Today’s device from William Packard’s The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices is

Macaronics:  The use of foreign words to enrich the texture of DICTION in a poetic line.  The most common practice of macaronics is the mixture of vernacular worlds with Latin words, but macaronics can be any combination of two or more languages in any given passage.

I tried to use today’s device as a forced writing exercise, comfortable in the notion that poets all over the country are doing something similar, either through a collective daily writing prompt, or some other self-imposed practice.  In other words, what follows is a draft – but I’m sure it isn’t the only draft on the internet today!  Thanks for reading!

Circadian Contrarian
(draft) by Suzanne Baldwin Leitner

I have crept from room to room
like a lazy nomad’s wife
forced to wander quietly
to hide, by nothing more
than the absence of light.

My head does not seek
soft pillows or places
when you are in your dreams
hunting a path or a gate,
some way to escape

before the haunting comes.
I keep my eyes open
and wide, on the ghosts.
My rest seeks no pattern
approval or instruction.
It asks for no help
and no help is given.

Carpe diem quam
minime credula postero
the great poet wrote long ago.
Carpe noctem was left for the lunatics
only. Carpe noctem slogan
for ambitionless woman.

But ambition is lunacy
wearing its day clothes.
So what if my days
wax and wane in a way
unwritten in your books;
and so what if sometimes
my dawn shares my supper
and looks silvery white like a pearl?