December 2011
9 posts
Prompt #3
Write from the point of view of a freshly scrubbed floor.
Look down.
Everyone seems to have convinced themselves that I prefer to be this way, which would make me laugh if I could do that, since they all hate what it takes to get me that way.
This is not a clean house, which is what I love about it, and what I hate about it.
When you’re laying underneath someone’s entire life, cloaked in their things, collected carpets and keys lost...
Prompt # 2
The doorbell rings.
Meet.
Happiness is a stranger here.
You open the door, let her in. She never looks the way you expect her to. Covered in mud, or in clothes that don’t fit, or anachronistic in dress, like an alien who studied the wrong era before attempting to costume herself as a commoner.
You didn’t know you were running a bed and breakfast but her fingers on the doorbell set you in...
Prompt #1
Open a book of poetry to a random page.
(Go to a library. Or search for Frank O’Hara or Bukowski or William Carlos Williams on your computer. But jeez man, buy a book of poetry for next time.)
Read the first poem you see. Don’t cheat. Don’t re-flip, or pick a new one. Respond to the poem.
“Dear, though the night is gone,
Its dream still haunts today,
That brought us...”
– W.H. Auden “29”
On W. H. Auden
On wanting to tear out this page because my writing, like so many of my reactions, is imperfect…….
Well, he wrote a poem called “29,”or probably it didn’t have a name, and this editor said, “well, they go in this order,” and so they numbered everything, so now this poem wears a numbered badge like a title, unearned and unasked.
Well anyway, what I want to know is,...
