Creative Writing Exercises

These are all from semester one this year, from the creative writing class I dropped (because I thought it was trite and uninteresting. Yes, I am exactly that pretentious). None of the titles are mine (though I invented a lot of the subtitles), they came from the text book. I had to write the responses. And I did my very best. I hope you like them. If you don't, then that's swell too.

5/3/07 Response to a painting
She leant and grasped at the place where no child would scream, and the drought was inside her, though the roof of the world had split and spilled around her. Cracked earth in her belly contracted and swelled with a low, dull ache. Her mouth closed against the tempest, she turns her back to it and gulps below the blackness of cloud.

He sat smothered by a tyranny of water. The holes in the river whispered with open mouths of sanctuary. An offer of stillness. He opened his arms and held the rain.

What was breaking had broken. All lost. They kept on.

Loving Hitler
A symphony for Eva Braun definitely not composed by Wagner

Oh Eva
Will you ever
Notice Me?

I would do
Anything
for your pleasure.

I will give you
coloured jewels
or a country
maybe Poland

Oh Eva
Will you Ever
Notice me?

I would annex
I would solve
who needs friends
when you have genocides like there?
and you
I would have you
Oh, Eva.

Woman to Man
if you can call us those

Where are you, pretty thing
your head in bowls of Roses
your presence so slight
I fear you'll float away

Talk of tying down
could only push you further
from the ground
from my arms
into wispy clouds of vague

Your parallel a shadow
a quiet nighttime walk
with you and your ghosts
a stroll with memory
cooled by time

You asked if you could hold me
you didn't say how long.


A Child's Essay about the Sea
The sea is vast. Vast means almost endless, I think, and endless is the biggest kind of big there is. Bigger than huger than giant. That's the sea. I walked into it once, the almost endless sea. A strange thing happened, thought, the water lapped at my ankled like a tongue, and my feet began to sink. I stared out at the sea for a very long time, and I thought of what would happen if I stayed. I wondered if the sea was trying to swallow me because it was lonely. It wants us all. It wants us all inside it, I should think.

I thought of it a little. I thought of joining the sea. Of sunken ships and giant squid and smiling sharks. So then I believed that there may be no room for me there, and that it may be trying to trick me. The sea is as full as it is empty, and it is vast.

The End

So that's them.

And it made me think that I want a lover with a soul like the bottom of the ocean. Cool, and dark and still. And occasionally visited by James Cameron.