Yesterday I did what everyone--cat, squirrel, or human--should do on a hot day: I scampered around early and late and spent the middle hours flopped quietly in the shade. Ruckus the cat preferred to flop in the driveway in the shadow of my car. I preferred to flop on the living room couch in front of the fan, but it all came to the same thing.

I spent my quiet afternoon reading Margaret Atwood's novel The Robber Bridegroom and writing a new poem. Given that I'd had such good fortune with the word-trigger prompt that Vievee gave us earlier this week, I reconstituted the idea for myself: I opened Atwood's novel and randomly poked a thumb into four of her words. Then I typed them at the top of a blank page and let myself go.

In Vievee's workshop I ended up using all four of my words in the subsequent drafts. In this case, only one of the words remained in the version I'd concocted by the end of my siesta. Nonetheless, the process and sensation were parallel: by focusing on these unexpected (even unexciting words: one of them was something) rather than trying to dredge up material from my own predictable stream, I found myself writing a strange and surprising little fake-instructional poem, one that borrowed from adages and idioms, even famous lines of poetry, but replaced the expected nouns with near rhymes and in this way constructed a pastiche of imitation wisdom about how to be a coward.

I've never written such a poem before. I don't know if it's good or bad, but I'm interested in it . . . and this is the crux: poets can get bored with their own patterns, and for me Vievee's use-four-words-that-belong-to-someone-else trigger has quickly increased both the excitement and the curiosity that are necessary to my endeavor.