Topic of the Week (Week 1)

godspal

I was thinking that a good way to improve everyone's skill in general is to set a topic every week to allow people to consider writing about various things.

Simple rules:
-It can be a poem/short story/novel extract.
-Poem can be no longer than 30 lines.
-Short story/extract can be no longer than 500 words.
-And you must comment on the previous person's entry. (Praise/Constructive Criticism.)

This week's title is:

Common

I think its best leave it uncompetitive at the moment and see how people react, and if you want to make it into a competition just put a P.S. in your entry.

godspal

Glazed grey glances onto a white screen.
The continuous noise; click, click, click.
My legs crossed under my desk,
My posture morphed into the broken chair.
I lick my teeth, raking away the coffee taste.
My mind retracts, melting to mush under
The strain of pointless information and
Instant gratification.

An experience lost personally;
Made universal.

imasmeasmecanbe

I like the imagery, it takes a good eye to find the beauty in the mundane. Ive gone with the increase in college dropouts....






Three drinks a day for long enough,
a pint, a short, and navel fluff.
A wooden jaw and bloodshot eyes
Of course we failed. Shock. Suprise.

We joined the ranks of dreamers lost,
of piss-heads, drunkards and the rest,
of the lazy, never-arsed
and of the heaven blessed.

Now we sit between shab and chic
We drink, we smoke,
we slur our speech.

Bound by failure
Blind to sense
we take but little solace

in a 15 credit cadence

SmokeyJo84

i really liked this, love the use of sibilence ('shock, surprise', 'slur our speech') to create a softer image of college drinkers which perhaps reflects the general feeling of Irish society's tolerance/pride towards our binge drinking culture?

here's my contribution....pls dont be brutal, I haven't written anything in a v long time, hoping to get back into it!



“It's just a ball of cells. That's all. A ball of cells.”
I repeated this to myself as I sat in the waiting room. I arrived in the clinic just after midday, exhausted from the drive all the way from Dublin. We drove straight to the B&B. Seventy pounds sterling per night for the dingy little room. Well it wasn't a planned trip. We had no time to settle into the room before we went to the clinic. Bad if you don’t like rushing, good for not allowing pregnant pauses in thought.

I asked Jane not to wait with me when we arrived at the clinic. More like I insisted. I sent her off down the high street to shop and maybe go to the cinema. It was like any other waiting room. Bright and airy with two large cream couches and an arm chair. Magazines were strewn across the coffee table. Fashion magazines for women like myself, young and carefree.

Careless more like. At twenty five years of age I should have known better. I had told no one but Jane. I didn't know whether to be more ashamed about getting knocked up in the first place after a one night stand with "Let's Call Him Lenny", or about the fact that I was going through with the "A" word. A bit of both, but mostly the latter. Jane told me she knew someone who had been in this situation and said that if you refer to ‘it’ as a ball of cells, it makes ‘it’ much easier. The desired effect had yet to set in.

A nurse came out to speak with me and told me I would have to wait a bit longer than expected. She apologised for not being able to offer me tea and switched on the television for me. As I was waiting, a woman came into the waiting area with her friend. They were both dressed in M&S casual clothing, as if out on a country walk. I guessed late thirties to mid forties, but wasn't sure. They both smiled at me, weak awkward smiles of those who want to appear friendly but don't want to be drawn into conversation.
They whispered to each other as the blonde woman filled out the form. She burst into tears midway and buried her hands in her face.

“Do you want to leave?” the friend asked in her strong Scouse accent.
“No, I don’t,” was her muffled reply.
“Are you sure? Because you can, you know.”
“No. I can’t. I can’t have this baby. I should have known better.”

And there we were. Two women of different ages, from different places. Both should have known better. Both human, both fallible. On common ground we walk.

Fabulosa

"A ball of cells"

I like the bit about the weak smiles like you don't want to get drawn into conversation. Very visual story. I can see it all. Perhaps would have been nice to flesh out the top part of the story about the dingy room and all that? Using exterior place to describe interior mood?

Anyway, here's mine. Sorry, I got carried away and broke the 500 word rule!

"It"

There were many strange things. The first came down the river just after I became a man. I was crouching at the bank watching for fish. In those days I would spend many hours like that, still and stiff, afraid to scare the fish, my mind lost in the froth and the trickles and the swirls.

I saw it come down the river. Not jumping, not alive. It was shorter than my forearm. Maybe wider. It was clear like water but not fluid. The light dripping through the canopie reflected off it. But the reflected light was not soft like light glimmering on water. These were glints bounced off hardness. It was on the surface, not in the stream, like hollow wood but not hollow wood.

I ran down the bank after it. My spear tipped it away at first. I had to reach my spear into its small round mouth. I lifted it out of the river. It was light like nothing. I tipped it empty on the moss and touched it. It was smooth like a stone but not cold like stone. It was round but with length, a cylinder like a hollow log. But its roundness was perfect. And constant along its length. To look at it from either end was to see the perfect roundness of a full moon.

I brought it back to the village. It was passed from hand to hand. Kaso played with the light noise it made when tapped but said it was not enough to make music. But Ola could make a sound when he blew across its perfect round mouth. Zela poured water in and out of it and marvelled at how not one drop dripped through. I held it close to my eye and looked straight through it - at the huts, at Kaso working over the fire, at the drying monkey meat, at the children. Everything was a little cloudy and a little twisted around the edges, not as I had ever seen things before. Little bumps and twists on its surface sent the image on its other side off in a crazy direction, twisted big or small or sideways. I could move it so that little Zia looked not lithe but gross and distended. But the Old Man grew angry. He said that in the world only water is clear and see-through and thats how it should be. He flung it on Kaso's fire. But it didn't burn. It went soft and grew tighter and shrunken and started to drip, like water, if water was slow and thick and heavy. And there was a sharp, horrible smell like nothing in world. We all drew back and covered our noses in fear.

"Tch. I told you. This is a very bad sign", said the Old Man.

We hoped the fire would take it away, but something brown and horrible was still left so we moved our village the next day.

Of course there were many more strange things. Much stranger things. The Tall Men came and told us we were naked so we needed their money to buy cloths. Then they took the trees away and made the water so dirty that now we had to go and buy their water. Then we understood what the thing had been. They called it a plastic bottle. This we learned, as well as petrol spills and canned food and debt. None of this was good but not so bad. Not as bad as the thing that made our faces red and our bodies hot and yellow dirt like frog spawn come from our noses. To the Tall Men this was nothing. To us it was death. First came the plastic bottle and then came 'the common cold'.

Bad-doom-tish!!! Feel free to critique freely. Great idea for thread by the way, looking forward to next weeks.
p.s. the common cold kills people in the amazon cause of their immune systems... in case you're wondering

godspal

Its definitely a decent interpretation of the word common. However it is quiet derivative, I am thinking Apocalypto. Still there is some nice imagery in there.

Anyway this weeks topic is a phrase that has to be by everyone used within their story/poem:
destroyed itself from within