About today's writing prompt genre: Instead of just using a random title generator, for today's exercise I will offer up six titles. Pick the title that appeals the most to you and run with it. If you want to leave your choice still somewhat up to chance use this random number generator. I will also have a small list of possible last words or phrases that you can use as an end-goal if you feel like you need a little extra direction/constraint for the piece.
Titles:
1) Topping Beehives
2) Under the Town's Skin
3) Blame Roberto Clemente
4) When Combustion Fails
5) Crippling Affection
Words or phrases to end with:
1) Park
2) Green
3) Foreign
4) Coup de foudre (french phrase which means that lightning like striking of "Love at first sight")
5) Donations
6) Exalted
Again, if you want to leave this to chance, use the random number generator.
And finally, while April 20th means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, to me it will always be the day which I happened to propose to the lovely lady who would become my wife, so as an extra bonus exercise, it being National Poetry Month and all, I'll add as an Ekphrastic Exercise the poem that I wrote her for the occasion of asking her to marry me, which was subsequently published in The Briar Cliff Review, in their 2008 issue.
This may not sound romantic, for which I’m sorry
for Jessica
Where there is limestone bedrock,
water seeps meticulously through the dirt
and finds fine cracks where it can settle.
This allows the acidity it’d gathered
along the way, like wild azaleas,
to feast on the rock’s surface until
small caverns take shape.
Eventually, those caverns are deep enough
that the water’s trickling rubs away
tiny particles of rock and creates a cave.
Given time and exposure to the passage of
any force that can be felt on the fingertips
of the planet’s paper thin skin,
hollows are formed for lack of that anything
that once touched it, had once run its
finger ever so gently across its epidermis.
Craggy peaks are smoothed by the wind’s
soft whisper, stoic drips kiss caverns
out of solid rock, and lazy rivers
ride the prairie into grand canyons.
These sites of erosion don’t want
for the surface matter that has been
so carefully sloughed off like dead skin cells.
They have ultimately taken shape with touch,
and if anything, want for more.
They practically beg for it, as if to say
“What you’ve done to me is amazing,
and we’re just getting started.”
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If the idea of erosion—don't forget Eros is how the word starts ;)—strikes something in your brain, of writing a love poem, of caves or geologic features, of the anti-love love poem, of whatever, write it! Or stick with the Title Mania exercise. Whatever gets you creating the best, do it.
