Cynically Trash Panda: A Wordle Inspired Poem
We all surely know by now that Wordle has taken Twitter by storm and become a hugely familiar face among the writing community online. Over at OverWoods, we truly love the game and as a kind of pseudo tribute (and a not so subtle way to remember to keep up that Wordle streak!), we've decided to use each daily, 5 letter answer as the inspiration to a short story or poem this May!
*Of course, we wouldn't want to reveal the answer of the day's Wordle prematurely and ruin the experience for others. So, every Wordle inspired short is brought to you the day after its inspiration hit your screen. This is a no spoiler zone! We promise.
This short is brought to you by our blogger, Megan Oberholzer.
Author comment: Today's inspired short is from the 30th April where the answer was "trash". Of course, I did take a few more inspiration ideas from here and around, which you can read more about after the poem. With all that said, here it is:
Cynically Trash Panda (30/04/2022)
Black eyes and tiny hands,
Rummaging through trach bags and garbage cans,
Watch the cynic stealing
Those rotting, discarded pieces:
Piece back again someone else’s great tragedy
For which you hold nothing but self-serving apathy.
Watch him lay it all out –
Look, look at all this! – another triumphant shout,
Rub the plastic packaging together,
Bank notes put forth to a counter, he’s languishing –
Languish in the suffocation of his own desire,
Without which’s placation leaves you only a liar.
Paint the world grey, broken
Point to suffering, death, destruction: chosen
For a life he’d prefer as entirely forgot
Unbidden to this boycott, his terror of waking dreams –
Wake to the excuse of another’s pain
And watch your own life spiralling down the drain.
Ha, ha - it's a bit of a ride isn't it? I definitely had some fun and tried to put some kind of interesting, analysable (if that's a word . . . which it appears to be?) message into it. Hopefully you got it!
Some of the other inspiration I sourced included searching "phrases using 'trash'", just for fun, to see what happens. I stumbled across the lovable internet nickname for a racoon: a "trash panda". Love it! Instantly gave me ideas of a little skittish fella with big black eyes, a fluffy tail and teeny, tiny little hands.
Then I opened Pinterest - obviously, a writer's go-to inspiration hub - and chose the first random written quote I could find.
The post I chose was posted by WeHeartIt (OK, I admit, I got ad bombed and WeHeartIt maliciously and mercilessly bamboozled me into twisting their company promo post into my story but don't worry, I never told you that). Their post reads:
“The truth is, I pretend to be a cynic, but I am really a dreamer who is terrified of wanting something she may never get.”
- Joanna Hoffman
So, from this particularly emotive quote, which I stress I picked randomly, I swear I'm OK, I extrapolated a few key words I was going to use: trash, cynic, dreamer, terrified, wanting, never.
Although I didn't get round to using all of them, I let the "vibe" of the words guide my ideas. For example, I exchanged "wanting" for "dreams" and "desires", and "terrified" is "terror" now, etcetera. And I think this worked out really well. The poem probably wouldn't be as good if I had tried to cram unworkable words into it instead of just letting the rough ones go.
Originally though, this wasn't going to be a poem. I did begin with prose, attempting to write a flashfic, but something about it wasn't working. I thought it was tripping into preaching territory with not much else on offer. Then, it occurred to me how almost poetic the first line sounded (Black eyes and tiny hands, rummaging through trach cans and garbage bags) and it all spiralled from there, with me adding in a loose rhyme scheme (subject to half rhyme and availability), as well as a vague rhythm where the overarching pattern is short-line long-line short-line long-line (for an accelerated rising and falling effect, hopefully) and then I decided some good central structure might be tucking in internal rhymes and borrowing the last/second to last word of the 4th line of each paragraph to start the 5th line off, just for some added spice and potatoes. In the end, I think the poem reads well aloud and I managed to stay away from "telling" what was happening outright just fine.
I hope some parts of the poem, although somewhat carefully laid out, feel discordant and erratic like a crazed little racoon scurrying from trash bag to trash bag, and that you enjoyed reading (and maybe reading about) my work.
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And let me know what you thought down below (in case you can't find it, I have left arrows like so: vvv).