Prompt # 101

Here's what's good about today. Waking up with energy and my legs didn't feel 

heavy when I went to get the yowling cat more food. The air felt good against my 

skin and in my chest. I can feel like I'm close. Close to the body tipping over 

into feeling so much better that I can see it. Close to some pay off for the 

misery of the ache and twitch of wanting a cigarette. It's good this happens first 

because what usually happens at some point is that I get really sick, my lungs 

spaz and I have some kind of crazy asthma crisis. 

So it's good to get this little bit of feeling better. I am wide awake. 

Here's what's scary about today. I can't pick something up without dropping it. 

Just getting the cat his food and making myself a piece of high protein toast I 

dropped everything in the kitchen. My son, who has a day off and isn't feeling 

well staggered into the kitchen to make sure everything was alright. I dropped 

plates and cutting boards and glasses and silverware. I bumped into the stove and 

knocked the cayenne over so that our house is sprinkled in dangerous red powder. 

And what about the writing. I'd like to write something new to read tonight at the reading salon. I don't feel confident about it at all. I feel like the words are all poking at me, all angry and bitter. Writing is like that argument you never have because you won't get that angry with someone you love only it's happening. Writing is an opening and once that opening happens it will all pour out and it isn't all pretty. I can feel it just waiting, mean writing, angry writing sharp and pointy and not pretty writing. The kind of writing I do and must immediately have a cigarette to mute it down inside. 

So not afraid of the writing today but resigned. I know what the colors are going to be. I feel them, all in reds and maybe some black. The words are all red and dangerous like the cayene all over my house. 

Sometimes when it feels like that inside it's a great time to write about sex. Like when you can pick a fight with a partner or do something else. I probably won't write about sex. I'll probably write something caustic instead but that doesn't mean you can't. If you want to. Sometimes it can be liberating, fun, surprising and full of change. We can play with sexuality, gender, power and we can play out ourselves or our characters in ways that break past our limitations whether we grew up in trauma or not. 

So todays challenge to  you- am I daring you? It's just to write. 

Now if you felt anxious or curious about the thought that the dare was to write sex, write some sex. Even if it's just in a circling way. You could set the scene for something to happen, or set a mood or write around it in ways that aren't really about sex at all like the poems I found today. Or you could zero in on one thing- a hand and it's placement where? What do those fingers feel like against whose skin? What a story right there in a hand. Or a mouth. Or the skin at the back of a neck. 

The poems are titled Safe Sex and Fish Fucking. They were both surprises for me so I share them with you this Saturday morning. 

You can always make a list of places or body parts or states of being or all three.... 

Oakland.....elbow....content 

and scramble them 

I am content in this place, this home in Oakland where I elbow my way in between you and duck down on the roof and watch the city move down below, secrure in my perch. 

or 

Hand... Ocean... Anger 

Lists are fun. Combining them can be a great way to make your own prompts. 

Whether you write sex or not I hope you make some time to write today, of think about writing, dream a little about characters bumping into each other in surprise or anger or flirtation or memmory. 

Take ten minutes or twenty or if you have time take a writing nap. Read a little before you lay down and let yourself drift and see what kind of waking dreams or sleeping dreams you have. When you wake up (if your time is limited you can set an alarm) go straight for the paper and write for ten minutes at least and see what comes. This requires a luxury of time without guilt, without pressure, which can be hard to find but if not this weekend, make a date for luxury of time dream writing soon. It can take the work in surprising places. 

May this day be good to you and your creative. 

Safe Sex

 

by Donald Hall

If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident

they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;

if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire

only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other

as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—

then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,

no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,

no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated

apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge

Fish Fucking

 

by Michael Blumenthal

This is not a poem about sex, or even

   about fish or the genitals of fish, 

So if you are a fisherman or someone interested

   primarily in sex, this would be as good a time

As any to put another worm on your hook 

   or find a poem that is really about fucking. 

This, rather, is a poem about language, 

   and about the connections between mind and ear

And the strange way a day makes its tenuous

   progress from almost anywhere. 

Which is why I've decided to begin with the idea

   of fish fucking (not literally, mind you, 

But the idea of fish fucking), because the other

   day, and a beautiful day it was, in Virginia

The woman I was with, commenting on the time

   between the stocking of a pond and the 

First day of fishing season, asked me if this

   was perhaps because of the frequency with which

Fish fuck, and—though I myself know nothing at all

   about the fucking of fish—indeed, I believe 

From the little biology I know that fish do not

   fuck at all as we know it, but rather the male

Deposits his sperm on the larvae, which the female, 

   in turn, has deposited—yet the question 

Somehow suggested itself to my mind as the starting

   point of the day, and from the idea of fish 

Fucking came thoughts of the time that passes

   between things and our experience of them, 

Not only between the stocking of the pond and our

   being permitted to fish in it, but the time, 

For example, that passes between the bouncing

   of light on the pond and our perception of the

Pond, or between the time I say the word jujungawop

   and the moment that word bounces against your 

Eardrum and the moment a bit further on when the

   nerves that run from the eardrum to the brain 

Inform you that you do not, in fact, know 

   the meaning of the word jujungawop, but this,

Perhaps, is moving a bit too far from the idea of 

   fish fucking and how beautifully blue the pond was 

That morning and how, lying among the reeds atop 

   the dam and listening to the water run under it, 

The thought occurred to me how the germ of an idea

   has little to do with the idea itself, and how 

It is rather a small leap from fish fucking to the

   anthropomorphic forms in a Miró painting, 

Or the way certain women, when they make love,

   pucker their lips and gurgle like fish, and how

This all points out how dangerous it is for a 

   man or a woman who wants a poet's attention 

To bring up an idea, even so ludicrous and 

   biologically ungrounded a one as fish fucking,

Because the next thing she knows the mind is taking 

   off over the dam from her beautiful face, off 

Over the hills of Virginia, perhaps as far as Guatemala 

   and the black bass that live in Lake Atitlán who 

Feast on the flightless grebe, which is not merely

   a sexual thought or a fishy one, but a thought 

About the cruelty that underlies even great beauty,

   the cruelty of nature and love and our lives which 

We cannot do without and without which even the idea

   of fish fucking would be ordinary and no larger than

Itself, but to return now to that particular day, and to 

   the idea of love, which inevitably arises from the 

Thought that even so seemingly unintelligent a creature

   as a fish could hold his loved one, naked in the water, 

And say to her, softly, Liebes, mein Lubes; it was 

   indeed a beautiful day, the kind filled with anticipation 

And longing for the small perfections usually found only 

   in poems; the breeze was slight enough just to brush 

A few of her hairs gently over one eye, the air was

   the scent of bayberry and pine as if the gods were

Burning incense in some heavenly living room, and

   as we lay among the reeds, our faces skyward, 

The sun fondling our cheeks, it was as if each 

   time we looked away from the world it took 

On again a precise yet general luminescence when we 

   returned to it, a clarity equally convincing as pain 

But more pleasing to the senses, and though it was not 

   such a moment of perfection as Keats or Hamsun 

Speak of and for the sake of which we can go on for 

   years almost blissful in our joylessness, it was 

A day when at least the possibility of such a thing 

   seemed possible: the deer tracks suggesting that 

Deer do, indeed, come to the edge of the woods to feed

   at dusk, and the idea of fish fucking suggesting 

A world so beautiful, so divine in its generosity 

   that even the fish make love, even the fish live 

Happily ever after, chasing each other, lustful 

   as stars through the constantly breaking water.