Casual Sextrains

My First Sextrain

© Dr. Wes Browning

Must your legs be always in the way?

We only have the room for an hour!

Can't you do your reading another time?

What? Now you have to take a shower?

Well, while you do, I'll sit in grime

And write six more scenes of my play.

That was a little experiment of mine. Let's get scientific and experiment together!

Given a list of random words your brain will try to combine them into one idea. For instance, presented with the words onions, tobacco, umbrellas, five, and neon, my brain pictures five Englishmen with bad breath entering a Broadway theater. The cognitive psychologists have proved that this sort of thing happens all the time to college students of all ages who need the money badly enough to answer silly questions for hours. But they're certain it works for everyone else too, because they are psychologists, and that's how psychologists think. This is also a fact from cognitive psychology!

We can exploit this phenomenon to write poems without concentrating! We'll pick words at random from a dictionary, let them operate on our brains as above, and then use one word per line to describe our image poetically. Since I am into sextrains this month I'll pick 6 words for this illustration:

Poem Based on Random Words:

Letter, scratch, deluded, brain, rabbit, spin

or Opus 21, "Where's the Rabbit?"

Got your LETTER in the mail,

I'm reading it now as I SCRATCH.

DELUDED as always, beyond the pale -

Amazing, what your BRAIN can hatch.

You just STEW and seethe and steam and spit -

Here's my suggestion: "SPIN on it!"

It's just as easy as it looks! Here's another one at no additional cost to

you, the reader!:

Poem Based on Random Words:

Job, rent, food, bed, street, reeks

or Opus 22, My 3rd Sextrain

This sextrain is about a JOB not had;

With RENT to be paid - that's really bad:

It's not that it's hard to find any FOOD -

It's not that I'm going to miss my BED -

But the STREET always puts me in a foul mood,

It &#!$-ing REEKS, as I've always said.

Special thanks are due this month to fellow editor and community leader Anitra "alf" Freeman for reminding me of the usefulness of diffusion.