Disclosure: What you see below, which is what I have also submitted, is not exactly the first draft. What constitutes a first draft anyway?
To give you an idea, this poem had undergone a major revision in prosody pre-submission. It went from having paragraph-like stanzas (lines grouped per image or idea), to this now musically focused line-cutting.
Draft 1
FlamesUpdate (30 September 2023):Write your name on top
of your beloved's,
strike the common letters,count the odd ones out,
and you're left with a number
that tells your futuretogether or apart.
Matthew and Anna
were meant to beEnemies. So I tweaked the rules,
wrote full names and nicknames,
till the game declaredMarriage. Twenty years
since high school I lay in bed
alone, playingwith my phone:
Swipe left for the Oh-Nos,
Swipe right for the Why-Nots.How to outsmart the algorithm
to make it make matches
that catch a flame?I may not win again or ever,
but I carry on dreaming
new ways of miscalculating fate.—RE, 2 August 2023
I am pretty happy with the draft and so I am labelling this as Poem 20. In fact I kind of knew that I won't budge on this one as soon as I hit submit. Like I said in the intro, this has already undergone several revisions.
I will be editing this poem draft instead for the poetry course. It's a fun verse to write, but lame. Will do my best to un-lame it.