Day 2, Poem 2

My friends still have 0 words on their NaNoWriMo‘s. Nooooooo!! (You may think I’m being over-dramatic, but I really do stress out about other people’s procrastination).

Today I put together a NaNoWriMo display at the library, and when I went to the site to download the graphics, I felt this ache in my heart not to be updating my word count. Last year I had Europe to distract me through November. But this November, I’m daily fighting the temptation to throw the rest of my life and projects away for a while and plunge in, just for that wonderful sense of accomplishment you get when you update your word count every day (I mean at least there, those words do mean SOMETHING, even if it takes you two years to untangle the mess you made of them).

I did feel a nice sense of accomplishment while working on ETD tonight; I reworked what’s essentially the “emotional climax” of the novel so that it resonates more deeply and ties into the rest of the novel better as well. I even discovered a few new connections. That means I only have one chapter left to revise, but it’s going to need some pretty big revisions just to make the logistics of it work. It’s a bummer to have logistics get in the way because I do like the last chapter pretty much the way it is. But unless children start going to school 7 days a week, I’ll need to do some tweaking. (This stuff didn’t even exist in draft one, and draft two was created over MANY long months — so many long months that I lost track of things like how many days in a row the main character was going to school. Oops.)

I wrote my first poem based on a LiveJournal prompt tonight! Here it is, November’s 2nd Poem:

She says if I saw it today
I’d think it was funny.
But all I can remember
is a gray-faced girl
with blood in the bathtub,
eyes and ears and tongues
mutilated to corn-hash mush.
See No Evil
Hear No Evil
Speak No Evil

Like the three monkeys,
we were three little girls
and one unexpected boy
huddled together
in one big bed
With screams from the living room,
our eyes closed tight
was not enough to save us.

When I sit beside you on the couch
you confirm what I remember:
This was never funny
You grew up listening to
the noises in crumbling walls,
and made ghosts your only fear.
Three little girls again,
and you the unexpected boy —
well, your parents only wanted one.
And after that, you knew what happened
to your brother.

You know it’s not funny
but you find a way to laugh away fear
and that’s why I crawl into bed with you
and imagine myself brave after all
burrow into your neck
to see no evil
hear no evil
speak no evil