WWP6: Excavation

(www.jamesjean.com)

It was a lonely life, but it was hers.

She loved her forest dearly, of course; it's not that she had ever dreamed of leaving.

Even in the dead of night, when the darkness seemed to breathe, heavy air pulsing, pressing like a stranger against the nape of her neck, even when every sound was scared silent by the pressure and the fog, even then she would just wrap the smokey tendrils tighter around her naked body, pulling the cloud across her dripping candle like a funeral shroud, smiling into the misty caress until the sun's fury burned the vapors away.

It's true that she wasn't overly fond of the sun, either. Although she understood that forests need light to grow, she resented the way his relentless rays washed all the mystery from the shadows of the trees, scouring away uncertainties, revealing details but removing questions.

No, it was the twilight she loved the best, that in-between-time when the moon waltzed up the sky, gracefully forcing the heavy, reluctant sun below the hills.

During this dance of light and shadow, night and day, she would roam her forest haven, wandering, searching for someone-- anyone.

She'd tried forming her own companions from the woods around her. She'd made a pair of slender hounds, carefully stitched and sculpted from wilting petals and dying leaves, stuffed with loam and the souls of the moths circling her head. They ran beside her as the sun sank, faithful and silent as shadows, but still she searched in ever widening rings that grew with the hearts of her trees, searched for someone to share in the fleeting beauty of a spiderweb at dawn, its gossamer strands beaded with perfect drops of glittering dew, someone to share in her tiny circle of candlelight and read the patterns in the wheeling stars.

Still, she knew that if her spiraling exploration ever reached the edge of her sylvan domain, she'd never set foot beyond the treeline.

It was a lonely life, but it was hers.

--

This needs some major editing.

WWP4: Passive

(buttercupfestival.com)

Sometimes it strikes me suddenly, the static.

Like the trees and the grass I am grounded,

Rooted deep in the fertile loam

Reaching down to unyielding bedrock

Sitting motionless,

Day by day

Waiting

Always waiting

For someone with the gift of freedom

Of motion

Of flight...

For someone to bring me news of elsewhere

To tell me fantastic tales of that which my eyes will never see

Someone to fly back to me and sing of the sky

Lying upon the world like heavy wet cotton

Wrinkled and lazy and blue.

WWP3: Possessions, Possessions

(maggietaylor.com)

No one ever quite figured out the flood of '47. It wasn't really the intensity (although that was quite astonishing) or the duration (though three weeks was no blink-of-the-eye). No, it was definitely the fact that not a drop of rain fell from the sky, nor did a river, swollen from some torrential downpour far upstream, burst its banks to overwhelm the fertile fields. No, this flood was different.

This flood rose up.

It came seeping up from the grass and the gravel, collecting first in tiny droplets, then slowly pooling, puddles to ponds to lakes, a river in every avenue.

--

Gaaaaaah short and unfinished AGAIN. Also, way to barely connect to the picture at all. Again.

Weekly Writing Prompt 2: Reaching

(thelotuseater.com)

Sitting alone at night, I can feel you beside me in the prickling silence, feel your hands ghosting over my skin. I look to you and the world dissolves around me, narrowing, simplifying, concentrating around your figure. My eyes see nothing else.

Love fluctuates like mercury; as the summer fades to autumn I find myself beginning to doubt your solidity. Anxious, I try to wait it out. Petrified, I can do nothing else; I am frozen--longing, hoping, wishing for your return--and when I close my eyes I can feel you beside me, never close enough.

The land is bare and dead, its beauty now lying in desolation... a stark contrast to the joyous vitality of summer. I wait ever-longer, never truly believing you'll come back to me, but far too terrified of solitude to leave.

Weekly Writing Prompt 1: Girl in a Bee Dress

Emma and I have decided to share writing prompts every week so we don't stop. We both write on the prompt, with a deadline of midnight the following Sunday--finished or not. This week's is a painting by Maggie Taylor.

--

The sun rose crimson that morning, into a sky as thick and golden as the richest clover honey. I woke with a feeling of finality, fatality, emptiness. I rose with the sun, the two of us mirrored--slow, silent, moving to a timeless, ceaseless rhythm we had no power to oppose. Padding softly on calloused toes, I stalked the dawn through the foothills. Heavy shafts of golden sunlight broke around me as I emerged onto the floodplain, following the footsteps of my mother, my grandmother, my whole line of apian girls. Between my fingers I carried--oh so carefully--the first flower of spring, a glorious zinnia as brilliant a magenta as I'd ever seen.

