This is where I post things I write based on odd prompts, surrealist parlour games or odd patterns in my journals. Will be updating and editing constantly, so things might look different between clicks on this thread.
The clever non-profit rescued the sleep, but condemned the wakefulness. With charity sales of mushrooms, they brought back a certain balefulness. It sent people ducking under cover of white-spotted red rooftops.
There was an ignorance of his parents’ disappearances. They were first to go, out in the fog, to the performances. He rescued his wakefulness but heard not the sounds in the pipe.
A poisonous collective rang up each row of homes to denounce sociality. Everyone he called murmured and denied his familiarity. Before he could leave the haunted fungi erupted from the tap.
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I played a game of Opposites with myself and used some of the lines for inspo. The lines are in the spoiler if you're interested.
Spoiler! :
The wise monk revived an ignorance of the parents' disappearance. The clever non-profit rescued the sleep of the old folks' invisibility. The traditional company condemned the wakefulness of the college students' prominence. The poisonous collective denounced the cleverness of the kindergarten's sociality.
People eat mandarin oranges. Dragons don’t. People sometimes try hard. Dragons don’t do what is too hard. People never think they’re enough. Dragons always seem to be enough for themselves. People have never seemed to notice me. My dragon never stops looking at me – it’s cutely creepy.
Dragons drift without notions of family. For people, family is almost everything. Dragons don’t go out for coffee and cake. To some people coffee and cake are essential. Dragons like to destroy abandoned cities. Ruining historical ruins doesn’t appeal to me. My dragon makes do with pushing down toy buildings.
People and dragons are arguably friends. Dragons and people want some of the same things. They want to breathe clean air. They want to eat good food. The differences between dragons and people don’t escape me, but it’s up to each of us to see how friendly we might be.
Everyone is trying what they can try. ‘Can’ is relative. There’s no one who is incapable of trying. Each of us can try different things. Some of us can try at caring. Others can try reading about dragons. As for me, the thing I try is to think about things a little differently.
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A pretty wholesome one, considering the base inspo. What I like about it is the whole thing feels unified in delivering one theme/message, while there is still development from one stanza to the next.
snowflakes above you touch in the insect air, they make gentle contact without a care. the memories of longing join in the moonless night, by her bedside only the candle is bright.
The italicised lines were generated using the YWS Poetic Line Generator. Well, not *these* italicised lines, but you know what I mean. I kind of like this as an improvisation exercise. The title is part of another line generated with that, which was "the men of our imagination escape like a dancer alone on the stage,".
The sleeping past you've never met
the dreamers of tears reach inside the meaning,
melting crystals into ocean water.
the seasons of love speak in the insect air,
but their season ends there.
the old ones of ourselves touch wordlessly,
meaning slips away like dewdrops from their stories.
the men of the dance hurt under a cover of new snow,
but where they've been buried nobody could know.
Title extracted/modified from the generated line: 'the dreamers from your past sing before you met,'
I am flowing into rain flowing into nothing-reeds on the duck pond. Floating islands scrape at the endless heartache bulging red out of the storm mountain. I cannot follow the river stream the way it falls endlessly from one to-do list to the next, a beautiful waterfall I wish I could flamboyantly imitate.
Have you seen the fish fishing a fish from the fish farm lake? There was blue in their eyes, you could feel it when they looked at you – it was like drinking coffee. The yeast pours golden from the trough flowing into the river polluting it. Algal growths are king in this biotic reckoning. I have used the same phrases, plastering them with red glue onto my car roof all my life.
Have you found the end of the log bridge, and was there a rainbow underneath?
Automatic writing - writing whatever that comes to mind without stopping for a period of time.
Might be a good bit of short story inspo, maybe another slipstream piece.
1. The apartment was stolen from the skies; those contractors had it coming, they made it look like a miserable little thing, and it was censored.
2. Those first few people peeked through, reflected in glass windows, the possession of the building.
3. Saturday morning: I went on foot to the names of people I had spoken to and censored the contents before the sun renovated it.
