We took a rough draft poem and tried to add more imagery and stronger diction. This is what we came up with:
The wound of you
slices across my heart.
The gash runs deep and purple,
but eventually, it scabs over,
leaving a jagged scar and
a dull ache.
Will your loss kill me?
I’ve cried all my tears,
run dry like an empty desert.
My throat tightens, feels bloody.
Your memory gushes forth and
spills onto the starlit sand.
I lap it up, quenching my thirst,
savoring the sharp remnants
of you.
i didn’t watch the solar eclipse but worked on my novel instead, waiting for the dragon eye to open so i could ask it why modern life is so hard and why we accept humans killing other humans and who deserves punishment, and when the eye didn’t answer, i picked up candy wrappers under my desk and spoke in Scottish and Russian accents, throwing them away, smashing garlic with the flat blade of my knife, and figuring all life is hard, whether it’s justice or vengeance or a horse standing alone in a convenience store aisle, it’s all the same: a missed opportunity.
The reading challenge ebbed and flowed. I don’t know if I really succeeded. Some days I read more than others. Some days I fell victim to my own addiction to surfing the internet. The addiction is deep. As soon as I think I’m master of my attention, something happens to draw me back to the “abyss of Total Noise” that is scrolling the web.
What a perfect metaphor. A web. Like flies, we’re caught.
It’s not that I think the internet is a bad thing. I literally would not have met my husband or developed a career as a professional writer and editor if the internet didn’t exist. I might have met another husband or made a career as a writer in some other way, but not in the way I did. I’m grateful for the internet.
But it is a web. A vast web. And that vastness has been a double-edged sword.
Anyway, the reading challenge was a bit “meh.” I wish I had been better about carving out my reading time. But life — always life — intervenes. Children with broken arms. Emergency room visits. Power outages. Deadlines. Exhaustion.
I suppose I can try again with a new challenge, but is that just setting myself up for another failure? I also made a pledge to blog (nearly) everyday, and that has been a bust as well. So many missing days. Weeks gone by and nothing posted.
Perhaps the better thing to focus on is my persistence. Despite all these setbacks and failures and inabilities to maintain a challenge, I have a stubborn inability to give up. Even as I fail at these challenges, I keep going. Maybe there’s merit in that (or some form of insanity!).
I used an old Austin Kleon prompt today in my writer’s notebook. I can’t find anything on his blog about it, but I know I first got the idea from his writings. Here’s a link to elsewhere that explains the prompt: Spine Poetry.
So, these are the book titles sitting on my desk right now: The Sleeping Dragon, The Broken Lands, The Tolkien Reader, Maps of the Imagination, The Summer Book, The Fall of Arthur, The Once and Future King, The Lore of the Land, The Book of Idle Pleasures, Listen to the Echoes.
And here is my poem made from the titles along the spines:
Listen to the echoes:
the lore of the land,
the fall of Arthur (the once and future king),
the broken lands,
the sleeping dragon.
Maps of the imagination:
the Tolkien reader,
the summer book.
The book of idle pleasures.
That watery squirt
from the mustard bottle
is the saddest yellow.
Weak and dirty-looking,
like day-old dishwater,
it doesn’t even have the
prickly tang of real
mustard.
Yellow must be bold or
else it risks disappearing
into the plate.
Not like the yellow of
sunflowers or marigolds,
or even the pale yellow
of that mustard stain
on my shirt, which
may be sad, but it
speaks to happier picnics
and sustenance
and glorious afternoons
under the sun.
Listening to: Michael Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in D
Reading: “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Drinking: Magners Cider
My reading list grows ever longer. The Coleridge came about because I was rereading How to Be Idle, and there’s a little anecdote about how Coleridge probably got the idea for the poem after walking in the countryside and taking some opium. Does not surprise me. I hadn’t read “Kubla Khan” in awhile, but reading it again was fabulous. Very DCC RPG in a lot of ways.
Other books currently reading or in the queue: The Two Towers, Labyrinth (yes, the movie novelization), On Lying in Bed and Other Essays (by G.K. Chesterton), Jonathan Hickman’s run on Avengers, and Jack of Shadows (this one is in the queue). Plus, I have about a dozen more I really want to start reading in earnest. Too many books. I really need a week off from everything just so I can read. It will never happen, but a girl can dream.
Title: “Retirement”
Today, what?
Cards and gifts, but the honorees
are already gone.
Cleaning out papers, and
handing over keys.
I’m not ready yet.
Probably should send some emails,
personal and professional.
There is paralysis because
my choices are infinite,
and today filters itself
through each choice, each
possibility, until there’s
no time left, and nothing’s
done, except the card and
gifts and no one to
give them to.
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