2024 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 2

For the 2024 November PAD Chapbook Challenge, poets are tasked with writing a poem a day in the month of November before assembling a chapbook manuscript in the month of December. Day 2 is to write a disguise poem.

What a great first day! Let's keep it going (and poeming)!

For today’s prompt, write a disguise poem. Of course, we just celebrated Halloween in these parts, which involved a lot of disguises; but people also disguise their voices and/or their true natures every day. They may disguise their intentions. And some poems even disguise their true meanings. So play with disguises today.

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Write a poem every single day of the year with Robert Lee Brewer's Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming. After sharing more than a thousand prompts and prompting hundreds of thousands of poems for more than a decade, Brewer picked 365 of his favorite poetry prompts here.

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Here’s my attempt at a Disguise Poem:

“overwise,” by Robert Lee Brewer

-after Paul Laurence Dunbar

& then we found we
weren't ready to wear
every assumption & stare the
world wanted to use as a mask
to disguise all the lies that
fester as society grins
& welcomes us in &
pretends there were never lies--

though perhaps exaggerations but
truths were only supposed to let
poets dream in worn spaces the
society used to define the world
burning down in some fevered dream
until the critics cry out otherwise--

& then we found we
weren't ready to wear
every assumption & stare the
world wanted to use as a mask!

(This is my attempt at a golden shovel poetic form, which is a sort of disguise of an original poem.)

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.