One Word

There's a site called oneword.com where you have a set time limit to write about a set word. It's a brilliant exercise or working on flow and tone, for finding inspiration and destroying writer's block. I usually do two for each word. Here are some of my own one word creations:

Punishment

She fell from the branch to which she’d desperately clung, arms flailing in desperate bid for purchase. But no, her attempts were fragile and frail. That which was lost faded high away like dots in the distance. Faces of the leaving went quickly by and the below rose up with sharp fists to clutch at her broken body. She had not learned to run.

Punishment

It is a crash of rifting flesh like melting without the fragility. I break like breaking bones, unrepeatable. This is the rub of unending, just let me stop. Cease. It is never to end this pain.

Thread

Beneath the spool under a table in a small indentation in Ms. Jordan’s dingy home on the corner of Fifth and Crescent Street lived a family of five mice. The smallest slept always in the bundle of pooling thread that spilled over in turquoise blue masses. Their parents, small round mice with graying hair, made a sort of bed out of cotton balls but somehow always awoke with little thread fibers in their mouths. The oldest child slept on the next biggest mound of warm, soft thread. And the middle child slept on the hammock like sling beneath the two.

Thread

The piece that goes through the eye unwillingly, fraying until unusable and tossed aside. That which makes the needle tool rather than weapon. That which makes pictures of texture and color.

Avenue

Meaning to escape but forgetting the avenue even though twenty are open in the hedges. She streams forth blindly scrambling, nails scratch at latches and lost forever. Void. Fear. She knows his name. He leads her on and away and alone. Isolation.

Existence

He sat in the coil. Mortally wounded, his flesh fell out upon the earth, creating existence. His cells became persons who wandered and walked in their consciousness derived from his own membranous thoughts. They were one with him in his mortal wounds, his mortal peril, his broken, dying, immortality. They were his life force and they stole it away.

Existence

She existed between moments, breathing in the held breaths to try and capture attention. The glint of the eye, the flick of a wrist. She watched the things that make us human and longed to become as one. it is without permission that humanity begins unshakable and determined. Though that is a fabrication of human ego. She waited between moments with all the other corpses, the children, the infants, those who sat on eager edges for life to let them in.

As you can see, some are rough, but devoid of the words which inspired them, they take on entirely new meanings.

Mother's Foundling

Mother studied the still white figure. A child, no a teenage girl, lay bathed in the hues of night. Mother had not realized that the child was not a child. She wondered what made the child so innocent.
Honey hair spilled around her as she lay peaceful in the cold grass. Shadow things made lines across her pale, soft face. Relaxed as if asleep. But, no, the innocence lay in the whites.
Those orbs were like moons in the vague darkness, white parts glistening hazily. Staring. Her eyes reflected the sky, the mirror earth, the longing flight of ghostly stars. Staring.
One ivory palm faced up, as if in religious meditation. As if by benediction or rapture.Vulnerable to the chastising sky.
Mother thought with approval that perhaps she had given herself over to the clawing tears, sat cross-legged, back arched down with sobs that fell into open palms. Sacrificial pools offered to the stars.
The other hand faced down, claws digging into the earth to feel the pulse that beat there. Talons scratching deep in effort to hold still the spinning of physical time. A visible proof of life’s fated will.
Mother read in that hand, that coalition of muscle and thought, the sound of gasping for breath. Mother loved that hand.
Mother observed the way the child lay, exquisitely perched on the skewer of mortal earth. Body held taught yet quiet on invisible tight rope. Knees bent as if fallen backward from begging or prayer. Though Mother hardly knew the difference.
The tree shadows scraped wickedly at her edges, making them soft and transient. It was in mimicry of her current nature.
Mother knelt to touch the honey hair that spilt all around, combed with evening dew. Her eyes traveled the human length to the child’s feet. One pointed precisely as a ballerina’s. It’s tenseness in contrast to the body’s will.
The other clumsily upturned, almost grotesque.
This child had lived too gently in the in between until the reckoning moment.
And the poor child’s white dress was smeared with dirt and water, touched by earth’s sullying hands. She lay spoiled beneath the pure, pure sky.
Mother stepped away, dusting her hands of the sky’s child. Or what had once been.
And so Mother turned.
Mother did not need another body. She already held too many in her womb.
And so Mother walked.
Leaving the corpse behind.


