Trash
In the summer of 1986, I attended the Governor's Summer Institute for the Gifted and Talented at the University of Cincinnati. While there I attended a Poetry Workshop with some other high school juniors. For one of the exercises, we all came up with one word, and the entire group had to write their own poem, using those words or a variant of those words (e.g., using 'chin' instead of 'chinchilla' was okay).

If I can remember correctly, the words we had to work with were as follows: serendipity, soliloquy, chinchilla, rhetorical, oxymoron, understand, communicate, and manacle. Below is my contribution. Oh yeah, the last stanza is exactly how I felt after writing this piece. Fortunately, I don't feel that way now.

All because of serendipity --
The theatre director was amazed at
The way the man who portrayed the cat
Performed his soliloquy.

Standing on the stage in his costume,
He improvised a monologue.
Reminiscent of Shakespeare,
It still had relevance to the play.

"Why should the heavens
Take their anger on me?
Why must I walk
Under the formidable sky,
Which gives me such a chill,
With unpleasant joy?"

Thought the director:
A rhetorical question with an oxymoron
In a contemporary play --
With loads of symbolism
Was a creative idea.

Though no one understood it
The actor explained his question,
Which grabbed the audience's attention.

The director left the theatre
In search of more of those
With great communication skills.

And thus the young poet finishes his work,
Looks at it and tosses it into the trash.