Rage, reverie, and 30 almost-poems later

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (May 1st: That's all, Folks!): Well, we’ve done it again. Another National/Global Poetry Writing Month is in the books.

Our final featured participant for 2025 is grapeling, whose “askew” response to Day 30’s “songs-that-follow-you” prompt is a kind and keen reminder that there’s more than one way to experience to world.

Thanks to everyone who took up the challenge this year! We hope you enjoyed the prompts, the art/resources, and especially the community that has grown up around Na/GloPoWriMo. Speaking of that community, we extend a special shout-out for everyone who cheered along in the daily comment sections. It’s really heartwarming to see returning the same names/faces every year, and how actively and kindly you respond to each other’s work, help newbies out with questions, and create a supportive online microcosm for poetry every April.

As usual, all the prompts and posts will remain available, and the list of participating sites will stay up through early next year, when we’ll begin the house-cleaning in preparation for Na/GloPoWriMo 2026.

Thanks again, and see you next year!

Rage, reverie, and 30 almost-poems later

I can’t believe it’s over, again. This year felt like walking through fire in slow motion. I came in with so much hope, dipped early, caught up, almost quit, almost vanished, and still somehow dragged myself across the finish line with a tattered notebook, too many tabs open, and poetry leaking out of my pores like fever-sweat.

And this wasn’t even the poetic, noble kind of struggle. It was real-life mess. Rage migraines. Events I didn’t want to attend. Rooms I had to perform (my existence) in. Screens I stared at until the words blurred. Some days I was too drained to write full poems, so I dropped skeletons and breadcrumbs in my notebook or drafts and convinced myself I’d dress them later. Some I never did. Some got stitched together at 2 AM in a haze of panic, pride, and way too much tea. Some cramped up under blanket on my mobile phone (like this one, haha!). But I didn’t stop. I wanted to. Oh god, I wanted to. But I didn’t.

Thank you to everyone who read, commented, wandered into my wild metaphors, and let me be feral and sentimental and stubbornly verbose. I wrote on my phone, half-asleep, mid-chaos, in trains of thought that derailed mid-track and still, I made it to the end. That’s something. Maybe not everything, but something sacred.

To Maureen and the NaPoWriMo, thank you, deeply, for building this peculiar, beautiful yearly lighthouse. I don’t know how many poems I’ll keep. I don’t know how many I’ll burn. But I do know I’ll be back. I always am. Year after year, April becomes a strange, intimate kind of survival and somehow, you all make it worth returning to.

And somewhere in between all that quiet unraveling and screaming into drafts, I got featured. For the first time. That stunned little moment of recognition, like being handed a candle mid-storm, meant more than I know how to say without turning it into another poem. I wrote through sickness, noise, weddings I didn’t want to attend, rooms I didn’t want to be in, silences I didn’t want to carry. And still: I wrote. I feel like I have learnt the lesson of keeping going.

Also, confession (I have already mentioned this under the last poem, but I am reiterating): part of me didn’t post the last poem for hours because I didn’t want it to end. I kept staring at it, tweaking commas that didn’t matter, delaying the inevitable. Endings are hard. I’m someone who holds onto tabs for years. Who doesn’t return library books just to avoid saying goodbye. This felt like one of those tabs. One I didn’t want to close because closing means leaving. And I hate that. So this long-winded post? Maybe it’s me keeping the tab open just a little longer.

See you in the margins next time. Or in the dust of old prompt pages. Or maybe how ghosts return—quiet at first, then undeniable.

(P.S. If anyone’s curious (and I am sure many of you know this), I’ve all my poems + chaos on my weblog Chronicles of Miss Miseria: a corner of the internet where I’m usually weirder, wordier, and sometimes on fire or drowning deep in a river of regrets and rumination. Come visit, haunt the comments, or just read in the shadows. I’ll probably still be writing there long after April forgets me. Long after this, everything around me that picks my wounds and injures my will, this perishes. Because, I have learnt the lesson of keeping going.)

(P.P.S. AGAIN. I know, I know. This is wildly sappy for a poetry challenge. But what can I say? I’m an April softie wrapped in rage and lowercase feelings.)

(P.P.P.S. To the version of me who almost gave up halfway through: I’m glad you didn’t. To the one who almost gave up every single day after that? Same.)

tl;dr:

Still here, still writing, still a mess (thank god). The month that tried to swallow me (but I wrote back). How to survive April by giving a slow-burning goodbye in May. A bag of poetry, delirium, and the ghosts of almost-quits. NaPoWriMo, you beast, we’ll be back. This isn’t an ending, it’s a tab I refuse to close.