When I reached the shore the sun had reached its zenith, blazing down upon my naked skin with a joy it had waited the whole long winter to release. I sank my toes into the icy embrace of the ocean, grounding myself in the rough sand. Raising the flower's flawless petals to the sky, I closed my eyes and sang, pouring my soul into carrying the lilting melody across the water, calling, calling, calling with every fiber of my being. I sang until the sky had turned an evening's periwinkle, the sun lazily sliding behind a thick curtain of clouds.

My toes were the first to sense them coming, tingling with the deep humming that vibrated through the sand as my eyes scanned the gathering stormclouds on the horizon. Gradually, one cloud seemed to thicken, shifting restlessly and growing ever larger; the relentless hum filled my ears as the cloud filled the sky. The swarm swirled around me in dizzying eddies, the drone of millions of gossamer wings drowning out even the crashing of the waves, as countless fuzzy bodies drifted in the foam.

There were too many.

Every year, fewer and fewer flowers spread their petals on the hillsides for the bees... the land was dying.

--

Yeah... this isn't anywhere close to done. Or even edited at all. Oh well. Maybe eventually I'll come back to it, but I kind of doubt it.

Rough Silk

Ribbons, ribbons, ribbons; my hair, your fingers, my face. Laced between our outspread arms, silken cords of what-nows and I-wonder-ifs stretch taut through cellophane silence that freezes our limbs and stifles our words. Eye-to-eye and breath-to-breath, our lungs are paralyzed in empty anticipation of speech; we are waiting waiting waiting on the verge of confession, petrified of refusal but hanging heavy and unsteady on fraying bands of wanting. Your eyes twitch with unspoken questions as I stand-- colder than I ever meant, than I ever wanted to be-- with a face that leaves no room for queries, but a gaze that begs answers. Plaiting strands of barbed wire and organza across your shoulders, I weave patternless purposeless tangles in a fool's attempt at intimacy, wanting only to find clarity and comfort in the opacity of crumpled ties, in burgundy ribbons across your spine.

Bare

I haunt the sharpest place in the world, where the trees ring with astounding clarity before my eyes, but slip, shivering, out of focus at the edges of my view; they slide into a vast, unknowable darkness of rustling wings and shifting shadows. The curling smoke spiraling tantalizingly upward carries abjection, remorse, anxiety to the sky, leaving behind only being. Let the fire burn, oxidize your raiment, expose yourself-- let it go. Forget to remember. Strip down to your bones; stand calcified in the omnipresent, omnipotent blackness, close your eyes. One, two, three hundred heartbeats pass before you regain sight, eyes open to the ever-watching, ever-patient trunks. Hopelessly dwarfed, your eyes turn upward to the great velvet bowl of the sky, as it sinks slowly downward to envelop you... swim amongst the stars, love, and condense, brighten; let yourself burn.

I'll watch from down below, ossified in my ring of stones, roots pushing ever farther, holding fast-- the waxen fingers on my weary boughs reaching, reaching as you shine ever-distant: cosmic and unreachable.

When there's nothing left to burn, come back for me-- inflame me, engulf me in your silvery conflagration. Constellations, we'll fly.

Travel

We're on a train in the night,
accelerating with such a solid relentlessness
it sometimes seems we'll never be able to stop,
we'll just barrel on through the coaldust darkness forever,
ghosting through the skeletons of ironworks
and the shuddering bones of dying industry,
watching civilization level and smother the landscape,
watching flora and fauna slowly but inexorably claim it back,
watching the atmosphere oxidize the shining lines of the city's arteries,
watching each capillary turn to rust,
watching the blood rattle tiredly on.
Bleed it out, bleed it out, bleed it out.

Two

sunbaked and wasted
the beach holds all my secrets
digging fingers reveal all

--

pull me in, hide me
kiss my lips, my sanguine hips
clothed in thistledown

It's been too long since I've written haiku

the smell of the night
makes me want to run until
I can't get back home

--

you are embarrassed
and I'm just amusing, so
why try to hide it?

--

funny how sleeping
makes everything go numb
and fade to fiction

--

it's an eraser
or an ice storm, blurring to
surreality

--

I'm fading, aching
leaning, with lights flickering
I sink into you

--

I miss your music
even though now it only
makes me all empty

--

exhaustion, you see
is the most addictive type
of psychotropic