Writing Prompt: Metaprompt

Prompt:
You are a leader of a group of people who are interested in giving you power. Instead of rallying them for support in your name warn them against their actions, claiming that you do not deserve power for whatever reason. The argument can be made in any literary form you choose. Examples of topics could include a tyrant arguing that they will only abuse their subjects or an office employee arguing that they do not deserve to be promoted because they intend to rob the company.

Rationale:
It is rare to find an oppressor that will argue against their own oppression. Perhaps even unheard of. However, the temptation to abuse power once it is given is a reoccuring downfall for mankind. A blunt statement straight from the oppressors mouth about their cruel intentions would add new layers of complexity to their reign merely because they would be telling a more accurate version of the truth.

For Later:
Send it to Libya and then write a companion piece where the collective argues that they do not deserve power either.

Ocean Poetry – really deep moving stuff here

Anemone:
The enemy of an anemone
is just a killer in a deadly sea
I’ll pretend to make him a friend to me
and then sting em’ both when they’re on their knees.

Barnacle:
A particle on a barnacle
is no less astronomical
than a prodigal with a heart of gold
comin’ home actin’ all phenomenal

Writing Prompt: Aphorisms

I worked at a country club for two years. My nametag apparently read ‘waitress.’

I worked at the country club for two years and nobody ever asked me a single question.

I used to work at a country club, it’s like the wealthy man’s bar, but without any black people.

I used to work at a country club. Then one day I restocked the batting cages with golf balls. Fore

Writing Prompt: Transgenerational Writing

the fifties were our glory years
she bore my children with only ether for her tears
the American dream, but with cold war fears
her hands were soon soft again,
forgotten callouses of industrial machine gears
that she cranked day after day
while on the D-day shore I banked
freedom fighting walked the plank
warfare fought by faceless men in tanks
my battle buddy Tommy Tucker
got shot by this one nazi fucker
or was it the North Korean chink-eyed leek-sucker
who gave him no chance to duck and run for cover.
I came home and showed my scars at the bars
and my girl was still waiting so I bought us a car
and a house and a lawn and I laid her up nice
marked her softness my pillar
paved the driveway
checked for lice.
our children were lovely until ’63
when they started to question liberties’ policies
our boy was drafted – it was a life robbery –
claimed my old lady to no one, especially me.
they asked how I could defend a war
that caused the life of my son to end
I knew he died protecting his people,
but now I question if the defense was only pretend.
Margradelle was my bell until from my arms she fell
and I laid her in the ground before my life became hell
the papers blew up with Nixon’s Watergate intel
and my trust in democracy perhaps cracked in its shell.
Reagan years were a pagan plea
from the raven’s heart inside of me
alone, bitter, no harmony
fantasy murder, not begging for mercy
it’s the tragedy of a family with dead entropy
when the energy leaves and all I’m left with is me
I can hardly believe it’s 2003
I would say the time flew, but that’s not what I mean
as I die here in scrubs instead of army green.
cancer forced the guillotine
around my weathered neck
and now it’s time to share some thoughts
you’re not permitted to forget-
accept your offspring regardless of their personality or dress
there is no contest to win, and no one to impress
I’ve been both broke and rich, a hero and a mess
and now as my days wane, a life I need to bless
because she slipped away and it drove me out of my mind
she took off from our close minded nuke family in wartime
and since ’69, for her I have pined
but it was concealed by the ruler straight pride of my spine
you look something like her, so now come kneel here
I hope she appears before my soul transcends fear
but if I miss her you tell her shes loved and divine
and that I hope her beliefs never pit heart against mind
becuase mistakes like mine are the ruin of mankind

Writing Prompt: Seven Steps to a More Pretentious Poem

dear rotund eggman

is shitfaced

so he tumbles

and falls

rolling not like a ball

todo thine kings royal steeds

y todo royal soldiers

cleaned his milky egg innards

off the walls of the hall

Writing Prompt: Simulated Mental or Emotional State

The emotion I chose for this prompt was anger primarily aimed at the hypocrisy surrounding the ‘what makes a drug legal’ debate.

“D.A.R.E.”

DARE got aired over speakers that blared

-don’t smoke shwag students, or prepare for despair.

your senses impaired – start sluffin’ off hair

get compared to commercial aimed only to scare

so young and dumb we all swear

a forced lie without care,

but tongues lies get undone

the first time we get dared.

soon we’re smoking – toking

stoned thing pokémon – slowking

coke fiends with a poison sting

construed dreams destroying.

 

And before you call us unnatural,

step back – make this factual

full of crap you call it smack

tactical arguments far from actual –

unnatural means not in nature

so fuck the stupid nomenclature

we’re high and weed is what we paid for

and we’re here for some more so  your lies are endangered.

 

Not impure, it’s a cure

and they’re wrong, that’s for sure,

I aint’ shot no one yet,

in fact I’m quite demure.

