Prompt # 103

Monday morning. Weird night. Strange dreams where I am carrying someone around in a bag. Shes not dead but she sure is heavy. I can still feel the weight of her.  Who was I carrying? My back actually hurts this morning. A dream so real my muscles flexed and moved to adapt to all that weight. I was trying to get the police to come and get her before she woke up. I can see her sleeping face, squished inside the bag- she was white and pale with wispy light colored hair. Her eyes were closed. She was dangerous to me and I was dangerous to her. I could have been carrying an iteration of self and I was done with her so waiting to get her someplace safe from her and me? It could have been anyone. A stranger. It's hard to imagine who I would carry so close to me that was dangerous to me and I to her.

Sounds like family. Or a lifetime movie. So family then. 

Writing right now through a deep breath and around a tooth pick. It's getting easier except for when it isn't. I think I'm less cranky but we'd have to take a poll to see. Still clumsy. Confused to find parts of the world where they are. I don't see things as they are. I think it's weird that nicotine could change my spatial awareness. I must have traumatized A who didn't want to ask me how I was last night because I've quit smoking. I guess I get that. N just came out of his room looking awful. He' s home sick which hardly ever happens. I'm going to get him bubbly water when I get the cat food. God this is the worst sort of drivel right now. It's like mindless tweeting except there are no character restrictions. I like how I'm reading character more than one way in that last sentence. This is one of my worst fears you know. Writing a boring words one after another because that's all that's in my head. 

But of course while I'm typing this I'm am thinking what I"m not writing. Which is that I figured out who that person is in the bag. If I were writing fiction she'd be me, or my dead mother or something like that. But I'm pretty sure that woman was a younger S. The S who died. The S that I so adore. I can't imagine why she'd be a danger to me. I heard something about a two month anniversary. I know that A is moving from the house (which was creepy) but I think it feels like a tie to me and I don't think I knew I'd never not be there again listening to a dead woman tell me her house is getting dusty. Because it is. I don't know how I know that but I do. It's getting dusty. I'm still writing around it. Writing around what wants to be written is a good way to write flat fizzyless writing. 

I miss her. I haven't really grieved her. Now I'm fucking crying all over my toothpick. God I hate that shit. So all that dreaming and that heavy bag and this slow moving writing can boil down to something simple like I miss her. I miss the time I didn't get to spend with her. I miss that I had a lifetime of people who hated me in the guise of family and so much less time, an infinitesimal amount of time with a good woman who loved me because I made her girl laugh. That's how It started. We also bonded when A was at Highland getting abysmal nursing care if any because they were afraid of her. Women with beards can still be scary I guess. Even in 2012. S and I bonded in our rage and revenge plots and talking smack about what we'd do to who and for how long. If we'd been around each other when we were both younger we'd have been in trouble I think. 

Where did we land today? I don't even know for sure.  That's the other thing about not smoking. It's harder to make connections, to see past the immediate. 

How about this as a prompt and please know you can always make these funny or nonsensical: 

In a dream or in reality you or a character are carrying something very heavy in a large well constructed bag. Is it cloth or plastic? Canvas? There is some urgency here. You or the character needs to get out of sight for a minute. When you are someplace safe they pause and look around then...

Opening the bag up ....what or who do you see? 

Go for twelve minutes if you can. If the writing is moving, go longer. Why not? 

It doesn't have to be a person or serious. It could be a shit ton of sardines. Or mangos. Or books or???? 

All the possibilities...

I really like this poem. I want to live in it awhile. I want a duffel bag instead of the bag I was carrying last night- I like this poem but I suspect that won't be true for all of  you. I have a weakness for these settings. A part of me wants to be like this when I grow up. Instead I'm sucking on a tooth pick grieving dead women and cigarettes and good writing. 

The Duffel Bag

BY DAVID HARSENT

God’s blood beads on the tarmac and something rough is boiling up

just this side of the vanishing point, so it’s probably time to get

off this stretch of blacktop and into the wayside bar, where every cup

runneth over and you breast a thickening fret

of stogie smoke to get to the dank back room where a high stakes game

turns against you despite your trey of jacks, and soon enough   

you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame

but the luck you’ve been getting since first you threw your stuff

into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and lame,

with the grifters and drifters, the die-hards, the masters of bluff,

the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash. . .

So it’s into the crapper and out through the window—you’re free

to do whatever you must, so long as that purple-and-yellow blush

in the sky doesn’t mean what it seems, so long as that lick of flame

from the hard-shoulder spillage doesn’t travel as far as the scree

of garbage in the lay-by, so long as that’s not your name

in the red top front-page splash on the trailer-trash kidnappee. . .

Just keep to the shadow-side, keep in under the lee

of roadside billboards, bed down in the roadside scrub, your dream

of Ithaca, that ghost town, though the rest is mystery—

what brought you to this and who might take the blame,

and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea.

Source: Poetry (September 2008).

****

what brought you to this and who might take the blame,

and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea.

****

you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame

but the luck you’ve been getting

****

you’re free

to do whatever you must, so long as that purple-and-yellow blush

in the sky doesn’t mean what it seems, so long as that lick of flame

****

Just keep to the shadow-side, keep in under the lee

of roadside billboards, bed down in the roadside scrub, your dream

of Ithaca, that ghost town, though the rest is mystery—

****

what brought you to this and who might take the blame,

and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea. 

These words stay with me. What brought you to this and who might take the blame. This is what I will write to today. 

What about you? 

Can you write today? Do you have the space to carve out some time that is just for you and fill it with words or even just wondering?  If you can take that space just for you. If you have a door lock it. If you don't have a door do the best you can. The cat is waiting patiently for me to finish this prompting. I haven't had breakfast yet and N went back to bed without his fizzy water. I made the world wait while I took this time. Sometimes we can do that and sometimes we can't. If you can take it. It's your own life and your own time that your spending. Spend some on you. And if that looks like writing write and write and write. If that looks like a bubble bath or a bagel in solitude or a good book that is good too. Do it all the way. 

Someday we'll all be in heavy bags in someone's dream. Time to make a mark while we are still here with all our attention and intention. 

May this day be good to you and your creative.