I am in. Anyone else?

>>GroaningGreyAgony
Like a dime store flynt!

>>GroaningGreyAgony
>>Griseus

I seem to be, too.

Mike

The growth from the dirt is so firmly rooted,
It must remain Earthbound it seems, without doubt,
But in combo takes flight. A tuber that rose?
Far out like a beanstalk the thorny stem grows!

***

Years hence, the man lies on deathbed
Queried on how he coaxed all from the mud...
At the last, the citizen whispered, "Rosespud."

I just don't understand this one at all. Some of the words are made up, and I can't really tell from context what they're supposed to mean. There's kind of a rhyme scheme and kind of a meter. The protagonist finds a rose, but some potatoes tell him not to bother trying to grow it, and I don't know why, so he listens to them and goes to space instead because reasons? It feels like an absurdist piece to me, and if that was the intent, then you got there.

Hah, the prompt appearing right in the first line make me think this author was the one who submitted that prompt.

The rhyme scheme is very good. The meter at least maintains syllable count, but the stress patterns of "edge of the bouquet" and "and its deep scent" are forced.

I think it takes the title to understand what happens, which is fine. I like the theme that once cut, the flower will die, but its scent lasts as it clings to life, but then another will come to take its place. Then the speaker seems callous to all that, as they don't sound wistful at all about casting away the entire flower. It's just business as usual. Beauty is disposable.

I can't say I understood what happened in this one either. Two people (or anthropomorphized things) are attracted to each other but are also mutually destructive? Taken at face value, it sounds more like Rose was already in flames and they just realized they'd both die, but I also got the sense that their contact instigated it or at least made it worse. only they get together at the end, so I'm not sure how a rose being cast aside applies here. I'm probably way off base here, but the allusions to chemistry have me thinking of rubidium, which would have a similar etymology as Rose, referring to red, and it is highly reactive. Rhyme and meter don't have any hiccups.

Our love was so intense at start
And prone to sudden surge
They kept the two of us apart--
But now, we swiftly merge!
We heralds of catastrophe
Appointed on the hour
Arise now in a curling cloud,
We bloom, a desert flower.

A single rose was cast aside that day,
There seems no purpose to the one they chose.
Those sundered only fall in dark dismay
And sink into the dust to decompose.

>>Pascoite

Planned Obsolescence

I did in fact submit the prompt, but I did not have a preconception of this particular piece when I did so. I generally try to enter prompts with pleasing metrics, more so in the poetry rounds.

A sonnet is usually a reliable way to make sure that one reaches the word count, so I tried it first. It came together neatly, and the theme from my point of view was perhaps colored by the feelings one gets in middle age that the world is getting ready to discard you in favor of the coming generations.

The extra line at the end stands for the discarded rose and I felt it was a nice touch.

Thank you very much for your review!

>>Pascoite
>>GroaningGreyAgony

Thanks, folks!

The prompt struck me immediately as the perfect first line to a parody Emily Dickinson poem--our first person narrator would throw the rose away, but the rose would refuse to go. But I couldn't decide on what sort of tone to use: make it a humorous "The Cat Came Back" sort of thing or go for more of a horror thing, the rose's stem digging its thorny stem into the narrator's arm and like that.

So I went a completely different way and came up with this. Some rewriting, and there might be something here...

Mike