The November challenge was to write a poem updating a mythological character:

Laocoön

And serpents caduceus his calf to the chairleg.
He slumps over lattes, is handing out condoms,
gives in to the cries of hey Trojan man, Trojan

from fuckers. The foil packets spin from his fingers,
the magnums straight into the hands of the rudest,
in hopes, maybe vain, that they’ll have to trade down.

December’s challenge was to write poems dealing with the circus. I know all about the circus, so I wrote two. A little shortie:

Pants

Trucks stripe the road with salt, stretching up
a hill like grey trousers on a stilt-legged clown.

And a longer one that I knew would be immediately recognizable as mine. It was:

Wigged

And the last one out of the circus has to lock up everything.–Adam Duritz

Nothing’s funny in a clown car with only one
in it, tooling aimlessly around in the dust. No pants

are big enough to take up all this space, no ballooning
hair makes the audience gasp as it comes out

and keeps on coming, one red curl after another.
Trapezes squeak when no one’s on them, shift

and settle and shift in the rising heat. I could dangle
from my toes, from the yard-long toes of these shoes

high above the world and bask like a bird
could bask if its feet were nailed to the perch, upside down.

And the car would look tinier from there. And the world
would look as small and hollow as my nose.