Nothing Unexpected
The tour
began before dawn.
An avian chorus
rose from the trees,
while a pair of oxen
stood without ado,
their breath
small clouds
above the field.
A toad
slipped beneath
a fallen log.
Someone posed,
someone smiled.
The guide
asked us to remove
our phones
and simply listen.
Noise,
he said,
fuels forgetfulness.
The world
doesn't disappear.
It wanes.
We tidy
our lives
until nothing unexpected
can find its niche.
Then comes
a zig
instead of a straight path,
a squib
instead of fireworks,
a chia sprout
pushing through
a crack in stone.
A lonely ewe
calls from the hill.
A net
hangs drying
beside an old bar
where yesterday's feud
has already become
someone else's story.
I tear
a piece of bread,
share it with no one,
and realize
I've spent years
trying to alert
the world
when all it wanted
was for me
to notice it.
The Word Nerd’s Domain
What was I like in the ’90s? I think that’s a social media trend right now. Right? Well, I used to ask friends to give me a random list of words then challenge myself to turn those unrelated fragments into a cohesive poem. I haven’t done that very often in recent years, apart from the occasional challenge over on AllPoetry.
Somewhere along the way, Friends even made a joke out of the concept. Monica thought making word lists for games was the ultimate form of fun. Everyone else… not so much.
Yes, guilty as charged: I am a certified word nerd, and this is my domain.
I wrote some good stuff back then. If only I had saved it, or sent it to a publisher, or done something more than just share it with my friends. Well, most of those poems are lost now, left behind on scraps of paper or tucked away in notebooks that vanished over the decades.
From Play to Poetry
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of play as a creative tool. That curiosity led me to work with Replit to develop Word Grafting, a game where you grow and harvest words. At the end of each session, the game generates a unique word bank harvested entirely from your gameplay.
Rather than letting that list vanish into the digital ether once the final score popped up, I decided to treat it as a creative prompt. It became a way to resurrect that old ’90s habit, but with a modern twist. Instead of relying on a friend’s random vocabulary, I used the raw materials from my own digital harvest to then write Nothing Unexpected.
The Architecture of the Limits
There is something visceral about working within strict limits. When you are handed a mandatory word bank, you can’t rely on flowery prose or convenient adverbs to bail you out. You have to look at the raw, jagged edges of the vocabulary you have, words like oxen, squib, or chia, and find the hidden friction between them.
It forces a lean, deliberate focus. You find yourself stripping away the excess noise to let the concrete reality of the images stand on their own. In a way, the creative constraint of the game perfectly mirrored the theme that emerged on the page: a quiet rejection of the modern urge to over-complicate and over-schedule our lives until there is no room left for the unexpected.
The poem to the left, Nothing Unexpected, is the result of that harvest. It is a reminder that while the poems of the past might be gone, the instinct to create never really disappears. Sometimes, the best way to find a fresh perspective is to stop trying to force the narrative and simply work with what is right in front of you.
Your Turn to Play
Now it’s your turn. Head over to Word Grafting, play a round, and copy your final word bank. Use those exact words as constraints to write a poem of your own.
When you’re done, share your poem in the comments below. Let’s see what you grow.