I've been finding it hard to motivate myself to write, so one of my tricks is to read through vintage technical manuals -- the language is so interesting and odd -- and then change the significant nouns or verbs and use other text as found. I got two interesting pieces from this today. One for my postcard poems:

Dinner with the Taxidermist

Look at the empty space, where once
were willows. The swallow is made
up of hundreds and thousands of words.
Not all of these birds are in use today;
some are found only in old books, still
others are slowly dying.

When the spinning wheel went out,
a group of spinning wheels slipped
away. There was nothing for them
to do.

The stagecoach disappeared with
a piece of our sky.

Though we all have the same names
for things, still each Africa,
each Shropshire, each 10 Cadbury Lane,
has a few words that are not found,
that are strange
to my ear.