November Poetry Challenge

I decided rather at the last minute to participate in the November Poem-a-Day Challenge at Writers' Digest.

It seemed like a good way to get going again, since I haven't written much this year. Also, since the aim is a 10 to 20 poem chapbook, presumably somewhat linked in theme, a good way to write a lot of earthquake poems and get that out of the way, then maybe I can move on to other things.

I won't post them all here - if any are really bad, I may not post them, and if any might be tweaked for later publication, I probably won't post those either. So - this one falls somewhere in the middle. The prompt for today (Day 5, since we are a day ahead of the US so I didn't start till November 2nd) was to write a "broken" poem. Which was a bit problematic, given that so much around here is broken, I wasn't quite sure where to start.

Everyone here has a story and this is ours.
How the insurance assessor pronounced our chimney sound
Then the city shook for a third time and the chimney
sheared off at the roofline, took a leap
over the side of the house
and crashed through the eaves to land in the driveway.
The assessor, from halfway down the ladder,
leapt to the ground to find his car blocked in.
When the builder took the remains of the chimney
to be dumped, he found
it was a tonne of bricks.
It fell like a tonne of bricks.