The Flash That Lit Your Face
13 January 2021 Wednesday Prose Poem Prompt: speechless
I wanted to say something brilliant, something that would have framed everything just right; I’ve got this headache now, never completely washing itself away. You scrub at it. Beneath the brighter lanterns than what I’m used to, I try to see beyond my own skull. Writhing circumstances and crazed laughter.
Just as the flash lit up your face, it burns now in the back of my retina, and red-rimmed grief comes to the fore, demands ends to certain problems. I’ve nothing to compare it to. I’ve no recourse to sound and silent oppositions are stalking through the gardens barely lit up by the stars. I just know, but I don’t want to know, that there’s holes that I’ll sink into before I’ve made it back indoors.
I wanted to speak. I wanted to say something. Not to just sit here and compose something that has the death of a few seeds about it.
J.D. Harms 2021
Prompt:
Today’s prose poem prompt, speechless, may perhaps be slightly odd since we’re supposed to have (as writers, essentially) unfettered access to words. Perhaps this prompt is inspired by my reading 1984 at the moment. You can reveal a situation that has something of the totalitarian about it, an oppressive outside authority…
