alotus_poetry

From Cafe Writing's Halloween Project (October-November):

Option Five: Seven Things

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

- Arthur Conan Doyle

In improvisation, one of our exercises is a game called "Seven Things," in which we go around in a circle giving each other the challenge, "Give me seven things that [whatever]." We are not going to go around in a circle here, but if you're drawn to lists, this prompt is for you.

So, give me either seven things that scare you OR seven of your favorite horror films.

You are not required to provide any explanations, but it's more interesting for readers if you do.

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Fear of the Dark

1. They smell of things that are rotten or poisoned, and just when one crawls up your leg in the middle of the night, you scream for the exterminator. No matter how much you try to squash them, they pop right back up, running in circles around your feet.

2. It never understands boundaries, yet humans are surprisingly sinewy when it comes to their experiences. Everyone always tries to fill the downward-spiraling void when one is alone with his/her own thoughts. But why is it that silence is always greater than noise?

3. Tools can be weapons for good or for bad, but sometimes metals that gleam angrily have sharp tongues like a python.

4. When giving one's all > receiving = loss of self. So, how much is $$$ worth? Growing one's self on every leaf of the tree is to fall into Dante's Inferno and become something less than human.

5. When < 3 lands on an undefined region of a graph, does it not exist? Or, is it all a sham, and I was just drawing waves of the trigonometric curves because we couldn't fill in the pieces wisely together?

6. The cold draft envelops you when you enter a funeral home. Perfume will make you age by 10 years, making your skin and insides shrivel up frozen just as formaldehyde captures the deceased frozen in time. Then, when you return home, run and rotate your body through and over the tongues of fire to release ghostly fingers grabbing, desperately holding onto you for dear life. That's when shivers run up your spine and toward your scalp, letting you know that you've been screaming all along.

7. I'm a Scorpio, and I love and dream of many things blue, deep, and passionate. The color itself is a mystery and at times hold the sadness in its eyes before a storm. But sometimes I cannot forget the great poet who once wrote:

A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth,
Entering the whirlpool.

- T. S. Eliot

And then, I lose my life in the sea as it somehow merges with the heavens.