These days are flying by. There’s never enough time for everything I want to do. What a shame. Here are my responses to the Writober Day 3 prompts in Sounds of Words: Assonance and Consonance.
OctPoWriMo
For today’s poem, I looked at my entire wordlist so far looking for assonance and consonance and found the “ea” sound of “fear” was dominant for assonance, and “r” and “s” sounds were dominant for consonance. So I focused on those for my pantoum.
No Shame In
Wilted flowers decaying in a vase
terror-sharing death’s impression,
reek like the streets after the flood recedes
but don’t whimper or moan their shame.
Terror-sharing death’s impression,
ripe tomatoes squirt seeds down your throat.
They don’t whimper or moan their shame
but whine of a red-rash abrasion.
Pierced tomatoes squirt seeds down your throat
being obscene while fleeing.
A healthy gag reflex is a sign of being evolved.
Some say a bed of nails is comfortable.
Being obscene while fleeing a scene, may
reek like the streets after the flood recedes.
Some say a bed of nails is comfortable
while wilted flowers decay in a vase.
Writober Flash Fiction
Filled With Shame
Janice threw down her pen. She paced the room then stared down at the street through the window. Each face that looked up was a friend she had been missing since the hurricane, but she was now on the other side of the country, and they were most likely dead. She wanted to yell down, see their smile of recognition, run down to them, hug and kiss them. But rationally, she knew. She knew it wasn’t anyone she knew.
Turning from the window, ashamed that she couldn’t move on, she picked up her pen and sat back at her desk which she had covered in a large sheet of butcher-paper. For months she had imagined her thoughts, any good or interesting thoughts, escaping out the top of her head before she could think them. For the last week she collected blackberry vines. Now, she wrapped the vines around her head. The pain of the thorn-pricks were at least something compared to the numbness she felt for so long. The thorns will catch those words that keep slipping her mind, and create a trap for her thoughts, she thought.
When she couldn’t get her words onto the page, she blamed her pens, started breaking them open and collecting their piddly drips of ink. It grew into a calming obsession. She took a piece of linen and dipped it in a bowl of black ink, then pressed the blindfold to her eyelids and tied it behind her head. The ink spread on her forehead and dripped down her cheeks. Her eyes would no longer betray her. Now she could really see.
For so long every breath had felt poisoned, her whole body full of a filthy black smog, like the smell of death lived inside her. “Something has to change, I can’t go on like this.”
Janice put her pen on the paper, and while she blindly wrote, she opened her mouth to let the black cloud of shame escape her lips.
It tasted like the smell of excrement. She gagged as the dark, smoke thickened and flowed. It smelled sickly sweet like dying roses in stagnant water. Janice wrote and wrote, words finally flowing as she emptied. Elated, impassioned, she tore off her blindfold, shook off her thorn cap, and jumped from her chair to dance in her ecstasy, but then she saw it.
The filthy black smoke had taken form and was sitting in the corner staring at her. It started saying everything she had been telling herself, but tried not to hear. “Why did you live when so many better people died? What good are you if you can’t even get back to work? You’re just a burden now.”
She could feel again, and each thing the shame said crescendoed an aching pain into a screaming agony. It would not stop. It followed her everywhere providing crueler and crueler judgment that she couldn’t refute because they were the things she believed.
Janice was back to work. Her critics raved that her art writhed with pain. Her blurbs said, “So relatable and full of feeling, I could not stop crying.” Every moment of every day, Janice wished she could be numb again.
Halloween Photography Challenge
For today’s image, I used the colors that I thought of when I asked myself “What color is shame?” magenta and puce. To do this I set my fairy lights to a pinkish purple hue and draped my purple LEDs that my digital camera has trouble reading over them. Then I cut suggestive shapes out of the egg cut-out leftover from yesterday and pasted them onto iridescent clear plastic for my filter.
I’m really enjoying what you’re sharing. Congratulations on making it to day three. Keep up the good work/fun and come back tomorrow!
Experience Writing 