27 Day Karma Free Writing Prompts - Honorarium

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Sunday, April 4, 2010

Day #16 - Theme: Lies

#16. Theme: Lies.

14 comments:

  1. Intent to deceive is fraud.

    I think fraud is a lie.

    I work at a place where people are trained to use words. Words and service are our stock and trade.

    I work at a place where people speak well.

    I work at a place where people tell stories, interpret texts, make meaning of life.

    I work at a place where words are important. Words...where they come from, what was meant when the words were first spoken, why we use them now.

    I work at a place where words and service are all we really have...on a good day.

    I work at a place where sentences are made. Sentences that make sense. Good sentences, they are. Sentences that have precise words; sentences that use correct grammar.

    I work at a place where sentences pull you in, entertain, enlighten and inspire.

    I work at a place where simple questions are asked and epic sentences reply.

    Long sentences. Convoluted sentences. Sentences that are poetic. Sentences that are emotional. Sentences that are powerful. Sentences that are edgy.

    I work at a place where sentences use the same words but one day mean one thing and another day something else.

    I work at a place that professes the truth. I work at a place that questions the truth. I work at a place that calls for conviction.

    I work at a place that uses words.

    I work at a place that takes the edges of words, their shadows, their scents and pretends these are their wholes.

    I work at a place that uses words.

    Words, all we have on a good day.

    I work at a place that uses words like a barracuda uses its mouth.

    You never know you've been hit until you look behind you and you see the blood streaming in the water.

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  2. inkydinkyparlezvous: funny, how it ends with an animal. i did the same! snakes are slippery and so is the truth. anyways, that's what i got from your post. thanks!

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  3. I admire Henry David Thoreau. He famously said: ”I always tell the truth, so that I won’t have to remember what I said.”

    Delivering a lie must be hard work. It’s like junk food. Quick and easy, but getting rid of the toxins makes me wonder why we bother? I’d rather live organic.

    When someone doesn’t tell the truth you can tell. Some play poker face better than others, but the truth always wriggles its way out. Not telling the whole truth—that makes it a lie nonetheless. Lies are sneaky and slippery and even a masterful liar looks like they’re putting in effort.

    I prefer the truth. You can tell, because when it’s set free—it’s loose and out there. Lies are ugly, lies are thorny. Lies cause hurt and pain.

    Half-truths and white lies? Sorry, I must be a truth purist. There’s no halfway to telling the truth. They say the truth will set you free. Because you know what you’re dealing with. Even if it’s a spotted pesky animal—you can potty train it.

    Lies are cowardly by nature. If cloaked and hiding in the shadows? I’d rather stay inside, and look at the sunny side of the street from afar.

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  4. "On Word Safari"

    Rushing out into life to catch wit and wisdom
    Hunting words like butterflies -
    I usually come up empty-handed.
    I lay down my net.
    Resolve not to CATCH the words on butterfly wing ...
    but to join them ...

    Now I feel more alive! Warm and buoyant !
    I am fluttering within - teeming with authentic ideas from my Being ...
    ideas that know no bounds .....
    and barely enough words .......

    Let me stop,
    to think about this ...

    Oh, NO - where have my butterfly buddies gone ?????
    I've lost them !

    Wake up heart and help me see .....

    Oh, there - they're sipping cool dewdrops
    on fresh blooms ...

    Reconnecting with them,
    drinking just enough water drops .....
    sharing words that fly .....



    An Asian translation:
    Thinking is a net, with which you'll never catch the heart.
    Follow your heart - the thoughts follow.

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  5. Ah, nice... I do so enjoy reading these posts.

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  6. For years now, my right ear will cramp if someone is telling me a lie. It's my own personal lie-o-meter. There are several reason's why, and today's prompt just connected another dot.

    I’m not lying. I’m not lying. I’m not…

    I stare at swollen eyes, witnessing the hypnotic trance from some foreign, unfamiliar, though righteous person looking back at me. The melodic rhythm, the cadence holding me in its arms, there at the brink of a nervous breakdown.

    And I wasn’t lying – at least not that time – I really didn’t come to tattle on my brother. But step-father couldn’t be convinced. Maybe he’d had a hard day, maybe the nightly ritual, his own familiar beat, wasn’t taking the edge off. Mom, “grandma”, and “grandpa” watched, but no one came to my defense, their eyes instead focused on the ice clinking around their scotch and water.

