Experiment 3: Exploding Kittens

The Poem (An unfinished fragment)

TACO CAT

When teaching someone a new future, 

Skip the secrets –

No one listens to the telling 

Of the Kraken and the Sasquatch

Attacking all things anew.

The future is a palindrome

Emerging new 

In the body of explosions.

Like a 

!TACOCAT!

Today, I attempted an experiment I learned at an MFA Creative Writing course here at St Andrews. The challenge was to be given a set of words, and write a poem using ONLY the words from the set list. We were allowed to splice words in half and paste them together, but we were not allowed to add something that could not be found on the list.

For my set list, I decided to put my NSFW edition of Exploding Kittens to use (my flatmate and I bought it by accident and have since hidden it away. At least it will now come in useful for something). What resulted was perhaps the most unpoetic collection of words I have ever been faced with:

Skip 

Evade dirty sasquatch 

Exploding kitten 

Nope 

See the future 

Listen to the secrets the wizard tells 

See many wondrous things 

Crawl inside a goat 

Attack 

Release the bunnies 

Cat’s Schrodinger 

Unleash an adorable penguin 

A kraken emerges and he’s super upset 

An asparagus appears 

Taco Cat

Donate your body to cat science 

Teach someone a new palindrome 

Tacocat 

The words I ended up using from here, as you can see above, are: skip, sasquatch, exploding, listen to the secrets, tells, things, attack, new, kraken, Taco Cat, palindrome, teach, body.

And the result is the fragment above! It’s still not finished; I would therefore encourage my readers to take a look at the set list of words and finish my poem! Post in the comments below or email straight to me. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. : )

Good luck. Stay inspired.