Didi is having a poem contest:  Write a poem using all of these 12 words/ phrases.  I don’t usually do this — it’s my experience that when I write poems like this, they are rarely worth reading — but this list of words is so alien to my style that I thought it would be a useful stretch. So here it is: 

Oranges

When one wakes in the night
despite sleeping pills, white
noise machines, orthopedic
pillows, and thinks of oranges

— such sweetness — there it is,
that orange, floating brilliantly
in this dim room — and all
the things one must make sense

of — Nehru jackets, bouffant
hairdos, threatening french
nails — your attachment to top-
less bars, those artificial orbs,

that tooty fruity booze — all
this demanding explication
in the swoony night with its
train whistles and sock-it-to-me

buzz, love, American style, the ed-
ification of this planet’s turn to
darkness, the rebellious suicide
of the sun, the sweetness of

oranges — where is Lawrence
of Arabia when you need him
to peel this open, to hand you,
one-by-one, these white-veined

crescents, dripping with light?