I perhaps burned a blunt

but not to hunt a punk

nor inject shit with a shunt

I didn’t act like a cunt

or run over their runt

so call me whatever you want

cause it’s your shit propoganda

that I mean to confront.

didn’t lose a single job

didn’t deforest forest’s for the logs

didn’t destroy a wetlands or a bog

and it sure as hell aint’ me

flogging children, wives, and dogs,

so what’s with the judgment from ignorant hogs?

I just like to smoke b’s, and sometimes walk my dog

seems a harmless hobby,

just try to stop me.

 

So while they petition and rant with their signs

we’ll be smoking our herbal gifts from the sublime

who, in the genesis of time

with intelligent design

dropped some buds among pines

which gave to mankind the desire to rhyme

those musicians you love that ever earned a dime

have likely spent time smoking drug-felon-crime.

 

And they’ll claim zero tolerance

at the senior prom party dance

yet it seems everyone has a flask in their paints

and so they get smashed

to drive off in a trance

where they’ll cancel a life

who never stood a chance.

They tell us that drinking is the only safe drug

but tell that to the mother with no son to hug,

or the girl who passed out,

and woke up to a slug

drunk and sweaty on top

who just shrugs and then plugs.

 

No thanks, pass on that,

that grass plants’ where it’s at,

all we do is watch movies

buy good food and dance groovy,

smoke a blunt before a killing spree?

you telling jokes? they be killing me –

stoner fights rarely get bloody

we all claim world peace when it starts to turn ugly

plus pot won’t kill our liver or make us feel cruddy

so when arguments get ugly we just, “Let it be.”

 

So stop daring students to resist the urge

letting us only consume processed drugs that you prefer

labled as twisted, addicted, in need of a cure-

when really legal shit probably deserves to be purged.

Call me a long time listener and first time caller

and just so you don’t write me off as a baller

some homophobic popped-collar fist-pumping ‘holla’

I’d like to let you know I’m a blonde, waspy scholar.

3.5 gpa I crunch letters all night

even got some feedback about impressive insight

so take sight of my plight

before you call me a fright

lies blacken in truth’s bright

and now you’re under the light

so take this a mere warning

and you better

get ready

cause after tonight

begins the final showdown fight.

Writing Prompt: Writing Estrangement via the Line

#1

Van

Smiling driver parks there sanitarily

Fixing up fine French

Boulevard building St. Germaine

Untouched bombs fall

On pastry delivery man

On rollerblades

Who falls

Into van

Smiling.

Wipes hands like fake American on jeans

In between bus and truck

Spiffed up

But still in between a bus and truck

Exists, exile

Returned from death like J.C.

Exile no U-turns for you

Only surprise, pain, beginning anew

Exile with sun rising

First day, now realizing

Ahh- breath is surprising

     #2

Dubbed audio lips

Arouse skin canopy

Sleeves inside frame

Patriotic recovery contrived

Crushed duty’s head in groin

Puffed up, unidentified

No real experience

Nothing to speak or sing

Writing Prompt: Poetry Rules of Thumb

Call it corrupted currency

That they demand so urgently

Arrest them all for perjury

Our wasted cash insurgency

Massive resource in demand

Yet supply is reasonably grand

But the quantity of supply

Shrinks in horror of what they have planned.

Writing Prompt: Campus Crawl

College of Business

They stare at the incoming line of students as if seeing four-headed aliens from another planet bearing ancient artifacts of moleskeins with ink-stained hands.

Why do they write in those books? So many of them at once? Is it like a class or are we part of a non-violent hippie sit-in demonstration? Do they have a problem with the College of Business? Do they later plan on returning in trench coats to bomb it? One of them looks a little too much like a hipster for my taste. Hipsters always wear those shirts that fit. They probably wear scarves in the summer. It’s wierding us out. What’s really with the notebooks? Like paper and pens? Kind of archaic. We don’t remember even writing anything besides regurgitated facts and theories and opinions. We live in the land of science. The land of reality. We’ve realized our destiny. We are the future insurance salesmen, investment financiers, reason calculators.

     “COUNTRY Insurance and Finance Atrium”

     We wanted a big sign. To show off on the wall of our imposing new infrastructure. It reminds us of our purpose. Maybe in 1984 they liked bawdier slogans like “War is Peace” or whatnot (actually that’s not a proven fact. We’re not sure of the source really – perhaps a myth with no lasting relevance, maybe even a proverb that our fathers told us about their job’s at State Farm. It’s a great place to visit, and someday we hope that we too can work in a giant phallus-shaped office building that scratches the sky. Our future children will come and visit us when we work on holidays. They will look at our big, shiny buildings and know that we are men and women of facts and business. That we do not have time for pens and ink stains. They will follow in our footsteps, and we will be proud for having made the world a better place with all of our facts and statistics.

