Yeah Write #103: Palpitation ( #amwriting #flashfiction #poetry)
Phantom fingers slide and gooseflesh rises
As static hairs stand stiff — sizzling in sync.
Limbs quiver, lips stick; a whimper reprises.
Pulse quickens, mouth dry, panic on a brink.
It scrapes, clicks, and hisses promises dark.
Tonight it slides and slithers inside out.
Abaddon comes to bind blood’s watermark.
Tonight the last midnight beckons all dread.
Ink red bleeds paper skin; claws shred sinew.
Oh, hide not in the wardrobe or abed.
Never to rest or to die from pains anew.
14 comments on “Yeah Write #103: Palpitation ( #amwriting #flashfiction #poetry)”
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Aspiring writer, wife, mother of two, owner two cats. Teacher, lover of science, books, science fiction, fantasy, and video games.
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Laissez Faire 
I’m standing up right now clapping because this was that good! I knew from the first line that it was going to be. What a great way to start it off.
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Oh, yeah! So happy you enjoyed it. I find poetry extremely difficult to write and I tend to fall into a rhyme and fixed number of syllabus which probably makes it more painful than it needs to be. 😮 I do love horror though, so if that came through I’m happy. 😀
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Lovely job incorporating both prompts into this acrostic! I did have some difficulty with the line “It scrapes, clicks, and hisses promises dark.” It reads a little awkwardly — it feels like it’s either missing an apostrophe and an ‘s’ (on ‘It’), or missing a comma after ‘hisses’. You had some wonderful turns of phrase though: “a whimper reprise” was especially good.
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*reprises
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Thanks Asha. It /had/ been dark promises, but wouldn’t you know I couldn’t find anything to rhyme with promises. Why did I rhyme? I have no earthly idea, but once I started I couldn’t not do it. So I took a poet’s liberty and put the adjective after the noun. 😮 “hisses a dark promise” became “hisses promises dark” maybe a comma could help the sound “hisses promises, dark”. Commas and I fued a lot so it’s an iffy thing. 🙂 I thought I would challenge myself with getting the prompts to work with a poem. I’m glad it didn’t crash and burn. “whimper reprises” btw was the first line I wrote 🙂
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Ah! This makes so much sense and now that you’ve written it out, I see it. You’re right, the comma would have made all the difference, but I do appreciate the tense detente between you and commas.
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And I finally learned how to pronounce detente. LOL What did I do before Internet? I pronounced cool words wrong.
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Hahaha ask my about “awry” and how I pronounced it till I was 25 and set right by a friend!
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😀
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Oh my! I really enjoyed this.
“Ink red” is an amazing image particularly combined with the paper skin, but the word order tripped me up a little. (I know you had to get the I in there first though)
I love the line: Abaddon comes to bind blood’s watermark.
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I did take some liberties to make the beat work. I loved all the b’s in the Abaddon line. It sounded like the thud of a heart ready to be crushed in the hand of the angel of death…muahahahahaha!
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This almost read like a witch’s curse, which was fun and super creepy. I also stumbled a bit on the “Ink red” order, but I also kind of loved that line the most at the same time. That could be because I read horror like I watch it…through my fingers.
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I did struggled with those lines. I don’t generally write poetry and I always have a part where I struggle to keep the beat to a mind-aching frustration and the desire to get the imagery I want. It /almost/ sounds right. Gah. Don’t know why I felt compelled to rhyme and have syllables. Self torture fitting for the genre I suppose 😛
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There’s some good and gritty imagery here. I especially liked “claws shred sinew.” The word play of “Lips stick” is clever, but it might be introducing an image that doesn’t necessarily relate to the tone of the poem.
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