http://www.fictionpress.com/s/2949839/1/Mothers_Foundling

With Your Permission

As the sun, a frugal being, stretched the shadow material until it frayed at the edges of the room and in the corners and the slow motions of such careful artistry caused time’s passage to slow into a muddling trap, Aberforth, abandoning good posture to lounge on the living room’s singular green ottoman, cared little for time’s tedious movement, being only a cat, and minded not whether the world continued on or ceased, for cats are notorious in their apathy, so the world could end quite suddenly in this twilight time and Aberforth would notice but not fret (cats always notice but do not as frequently deign to show their attention), as he was quite content in his half-slumber, not truly worrying after the fate of the world, simply lazing and thus giving time like permission (even the sun needs a cat’s permission to make its rounds in the sky).

*A single sentence story for a writing competition, inspired by my cat, Aberforth.*

The Blackbird and the Beetles

Maybe I’ve had my share of freedom
Said the blackbird to the sky
To each his own pale misery
The sullen night replied
Then take my wings, now golden chains
The once proud blackbird cried
Burst forth the sun with wings of flame
And through the night took flight
And in this way for all a day
The once proud blackbird dies

The hopeful stars looked down in quiet sympathy
Their silver song no match for jewel bright tyranny
Night blocked out by light is an easy eulogy
The glimmer lights of pinprick stars
Dead to gloryless featherby

The wingless blackbird then commenced
With doing earthly things
Like beetles do when blinded
By their own bright shiny wings
When in hopeless resignation
The clever bird did sing

And like all birds in cages
Though voiced less so proficient
The rogue bird’s beak was sharpened
By flightless indignation
And then the beetles saw what
Was kept for sheer omission
That all birds’ beaks are sharper
Than a beetle’s indecision

Street Diving

Has anyone else ever been dive bombed by a spastic bird? Happens to me all the time Ah, the joys of Spring.

Bird Poem 3 (This is hot off the presses. Fresh, fresh, fresher than anything else I've posted recently.):

Road divers that dip
Flapping down in spastic
Frantic hilarity of feathers
From tight ropes strung above like
Seating for the audience to the show
Laughing in chirpy song
To the rhythmic beat of practical jokers
In the fresh born sun to tread
Dangerously before great beasts
These small, affectionate miscreants
With their shrill, cackling dance

NonCliche

Hey there, all. Spring is here but not with golden lilies with delicate frilled petals, not with robin's eggs blue like the sky. Spring here has come in a torrential downpour, a grand entrance of gusty air and slamming water. That which has always approached subtle and soft, like pastel marshmallow rabbits, now cries and sobs a tantrum in greeting.
And I say, hello spring, I'm much happier to meet you than last year.

Bird Poem 2:
(I swear it really was bird inspired. It actually went along with yesterday's poem originally.)


This sea of masks it teems
His sacrifice it seems
Not deep enough to feel
Beneath the skin
Imprisoned and in pain
By the stain of the refrain
Sing circular rhythm of a sin
Still dropping from the flight
In following with the fight
the broken wings creating spin
In the end of it he stays
In waiting for the day
In which the ending begs to begin

Welcome, Spring

It's been a while. I'm happy. Such a simple phrase, and yet so hard to make true. Today isn't the day to bore with my story, but here's the beginning of a series of bird related poems to welcome in the robin's spring.

They're really different then usual; I was trying to rhyme.

Catch a falling robin
In a net of contrived tears
And place it in a cage
of displaced hearts
then catch a falling lark
and put it in a locket
to beat away the years
beside your heart
catch a falling jay
control it ‘til tomorrow
a warbled lie
to never fall apart
and catch a falling crow
imprisoned with a smile
until the grayest day
to stay the start