Milner Library

     Microform is a system for looking at old newspaper articles. It seems almost silly in today’s world to even keep these old reels of dust around. Newspaper is dead and/or dying. News is dead or at least has decayed to the point that its once-straight spine of pride and truth and total control has dissolved into a gloppy mush of rotten entrails. For proof we look to the thriving metropolis of Detroit. It’s down to two a week! Imagine, only having to bend to retrieve the paper twice a week, it would be a relief for many Americans and our bad backs. Everywhere else should just follow Detroit’s lead and do the same. They only print trash anyways, and there’s really no way to skip the boring stuff or cater it to personal preferences like online news sites. Why read a newspaper when news can be literally fed to you through Facebook’s news feed? I mean, it literally feeds us news. Like hogs with slop. And if we’re getting it fed to us, why read a paper for it? You don’t eat a fast food meal to go home and cook a turkey dinner. Why work for what we’re already given?

     The labor of reading the newspaper rarely yields fact. It’s a rare occurrence to excavate a true, gilded, golden fact, and even when we know it, like know in our deepest gut, we still don’t know how to puzzle-piece it in our kaleidoscopic reality of dichotomy and contradiction.

     Can we even honestly believe that our children will read the newspaper? We didn’t even grow up reading the newspaper (a collective interpretation, excluding intellectuals and coffee-drinking debate-clubbers) so why save it? Any of it? It’s not classic literature, it’s not scientific data, it’s just crap some fifties journalist spewed to scare the nation into bloodshot-red-trembling submission as they dug out a wine cellar in case of nuclear warfare. Let’s take it away – Take away it’s biased history. Take away its political power plays and racial stereotyping and wonder bra ads.

We can fill the cabinets instead with stories. Stories about the rise and decay of empires, the lust of the adulterer, the fear of the mother. We’ll replace CNN with Whitman poetry readings; replace FOX with an actual baby fox. We look to the news for truth, and instead only find true lies and lying truths and white lies and black truths. But truth isn’t in the facts, beliefs, or opinions. The only truth truly there in the news is a transparency. Like chemicals left out in a lab, the truth has been contaminated, dissolved, and tampered with.

Writing Prompt: Synesthesia

I  smell its yellowing taint as I get out in the parking lot, where I dally until I feel my mother behind me wearing her “I’m about to evolve into my second stage of monster” expression.  Walking through the doors nearly bowls me over and sends me heaving, and each guttering breath I take stings my nasal cavity like salt on a wound. I decide to breathe through my mouth- I’d rather taste the judgement than smell it. Plus, that way I could even spit some of it out.

Mom lassos me into her conversation with the middle-aged usher, “Oh! That is so wonderful! Lindsay would be happy to take your visiting son out and show him around this afternoon!” False, I wouldn’t love to do anything of the sort. The man smiles at me like I’m not young enough to be his daughter and we’re not at church and took my hand in his two sweaty palms. It hummed in my grip like a tuning-fork. I drop it as quickly as is polite and wipe the sweat off on the fabric of my protesting dress.

I make like I want coffee and wait for my mom to find me again through the throngs of surrounding admirers. Their adoration is nauseating and smells burnt on the edges. Probably from all the times she overshadows them. I might be burnt the whole way through. My mother hustles me into the chapel when she finds me lurking behind the coffee station.

I sit in the pew and it crunches under me. The vertebrae of old church goers poke at me from the seat cushion, causing me to squirm and wonder how they keep their spines so straight even in death. Mom clears her throat with the ripping of a chainsaw and I go still as a tomb even though the needle-sharp fibula of someone’s great aunt is stabbing me in the back. Each promise reeks as it leaps out the preachers teeth. It’s like someone cooked a casserole with too many onions and left it sitting out in a well-lit room where we decided to gather for bible study. We sing hymns with a lilt and pretend not to smell everyone’s guilt.  I wonder how long it will be before God realizes I’m masquarading as one of his people and smites me in my pew. I wonder if the flames would scorch the fabric and reveal the old bones that make my teeth grind into compaction. Probably not. God is most likely an interior designer like mom.

The sermon is a transparent plea for money, deceptively disguised as a lecture on ‘giving’ that needles everyone in their seats till they squirm. Mom doesn’t squirm, ever, not even when the boy two rows down giggles at the mention of Sodom.  I don’t giggle out of respect for the man: Sodom’s spanking of Gamorra was so legendary that they got a sex-move named after them, which gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘bad-ass’ in the religious community. The list of men who got written into the Bible for fucking their wife in kinky ways is a short one. I close the Bible (Numbers 4:15) and am caught off-guard by the puff of mildewed air that escapes it’s thin pages. The benediction consumes the better half of the year.

We file out of the chapel down the center isle like sheep through a sphincter, shaking the hand of the pungent pastor on the way out. I’ll suggest deodorant to his secret Santa. It will be another twenty minutes in hell for me as my mother mills around the congregation, casually chatting with the ladies and talking about me in a fake-happy voice that forces me to pin on a smile too and leaves the taste of rusted metal on my tongue. We are some of the last to leave the stuffy hall (the odor must’ve driven the rest of ’em away), but I fear that it will take numerous showers and a whole tube of toothpaste to scrape the judgement off of me. The relief of leaving is small change to the debts I haven’t paid for yet, but the rush of fresh air causes me to exhale a small, “Thank God.”