prompt generator todos.

Is there an opposite to real love?
One thing I want to accomplish TODAY is...
My heart sings when...
I forgive _____ because...

prompt generator #1. write a haiku.

broken windowpane
it holds such strange symmetry
this old haunted house

things i know about you

shannon, you are wise beyond your years. you go not go by nicknames, you are not shani or shan shan or even just shan. cordially, shannon. you wear dress pants to your job, you know that the bank is closed on sundays. shannon you are rational and full of solutions, you have never doubted which side the stamp goes on. shannon you own shoe polish, a sewing kit, your car smells like the armor all wipes that you clean it with every other day. shannon, you are one month younger than me. shannon, you are many years older than me. you do not like theme parks, you do not like when people sing to you for your birthday; or any birthday. you do not like trying new things on menus, you do not like learning the names of strangers. shannon, you do not speak up in groups, shannon your arms are always crossed- why are they always crossed? shannon you think i am strange. shannon, i am afraid for you. i do not generally like to acknowledge fear, but for you i am afraid.
i am afraid that your todays reflect your tomorrows. i am afraid that you have not driven with the windows down and music playing loudly enough that anyone besides yourself can hear. i'm afraid that you've never fallen down and hurt your knee, or spent any amount of time laughing at yourself. shannon, i am afraid that you never think to sing off key, or to scream in the dark, to tell a scary story, to meet a new person, or try new anything, or learn some strange hobby, or run until your sides hurt.
shannon, you have told me that i seem crazy to you. you may not understand why i check out 20 books from the library at once, why i always pick flowers or why i check to see if any piece of paper on the floor is a love note. you may not understand why i drank a gallon of milk in one sitting just to see if i could, and later puked up a gallon of milk and became a vegan for a while. you may not understand why i thought we should buy and fly a kite that one time, or why i said we should try to make our own ouiji board.
       whats the point? you said, picking invisible lint off your sweatshirt. whats the point? you asked, your forehead creased with stress.
       whats the point, shannon? the point is that there is none, and you are missing all of it. the point is that if you are afraid of life, how can you say you are living it?
shannon, i understand. shannon i was once afraid, too, because i didn't like the idea of a sloppy life. and i know that i sound like i think my way is better than yours, and i'm sorry, sort of, if i sound arrogant, but shannon, every time i ask you how you are, you frown and say fine. or okay. and how is that okay?

E140 Creative Writing

Love without Love assignment

you are
            the reddest of poppies the
            brightest of stars
you are
            the prologue to a very worn book the
            brightest firefly in my jar

and we pull the fog out of our eyes
and the tangles from our hair
and rub our tanned maps of faces
as the sun starts ressurect itself
and shines on the sand, white as sin,
and illuminates the waves
and tom shakes out the blanket he bought
when we were in mexico
( 5 dollars, gringo! said the leering man in the mercado
 we ate sweet mangoes every day and wished
we could save all the strays)
and sammy is pulling things out of
her once white backpack
strawberries only slightly sweetly rotten
and juice from the bargain bin that we pour into the cups
where we normally keep our gin,
our jack
and i light one up and try not to let the smoke find its way
into carlos' face
( you're killing yourself with those things, you know)
and i rub some loose ash into my jeans and wonder
if the previous owner smoked too
and sally stands up and runs suddenly like
a girl posessed
into the hands of the ocean
laughing like a maniac while carlos groans
and throws a strawberry halfheartedly torwards
her crazy figure
before getting up to join her
and i rub more ash into my jeans and
tell myself that we live the dream
that we are the best of the wandering generation
because we sleep within the stars
and we haunt the alleys
and whisper ideas into the ears of the college kids
we are richer than others, i think, tom and sammy and carlos and me,
because we read poetry in the cemeteries
and toast each other with cheap strawberry wine
and when we see families on the beach
we turn our heads
and refuse to mourn the part of us that died
(or never really lived at all)
and i stub out my cigarette in the sand, white as faith,
and join my friend carlos and my friend sammy and my friend tom
and i know that we are richer than others because
we sleep within the stars and wear cheap sweaters
and dance in our impatient youth, and we wear out
our deteriorating dreams because it is always,
always, our last day of summer

everything must go.

this used to be a home once, not just a house, not just skeleton bones of wood in a field in a town. you can tell it used to be a home, because see the wallpaper? its yellow and it peels and is so old that it may have been one of the first wallpapers made, but its there. and see the sofas? they used to be creme white, now they are an ugly yellow, jaundiced eye, but they have lovely patterning on them that used to be burgandy but now is three or four shades down. maybe the mother polished the wood once a week but now it stands rotted, same with the big table in the room next door that you can see from the holes in the rotted drywall. i would sit on the couch, but no one has sat on it in a while, because a spring angry and violent pushes through the destroyed chair.
so i walk past into the room with the table, which i can almost almost almost imagine the family eating dinner together, maybe. and into the next room which is dark and horrible and has only a small ragdoll thrown in the corner and books that are falling off the spines. the books smell awful, like old water or dust or the slightly sweet smell of something decaying. and so i push the door closed and leave the room to the spiders and go on.
something flutters, up in the rafters, something pretends to claim this place, this falling apart place, these skeleton bones, this once a home collection of sticks.

and the thing is this place was once so important, it housed joys and fears and hope and laughter and family but now it sits forgotten. soon it will turn to dirt and dust and fall apart, make its groaning way back to the earth, whether on its own or with human aide remains to be seen but it is clear; this home has been given up on. the family either moved away or fell apart.
and i'd like to imagine that they moved away in a happy sort of state but the furniture, the furniture, the yellowed and crumbling pictures and the tarnished silverware that is inexplicably sitting in the middle of what used to be a childs' room floor, begs to differ. the leftover decay of a home quietly scream that something happened, something happened, something that made the family abandon the house completely, that the memories were too painful to pack and carry with them so they left them, left them to be found, by a nineteen year old girl fifty years later.
and i'd like to imagine now that i knew something, anything, about this family but i cant. all that i known is that this house hurts me in the pit of my stomach, it is haunted in the worst way, haunted by all the possibilities of what could've and should've been and i can't even imagine what quiet monster made the family leave their home this way.

blood oranges

there is a time of day
when the grass turns to emeralds and
the sky dark bright blue and
the poppies Manny planted to deep bleeding ruby
there is a time of day
when the sun beats less hot on our backs,
our skin,
and the smell of
sea air baked earth cut grass
spirals up from the ground
and Manny puts down his hose and walks past me
hey kid hey chica he says
and lights his cigarettes and puts
his boots up on the stucco porch post
and mama comes out with flour in her hair
hands on her hips chewing her seeds
to watch the mountains burn orange
there is a time of day
that i can't help but notice
from my car/room/house/window
that the beauty of the day is in full bloom
and you aren't here to see it
and you won't be
for a while or forever
there is a time of day
where i feel lonelier than i'd ever believe
because it used to be my favorite time of day
because i thought it was just for you and i
there is a time of day
that i am beginning to hate
because all i can see
is what is no longer there
there is a time of day
where all the colors bleed together
and manny eats his blood orange
and mama spits her sunflower seeds
and i do everything i can
not to let my tears mix with the
red clay dirt
this time of day.