Somewhat nonsensical - I reassembled these from words cut and pasted from an unfinished story I wrote many years ago. I might expand some of these into fuller stories though.
I ran away from the precondition. She walked towards the epilogue. The person escaped the prologue. The chair imprisoned itself in the chapters. The housefly guarded the short story. The fly-swatter assassinated the poem. The defibrillator revived the prose. The knife killed the verse.
Whoops, I forgot to post here, but I have been doing more of these weird experiments. This one is another one based on the surrealist game 'Opposites'. I think each sort of sounds like a nice beginning to a poem on its own, but together they work as a chaotic thing.
Unnatural Disaster
Fire ate the walls. Water regurgitated the doors. Ice retained the blockades.
More Opposites. I thought of continuing this at first, but couldn't really think of an opposite to 'Ice' that wasn't just water again hah.
Fear -- Instructions on the Bottle
Take fear twice daily with food.
Do not mix fear and alcohol.
Do not take fear on an empty stomach.
If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, or lonely, consult a doctor before using fear.
Fear is a supplement and not a substitute for any prescription medication or medical treatment.
Another surrealist exercise where you substitute words in an instruction manual with other words. I didn't base this off a specific text though, so it's just things that supplement bottles *usually* talk about.
The blood in the forest falls in fall indefinite. Drops drip down dark branches and trunks, seep through grooves I've pulled with claws.
I have to sow the sallow seeds, and hope they sprout loudly before the moon rises, because the moon muffles wild things.
Strings will come silver white, dyed in red soon, inundated, and drinking old leaves will grow new trunks, splitting into vessels, capillaries.
The first line I came up with through automatic writing. Trying to combine the following ideas: destruction and creation, or vengeance + vivacity. I might do something about how wonky time is in this poem. "falls . . .indefinite" but "before the moon rises" implies that an event *is* bounded in time.
He loved in light touches. A shoulder pat there, a wave goodbye here. Deft hands on the kitchen counter, the sink, the beds, the sofa. Keeping the place clean, stoking the fire.
I once told him that love wasn't worth it if it was light. Love had to be heavy, it had to sit in your gut and ignite something inside you until you and the beloved were on the brink of destroying one another.
She had a delicate taste, a sharp eye. She lost a rough scent, a blunt knuckle. She found a smooth sight, a tapered finger. She forgot a jagged darkness, a thick fist. She remembered velvety light, a thin wrist. She recorded leather weights, a plump forearm.
This one's not from an odd prompt or surrealist game, it's in fact from a cool Two Cents article written by Aley: Two Cents: Refrain. I tried the third exercise in the article and wound up with this.
Today, I blundered. Yesterday, I blundered. Next week, I will have blundered. Last week, I had blundered. At the beginning of spring, I blundered. At the beginning of autumn, I also blundered. In June, I blundered. In October, I blundered. This year, I blundered. All years, I blundered.
I think the 'loss of meaning' has not been as total as I'd hoped, but there we go!
Research question: can art truly help us transcend reality?
Researcher and participant: me
Content warning: death, mortality, references to alcohol, drunkenness
Senryu
Spoiler! :
1. Streetlight through old trees something ambling, crunching grass and glass underfoot.
2. Limbs which will glow white in summer’s night, dangling limp from beige cargo shorts.
3. Upright four-limbed pale at night hooting and honking – someday we all die.
Fragments of a Contrapuntal
Spoiler! :
1.
Life is heavy as neon stripes. The girls busy themselves, hurtle across the darkened lawn like close-set patterns.
2.
life is heavy, as a young man placing the red paper cup on the table, declares he is the best then picking it up again --
3.
Making sure that lock of hair – what happens when life is heavy, doesn’t hang for too long after the afterparty, and after on the same side of the face. And after.
4.
Calling each of their group by name, each and every name, so the whole complex knows the whole complex.
A gut contracting like a wave the shout flexes up the body and leaves the body trembling hanging shambling around the artificial grass only to come back to the same spot. How many times? How many times?
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