Prose Collection

i.
A freckled nose laments of smoke as it flips its hair into basins that drool blue puddles on the floor. You dip your fingers in those splatters of sky and run them all along the walls, drawing me beareded stickmen and red-roof houses – though how you finger colour from leaky plumbing is one of those things I can’t explain… like stumbling hormones and vanishing keys and how your lips can make my hiccups go away. Except you call it hormone imbalances and you call it forgetfulness and you call it love…
(That’s when I get that my-socks-are-off-my-feet-and-curled-up-at-the-bottom-of-my-shoes-uncomfortable feeling, drop my eyes and let them roll along the woodgrains in the floor).

ii.
The house smelled of tatter-tailed fonts and the green juice concentrate residing on the top kitchen shelf. The lampshades were all well-versed in bedsheet-tepee lore and the sofas renowned actors in any game requiring hospital beds or tiger ages. The television, speckled in black and white snow, served not as a centerpiece, but rather as a background that flickered cartoon ducks and mice into the epic battles or threat-riddled journeys that took places on the carpets and desks.
The tables were littered with crayons and old paper, all arranged in deceptively precarious piles. “Get Well Soon” cards, all scrawled in a childish hand, butterflied from surface to surface, leaving a wake of home-made envelopes tripping over cellotape in pursuit.
The corridors were always drenched in shadow and any aspiring adventurer needed to hop from one rug of light to the next to avoid the unforgiving carpet-marshes. These, however, had to be braved to reach the coveted islands of The Study or Bedroom, where cateye-green bedding silked from beds onto the floor and infinite fields of shoes; where wardrobes capped in boxes and socked with bags housed apparently endless reserviours of chocolate and yellowed, lacy frocks.

iii.
Phrases threadbare and colourless or measled with fluffballs from over-wearing and overwashing; the syllables strung onto the bangles of words I wear are no more than costume jewelry that please for only one or two occasions (or perhaps I’m just overly fickle).
Metaphors strewn over the floors like plastic novelties with their newness wrung out; plotlines and storylines draped over margins like feathers over bedposts or ties triangled from closet handles: it all seems trite or, at least, entirely unoriginal. Perhaps this is because what I write are common observations to me (I don’t know)?
Perhaps, that is what makes writing read-worthy: hearing life alluded to in order to explain itself – but in various approaches and eye-glassed through different states of minds.
I write so that someday I might still find a handful of the veined, withered scribblings I press in dictionaries and textbooks beautiful.

*Three completely unrelated pieces of prose that I’m posting together because they have nowhere else to go

The first is disjointed and written in a style that simply slaps whatever the speaker is thinking down on the page. I don’t think that the theme was hard to get (infatuation, lol, just in case you didn’t catch it), so that’s where this explanation ends.
The second is about a child’s grandparent’s house and the child’s experiences and memories of the place. Yeah, I used completely taboo words such as ‘unforgiving,’ ‘coveted’ and ‘epic’ regardless of the way I wince every time I read them. They need to be there, however, to get the tone I’m using right, so if you’re also suffering, I apologize *grins*
I think that I like the third one best, but that’s probably just because I wrote it the most recently. It’s my rantings regarding over-used words and phrases (the ones that I exploited so shamefully in the piece just before it, lol) and how I fear for the day that I can no longer enjoy my writing because it’ll consist of ideas that have already been concieved and words that have already been used in that context.*

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~ by cravingoxygen on September 28, 2009.