I just realized I haven’t blogged yet today and I am running out of time but I am rather creatively tapped out so I will just share with you what I have been working on.
The last two days, I have done a bunch of writing for my final portfolio. Warning, some of it is poetry.
Like this one. I wrote this one in class.
Homage To My Body
This body is large
Big feet, big hips, big heart, big hands
Big head, big eyes, big ideas
This is the body that survived
That conquered winter
By eating like a bear and growing fat
To others, winter was a scourge
To this body, it was merely a diet
This is the body that met the modern age
Ill-equipped for endless feasting
Still hoarding calories
For a winter that never comes
This is the body now scorned
Treated as disgusting
Considered unfuckable, unlovable, and unworthy of pity
Because we “did it to ourselves”
By doing what we were born to do
But you don’t see me that way, do you love?
You see the beauty of my mind
You hear the wisdom in my voice
You feel the warmth of my soul
You taste the sweetness in my nature
And you smell the purity of my intentions
So let us leave this shallow world
Set sail under a big round moon
Find some place where the ocean is deep enough to hold us
Knowing that we are forever safe
Because fat, like hope, floats
And we know we will survive the winter
Epic stuff, I know. Then there’s this quick bit of doggerel, also written in class :
The Moment Before
Two dozen men in one swiftboat
Fear in their eyes, lumps in their throats
Sweating and shaking and trying to be brave
Ahead of them glory, dishonour, or grave
Cowards and heroes and all in between
All of them part of the great war machine
Doing the work of the people on high
For while nations may fight, it’s the people who die
I am thinking of submitting it to some Remembrance Day poetry contests, but I would have to change the bummer ending.
This is sometung I wrote yesterday. It’s the exact sort of poetry I find fun to write. Because I like messing with people’s heads.
Playfully, of course.
This Poem Is Terrible
No really, it is
It’s shallow, and trite, and completely cliche
It was written in haste by a lazy hack
Who didn’t even bother to make it rhyme
No decent person could like it
No decent publisher would publish it
And if a literary magazine published it
I’d cancel my subscription
So why are you still reading?
Aren’t you afraid to be associated with such trash?
Don’t you worry someone will think you have poor taste?
Or worse, no taste at all?
What would your friends think? Would they question your right to be among them?
What would your parents think? Would they think you are wasting your education?
What would your teachers think? Would they wonder why they bothered teaching you if you are going to go read drivel like this poem anyhow?
So why are you still reading it?
Could it be that you’re….. enjoying it?
So that’s the poetry section. If that was all, I would not be so tired.
But in lieu of the process journal I was never going to write, I was assigned 4 writing prompts and was told to do “fifteen minutes” on each.
Well I don’t measure my creative output in minutes, so I just worked on the things till they were done.
Here’s the first one, complete with the prompt that prompted it. Promptly.
Read this before I get carried away.
One Day you come into work and find a cookie mysteriously placed on your desk. Grateful to whoever left this anonymous cookie, you eat it. The next morning find another cookie. This continues for months until one Day a different object is left—and this time there’s a note.
Barbara didn’t know who kept leaving a cookie on her desk every day, and she didn’t care. It had been happening for so long now that she completely took it for granted that every day when she came to work she would find a cookie of some sort – all different kinds, from delicate shortbread to thick oatmeal, from homey chocolate chip to exotically spiced cookies from the Far East, from tiny wafers to enormous cookies bigger than her hand – and, during her first coffee break, she would eat it.
And what’s more, she would enjoy it. The cookies were always of exquisite quality and despite their kaleidoscopic variations, every single time, she would find it to be delicious, and just the thing to go with her cup of Darjeeling tea.
So when she sat down that drowsy summer day to find that instead of a cookie there was an expensive looking ornate box, it was such a shock that at first she didn’t know what she was looking at. Her mind insisted in trying to see the box as a cookie for an embarrassingly long time. When she finally clued in, all the excitement she had felt when the cookies had first started to arrive came back to her, and it was with great ceremony she opened the box and looked inside.
Inside was a small but deadly looking gun with the name “Darrell Werther” neatly stencilled on the barrel. Beside the gun there was a note written in elegant calligraphy that read “For the cookies”.
Wait, thought Barbara. There was a Darrel Werther upstairs in Shipping. She knew that because they had been on the Red Cross committee together last year. He had made a snide remark about the dress she was wearing that day (her favourite) and everyone had laughed.
It was clear to Barbara (clearer than it ought to be, perhaps) that her mysterious benefactor was asking her to take the gun with his name on it and kill Darrel Werther.
And maybe it was in gratitude for all the wonderful cookies, or maybe it was because of the remark he’d made about her dress, or maybe there had been something in those cookies that freed Barbara from her usual moral constraints….
…but she kind of wanted to do it.
There’s three more, but that’s enough for today. I don’t want to overload people.
The other three will wait till either tomorrow or another day when, for whatever reason, I don’t have a better idea for a blog entry.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.