FREEWRITING EXERCISE #62

Photo by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash
  1. Four corners to everything if you try hard enough.
  2. To find the junction where Wall A meets Wall B is a matter of imagination. To fit one body into another, an act of cooperation. Reconciliation.
  3. I cannot help it but picture the world in blocks.
  4. I have never played Minecraft in my life, but I’ve played plenty of Lego. Polymers and squares, jagged edges sanding into the well of my hand. Hours upon hours like bricks for apartheid.
  5. Lightning strikes. The sound travels as though a storyboard – panel by panel, the vein lights up the sky, the loud applause of a faceless audience, the orchestra spits onto the floor.
  6. I am sitting in a corridor. Every corridor is a room if you try hard enough.
  7. Sometimes when you can’t find a door to open, you have to find a window. The purpose is entry. The purpose is passage.
  8. Do not waste my time I am sick of stone. I am sick of knocking, I am sick of the glass suspended just-too-high. I pry the frames off their hooks and put them into the cabinet.
  9. In my cabinet, a tower of frames. Each used to contain a story, but now they form a tunnel from the sky to the earth. If I dropped a shiny rock, I might experience what it means to be shot.
  10. They are going to find my stash and put them to use again.
  11. A door swings open as if to bow. The rain stops, the lightning retracts as though a tongue. Licking, licking, licking. Licking every building until they are half-digested by my eyes, only to be forgot in the scaffolding of my brain.
  12. The inner machinations of everything is an enigma, even when we have an answer.
  13. I toss an answer into an empty room. First, there were four corners. Now, there are still four corners. But one of them is forever marred with knowledge.
  14. Everything can be explained if you try hard enough.
  15. I do not want to try. I am fine with being an idiot.
  16. Every building is a tower of rooms, stacked upon each other. Bones in the walls, iron rebar fingers digging into the soil. Fingernails all muddy. Licking, licking, licking by the rain and the weather.
  17. The orchestra conductor gives piano lessons on the weekend.

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.

Filed under: Freewriting, Poetry

by

A member of Singapore-based writing collective /stop@BadEndRhymes ("/s@ber"), Valen dwells in the swamp of poetry. He has been published in various publications, including Anxious Poets Society, Eunoia Review and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. He has performed his work at the Arts House, the Singapore Art Museum, and in various dingy bars.

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