for In Your Own Words, a poem by Dave Malone: ‘Hello, My Name Is Thomas’
In Your Own Words begins September 5 (this coming Tuesday, the day after Labor Day!) Sign up by clicking on the waving trees below.
Over at Poetry for Life on Substack we’re reading and journaling and writing from a few of Dave Malone’s poems, in preparation for In Your Own Words, a three-week mini-course I’ll be teaching in September on Malone’s collection Tornado Drill.
Here’s my Hello, My Name is poem, inspired by Malone’s. (In this poem I’m playing with a different name than my own.)
Hello, My Name Is Wanderer
that’s what it means anyway
and I don’t get why my parents
would name me that unless they planned
from the start to send me packin
probably didn’t figure on me hitchin out
to California where I’ve stayed put mostly
other than moving and all but
I’ve had me the same girl for five years
plus three apartments two jobs
a college or three and one dog
Great God Almighty and she can’t
fit in my car too good anymore
so’s I’m lookin for a pickup
and a road to glory
– Megan Willome