Napowrimo #9

Today's prompt was to get your playlist and write a poem that included the titles of 5 random song titles. A few months back, a student of mine gave me some of his hipstery folk music, and actually, sometimes I like to listen to it while I'm working. My "heavy lifting" music is classical/instrumental, but this music is kind of nice for more freewrites and such. So anyway, it's become a part of my writing playlist on pandora. I digress. Here's my "poem" -- song titles in bold.

Who was that teenage girl with moons

For eyes, who thought that she could pack

Her things inside a beat-up baby blue

Sedan and leave her self behind:

A magazine of CDs, backpack filled

with Kerouac and tattered love poems

to some abstraction (that day, a boyfriend’s

midnight spikes of hair) black nail polish,

glass bottles filled with cherry coke?

You had your life before you to screw up –

It was too precious to waste on good behavior,

All the right decisions. You couldn’t wait

To shake it loose. This was a time for mistakes:

Closing your eyes and letting the wind

Run through your tangled hair, speeding

From this southern state of slow contentment.

And somehow you still ended up right here –

Like a specks of pollen or paint tossed

Onto a canvas, a beautiful mess of color

And of life. But now the baby blue sedan

Is rusted out and life’s soundtrack

Sounds like silence in the wind.

The little left of the boyfriend’s spikes

are slicked back and wet. Admit it now:

you’ll always be in love with this,

the sound of pennies shaken in a jar,

the shattering of glass on tiled floor.