Broad to Narrow
This poem is so broad almost anyone could have written it. I circle around real experiences without fully stopping and embracing them. Looking back, I can see I was intentionally playing with alliteration and brevity. The result: a pretentious pile of emotionless baggage.
But I wrote it.
Sometimes ideas need to start broad. That is how the mind often works. We name a category before we narrow it into something specific and concrete. Suddenly “comfort food” becomes crispy bacon, mashed potatoes and gravy, or a hot cinnamon roll cooling beside a cup of burnt diner coffee.
Specificity is where readers begin to trust our truth. Not because the details are dramatic, but because they become real.
Comfort food calling,
Midlife belly broadening,
Soft couch, salty snacks, hard choices.
Soft stomach hangs low,
A victim of age,
Self discipline lacking.
Ready, set, go!
Keto plan: carb cutting, protein packing
Will this work for my gut?
I surrender, hunger
Pangs grow with each pound,
Doubt punching my paunch.
Intermittent fasting:
Renewing hope for old
Man on a fat-loss chase.
Get Specific
I have quite a few broad ideas here that need to be workshopped and narrowed down to build a stronger poem. Let’s break them down:
- comfort food
- hard choices
- hunger pangs
- fat-loss
- doubt
- life
- struggle
- health
- motivation
- aging
Diets go round
This poem covers so many broad ideas that, honestly, we could probably build an entire anthology out of narrowing them down one at a time. “Comfort food” alone could become twenty different poems depending on whether the writer reaches for gas station nachos, late-night cereal, fast-food fries, or grandma’s mashed potatoes drowning in gravy. “Hard choices” could mean skipping dessert, throwing away the Halloween candy, or walking past the donut box in the faculty lounge pretending not to look directly at it.
That is the strange gift of vague writing. Even when the poem itself feels weak, it often contains dozens of hidden doorways into more honest and specific poems. Every broad phrase becomes an invitation to ask better questions. What kind of hunger? What kind of exhaustion? Which late-night snack? Which failed diet? Which mirror? Which moment finally hurt enough to matter?
Ironically, this poem says almost nothing clearly, yet it accidentally points toward hundreds of things worth actually writing about.