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 30th): She Who Burned Beautifully

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Thirty): Wow, we made it, everyone! Today’s the final day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month. We hope you make it to the end of the day with thirty new poems under your belt. But even if you didn’t manage to keep up with the whole poem-a-day thing, we hope you had fun!

We’ll be back tomorrow with our final featured participant and some closing thoughts for the year’s challenge, but in the meantime, our featured participant for today is Catching Lines, who brings us an elegy for Janis Joplin in response to Day 29’s inspired-by-the-music-makers prompt.

Our final resource is MatterPort Discover, a site that lets you take virtual tours of all kinds of museums, ranging from the National Museum of Ireland to the Bicycle Museum of America.

Finally, here’s the last prompt of this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo (optional, as always)! In his meandering poem, “Grateful Dead Tapes,” poet Ed Skoog riffs on the eponymous tapes that he’s found in a secondhand store, remembering various instances of hearing the band, both live and in recording. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that also describes different times in which you’ve heard the same band or piece of music across your lifetime.

Happy writing!

Note: I almost gave up. And I tried my best to wrap this up without giving up this year. I will always come back to this.

She Who Burned Beautifully

(for the songs that found me when no one else did)

Oizys, mother of the sharpest silences: hear me now.

They played that song again—

the one that howls like a woman unspooling her bones

on marble floors too clean for grief.

I was thirteen, and I screamed.

At him.

At the godfather of my silence.

At the man who carved his name in thunder

and called it parenting.

That day, I tore through the wallpaper of obedience,

raised my voice like a temple bell,

and the song rose with me.

War drums.

Chords like broken bangles.

A voice that wasn’t mine but knew my rage

like a sister.

Years later, locked away in velvet cages

stitched with gold and expectations,

I escaped.

Not with a suitcase—no,

with nothing but a name on my tongue

that meant sorrow and sovereignty:

Oizys.

I walked through strange cities

where no one knew how to pronounce me,

but I played that same song,

a siren of survival,

and the walls of every hotel room shivered

as I danced like a girl unchained

but still carrying her rusted manacles in her purse

like relics.

The air smelled of cardamom and gasoline. My wrists still bore the red threads of home.

The third time I heard it,

I was on the floor of my own apartment,

cold tea beside me,

achievement collapsing like a palace made of sugar.

I whispered:

“I am not capable.”

The song didn’t disagree.

It hummed around me, ancient and cruel,

as if to say—

“Then be incapable.

But burn anyway.”

“Even broken things can echo,” she sang,

and I believed her, for once.

Now when it plays,

I don’t cry.

I open my wrists—not with blades—

but with bracelets of fire,

the kind only a woman forged in rage and ruin can wear.

I sing back.

I sing back, with rusted manacles now melted into melody.

And somewhere,

the gods of HeeraMandi nod from their carved balconies,

their silks stained with blood and rosewater,

knowing I’ve earned my own music.

- Oizys.

Another Note: Things have been difficult recently. I started the challenge with a lot of hope; actually kickstarted early. But once April began, I fell behind a bit. Still, I kept writing bits and pieces for the prompts, thinking I’d post them here and there, eventually. And I did. I found time, caught up, and kept going. And… I got featured. For the first time. Woah. Towards the end, though, things got heavier. More chaos. More anger. More sickness. More weddings (bad…?). More exploitation. More hurt. More loneliness. More humiliation. Just more difficult days. But I stayed. I posted. Even though, near the end, I kept feeling like giving up. Even the second last day, I posted that one quite late. And today’s April 30th prompt too. I didn’t want to give up so easily.

But part of me kept putting it off. Stubborn. Delaying and delaying, maybe because another part didn’t want this to end. That’s always been me: delaying or ignoring endings because I’m scared to confront them. I procrastinate until regret starts swelling in my bones. But this time, I tried. I tried to fight through the pain, through the restraining thoughts and I posted.

Had to write it on mobile. Haha. Not my usual style. Mostly, I do it with my laptop, some randomly old notebooks, a book or two and a pen.

But to win a battle, you do what you have to. I think I’ll always come back to this. That fight—the internal one—was the root of this poem. This month, I stuck to every theme, every prompt, went beyond and above just to hold on to it. But this final one: I took it purely as inspiration. I poured my conflict into it. Let the rage shape it. Let my sorrow speak. And I wrote it. I’ll always come back to this. A flag point. A fire I lit. And proof that even when I thought I couldn't (perfectly)—I did (even if not perfectly).

P.S.: Yeah, I know—it’s all very dramatic and sappy for just a yearly NaPoWriMo post. But hey, when you live inside your head 24/7, even poetry becomes a war diary. Let me have this one.