FREEWRITING EXERCISE #51

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

An empty socket where wisdom
should be, the aftertaste of
blood coursing through the mouth.

I don’t miss solidity, I miss concrete.
I don’t miss foundations, I miss building.
I don’t miss you, I miss all of you.

My back is wound up like suspended in motion.
So much kineticism waiting to be unleashed,
like an overfull cup.

My tongue feels about the cavern
of my mouth like a blind man.
The void of something is easier
to identify than the presence of
something.

I didn’t know what to do with the tooth
so I cleaned it under the sink.
The decay, a small lake in
the side of white. I could
see through the layers,
cut right to the middle.

I don’t like examining myself in such a manner.
Much less, removed and extracted by clinical hands.

This is a love poem disguised as one that is not.
This is not a love poem disguised as itself.

This is the only way I can express the great
lie that is my heart is made of bones, to
refute and draw out the nerve and to
purge the bloody mouth clean.

Why is it that my writing is full of violence
like plaque on an unkempt smile?

Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.

FREEWRITING EXERCISE #50

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Just a short reflection for the 50th exercise. It’s been a long 50 days since Day 1 . Where I just set out to write something ‘interesting’, it’s since become part of my daily practice as a writer. I set aside time to write every day – and even if these freewrites aren’t quite polished, they’re still drafts – now I have 50 to work with.

Ironically, however, I think the constant freewrites have made me more critical of my own work? Through identifying trends and spaces where my mind goes when I run out of ideas, I start to find my niche / crutches in writing – this really reminds me of advice I was given at the Manuscript Bootcamp regarding my constant use of a few select images and metaphors.

I did have some interesting moments in the past 50 days though:

FREEWRITING EXERCISE #49

Photo by Tobias Freeman on Unsplash

highway palette plank on plank
to a distant star think of yellow
dirt-runed dunes of carrot cake
sand flowing in infinite hour-
glasses off the side of a lonely
planet some other side of this
lonely galaxy what is the colour
of your gratitude can you explain
the middle ground between green
and not-green and who knows
what there is to do at all I mean
what good is knowing that going
to ruin imagine imagine imagine
safari jeep in the savannah of love
or insert abstract emotion here
the kind of thing people will
spend their whole lives debating
over for imaginary points on
a thoroughly punched scorecard
anyway we’re back to the safari
with all its poached lions lying
in a heap like a sunday breakfast
and that’s the cycle of life, baby
and that’s the way a bullet lives
to see through its raison d’etre
and what better outcome is there
for anything made by human hands
than to fulfill its purpose and
nothing more what is the colour
of blood on a dusty and dying
heap of grass what is the colour
when I find myself suddenly
alone in a crowd of notalone
what is the colour when people
become bullets and fly in-
discriminately discriminate
discriminate discriminate what
is the colour when another
species exits the party of life
what is the colour of the broken
down jeep with its twice-shot
driver what is the colour of
my blood vis-a-vis your blood
what is the colour of a thousand
fists pointed at a burning skyscraper
what is the colour of superman’s
leather bondage gear what is the
colour of the future where all
politics meets what colour is it
it is red red red red red red red

Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.

FREEWRITING EXERCISE #48

Photo by Lavi Perchik on Unsplash

In every throat, an apple
to be pared. The knives
of our tongues are still
not enough for this act
of love making. Before
the work is done, the
sculpture is already
waiting to be sold. As
with the bark of trees
we mark that we love
with something that
can’t grow back. Every
room is a cage of sky
locked away from roam,
every passing minute a
step further into the pool
of each other’s bodies.
The light can barely stream
in, the curtains a dam
against the world. How
a single piece of cloth
can have so much power,
how the most powerful
thing we can do is to be
completely vulnerable.
If I extricate the fruit
of your voice, will you
plant another? I slice
the saccharine into
pieces, I bury them
in my limbs. I go to
bed with your image
growing, growing,
growing, branching
through my veins,
spreading in the soil
of my brain, waiting
for this space of mine
to be filled with you.

Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.

FREEWRITING EXERCISE #47

Photo by Charl Folscher on Unsplash

Thoroughly wrung dry by this point
I am out of anything interesting to say.

I am reinventing meaning, less to make
a statement but more to simply be.

Be more of a person, and less of a poet,
those wretched, godforsaken things.

Wretches who write for the sake of God
while using their gods as placeholders.

Place a hold onto this world of ours,
it’s slightly askew and rolling away.

A cue for the record to be flipped to B-sides,
a needle spinning in its groove, quietly and built.

Quietly, we built a cathedral of needles
out of the static-noise site of yesterday’s deaths.

Yesterday, static, died sightless in a noisy room.
Castaway, thoroughly wrung dry like an orange.

Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.

FREEWRITING EXERCISE #46

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Fear comes microscopic.
A number on a page,
two letters in a text.

In the cells of our
bodies there are
words waiting
to never be said.

Stress and fear are ways
we reinterpret the fight
or flight response against
the desire of two outcomes
to intersect on a line graph.

Numbers, numbers, numbers,
falling like rain on a house of
stocks, trickling out the line
like blood, like pus, like bile.

Having reconsidered and
sold my ornate frame
of reference to the
highest bidder I find
myself surrounded
by vast expanses of
nothingness, which is to
say anxiety owns me now.

Down the well of a paper chase,
the entangled tails of a rat race,
we stampede over the dreams
of children, we crush the eggs,
we kill all the chickens.

Silence throughout the barn.

Silence throughout the barn.

I am looking for a way to release
the tension in my head like a knot.
As though to smash a glass bottle
against the shiny exposed head of
a maiden cruise would release it
from its obligations to the shore
to return in one piece, as though
time can be truncated into tranches.

Your childhood is over
the bridge you used to
cross on the way to a
simpler form of
stress.

Silence throughout the schoolyard.

All scribbles meaningless at the gates,
all games a distraction. I am working
on an escape plan, I am coming up
with countermeasures. I am constant
swinging between the two like
a man jumping across two cliffedges
again and again until something changes
or does not.

Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.

FREEWRITING EXERCISE #45

Photo by Paul Murphy on Unsplash

a flat cap, a smushed shoe,
the lawn cuttings left out
orphaned and buzzcut
bleeding steady, a broken
down car by the side of
a cruise liner, a ship at
the bottom of the sea,
a cabin locked and flooding
with all of the world’s
answers within it, like
a child rubbing their stomach,
a pot-bellied pig waiting
to be culled, the streets
lose their signs, and the
rain falls slightly slower,
as though off-beat from
some unknown composer,
the windows warp and bend
the light which passes through,
contorting them into impossible
understandings, compromise
in the form of a cup of coffee,
splashed on the back of an
errant schoolboy, the skin
sizzling from sunburns,
peeling like an orange,
a giant hand which degloves
the fruit of God, and the chop
chop chop of lunchtime
violence, a million future
deaths packed into a subway,
entering and exiting through
tunnels being how life is
to people who do not know
themselves, the body
a silo for these grains
of hate, or is it anxiety
in the form of plastic-wrapped
individually-sealed niceties
in the graffiti-laden murals
of an unknown town, is
it anxiety in the form of anxiety.

Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.