, 2014

drink

i want to live life

like it’s an open bar

drink deep

and get drunk

on every moment

with no regrets.

~~

And yes, hangovers would come under the heading of “regrets.” This poem was inspired by a piece of trash, a cardboard word fragment of the word “drink,” that I discovered lying on the sidewalk outside my apartment.

Tuesday, February 4th, 2014

word trip

a blank page

in an empty journal

a lonely highway

a dusty road

an unpaved pathway

in an uninhabited land.

where thoughts and ideas

notions and dreams

gather together

begin a journey

on a marvelous quest

from the mind to the page.

~~

A poem to show off my Hobbit moleskine. Could not resist. It’s my precioussss.

Thursday, February 6th, 2014

Daybreak & Dusk, or, When the Sun God Sits on His Two Earthly Thrones 

over a shock-pink

horizon

someone gazes—

a freeze-frame moment—

a beginning or

an ending.

~~

Tried to capture the mood of two individuals viewing the sun from different perspectives simultaneously; they are worlds apart: one of them is seeing a sunrise, the other a sunset.

~~

That’s all for my post-it note poems this week. I’m working on a few new ones for next week.