fountains and sunlight

it’s a photo only day. feeling pretty exhausted from the week. no creative juices flowing today. maybe tomorrow.

girl he calls [Harlot]

Reel 1

i stand on my mark. a black X beneath my feet. the foreground to a marbled gray backdrop. i am naked. exposed. with a V etched into my skin. above my heart. my freshly branded scarlet emblem. it does not stand alone. circled in red paint. slashed through. (no smoking. do not enter. no shirt. no shoes. no service.) he said i was stained. dirt on his white pant suit. a smudge on his camera lens. my body distorted by his idealism like a window coated in a thin film of rain. the camera losing focus. a grainy photograph. everything in black and white. captured. framed stills. my face smeared into gray scale. i am unrecognizable. i no longer exist. he placed a black bar of censorship over the ugly parts. pieces. fragments of me he would never touch. he tried to solarize me. turn me inside out. make me into something other than what he saw before his eyes. his (finger)prints covering what was left of me. or what he wanted to see of me. all he saw were the negatives.

snapshot no. 166

“You don’t laugh as much anymore,” she said.

“I have forgotten what it sounds like.”

hallmark card

i scraped my knees

and fell to please

the little lines across your face…

life

writing process

writing a novel is scary. scratch that. it’s terrifying. i honestly have no idea what i am doing. when i sit down to work on it i often find myself closing my computer and walking away. ideas can be flowing through my brain up until i am sitting in front of that screen. cursor flashing. the curse of a perfectionist.

overwhelming thoughts: check.

avoidance: check.

wanting the story to write itself: check.

when it comes down to it, i think i am scared to expose my characters to other people. they have been with me for years. slowly developing into the people i want them to be. what if i let them out into the open air and no one likes them? what if no one believes their story? what then? their story is my story. i have long forgotten where they end and i begin. they are my friends. they are my heart. they are

me.

yesterday i was able to work on it for several hours. i made some progress. not much, but some. little steps, i keep telling myself. even after i finished though i had half a mind to scrap it all. crap. all crap. i was consumed by the thought of how pathetic my dialogue was. i wanted to “toss it in the trash.” those hours of work would have been gone. erased.

but instead i will probably avoid it for yet another week.

or so.

the whole story is trapped in my head. waiting to come out. bursting at the seams to come out and onto the page. why won’t it just flow from my brain to my fingertips?

i was looking for a challenge when i first set out to write this thing. and a challenge is what i found.

out & about

it’s a day of few words…

in a car

he had silenced her heart. stopped its beating warmth. she felt its void. cold fingers came and snatched it without her permission. the sudden vacancy left her short of breath. she looked over at him sitting there. those eyes bit into her. sent a tremor through her body. she saw in their crystal cold blue a reflection of the black hole residing in her chest. a great cavern of echoes and screams.

“See you tomorrow?” he said.

“Sure.”

poetic form

pantoum:   the modern pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. the last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first. (example: until moonlight breaks)

abecedarian:   an ancient poetic form guided by alphabetical order. generally each line or stanza begins with the first letter of the alphabet and is followed by the successive letter, until the final letter is reached. (example: mind’s eye)

exquisite corpse:   played by several people, each of whom writes a word on a sheet of paper, folds the paper to conceal it, and passes it on to the next player for his or her contribution. the only hard and fast rule of exquisite corpse is that each participant is unaware of what the others have written, thus producing a surprising—sometimes absurd—yet often beautiful poem. exquisite corpse is a great way to collaborate with other poets, and to free oneself from imaginative constraints or habits. (example: a master of nothing)

ekphrasis:    ekphrastic poems are now understood to focus only on works of art—usually paintings, photographs, or statues. and modern ekphrastic poems have generally shrugged off antiquity’s obsession with elaborate description, and instead have tried to interpret, inhabit, confront, and speak to their subjects. (example: lines)

source for definitions: www.poetry.org

a master of nothing