    Jimmy knew I wasn’t lying. But he also knew better than to speak up. He’d learned. It took several smacks across the face and one punch to the gut, but he knew what Greg could do when crossed. Best to stay focused on the TV show, the one said I knew the end to before walking out to the bar, “just you wait and see.”

    Damn it. I wasn’t lying and I had to have someone acknowledge it, even if it was the wild creature in the mirror. If I’d been paying more attention to the world around me, I might have heard his angry stride now the hall, or the bedroom door being thrown open, but I had no warning.

    In the time it took me to spin around and face him, his arm, strong from years of tennis, cocked, back-handing me across the jaw. Stunned, I stumbled back, the coolness of the bathroom wall in stark contrast to the warm urine flowing down my leg.

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  7. The teenage girls from the projects had a raw truth with a dangerous edge. The project boys were connivers, conning already. I was onto them and they knew it. I was so happy when I left that city to go to college.

    My college roommate was from a wealthy town where everyone belonged to country clubs. She had gone to private schools and had so many sweaters and those wide leg tweed trousers. And, oh my god, three winter coats. My one was two years old and had to make it four more years. The only thing she hadn't had was the projects.

    I loved her. She was so daring, so smart, so rich, so bold in her sexuality. We were fearless together.

    She fell for Danny. I smelled trouble. A no-good project boy on a football scholarship.

    He started lying to her from the start. She refused to see it. The more I warned her, the more I lost her.

    First he landed in jail for stabbing a guy in our favorite bar. My friend diligently visited him in the state pen.

    "He's an asshole," I pleaded. "White trash."

    "But he's so intelligent and funny," she said as she started to defend him. Who knew that years later she would become a famous lawyer.

    Fast forward 30 years.

    She lightens her hair and has those permanent eyebrows and mascara painted on -- or is it tattooed?

    "What's up" I sniff, smelling the lying son-of-a-bitch project boy lurking.

    "Oh, just taking care of myself." It was him. She lied to me, the only person who warns her off bad men.

    A year later we're out and bump into his old friend. "My wife and I just came back from vacation with Danny and his wife."

    "I thought they were divorcing," she asks. The naive rich white girl getting conned by the project boy again.

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  8. Everything I write is a lie.

    I am sitting down in a chair that I never sit in.

    I am typing on my brand new iPad. It is perfect and it completes me. I waited online with pirates in the valley for over 2 days to purchase it. One fellow with a beard and not from this country was set to buy more than one. We argued about that for a short time, about only being allowed to buy one and it escalated quickly. He seemed to know the rules. He offered to settle it by, “cutting my fucking balls off if I didn’t shut my fat fucking face.”

    Pretty sure that’s what he said.

    I wanted to be the first in my neighborhood. I wanted it more than that ice cream sandwich the ding ding man sold in the summertime on my street just outside of Bonneventure.

    So now I have one. It is fast and shiny and powerful. I can now begin my novel and or screenplay.

    The rain has started again.

    A dog barks at the approaching mailman. The mailman maced a dog down the street last Friday, but the dog kept charging. Got a good piece of the mailman. The dog will be destroyed tomorrow if no one comes and adopts him. I think the dog’s name is Chet. He was a mixed breed mongrel. His owner came to my house and asked if I had heard anything, if I’d be willing to testify in a court of law. He had a beard. And his wife who stood five feet behind him as he did all the talking also had a beard. They were curious to me. He spoke fast with an Albanian accent. His hair was almost gone on the top of his head, but he had a strong beard.

    Once when I worked at a bottling plant there was this married couple Pat and Pat. Pat ran the label machine. It was an archaic machine that slapped wet labels on glass bottles of soda. It was the last step in the process before they were boxed and then laid on pallets. More than once a week the label machine would fire up too strong and the metal slappers would miss the labels completely and then they would slam onto the bottles, smashing one after another, spraying glass and soda everywhere. Pat wasn’t deaf but he spoke as though he never learned to speak properly. He had a high-pitched squeak. He was able to form letters but his voice was so high and raspy, it was uniquely odd, especially when the machine would go berserk and he would yell and scream, never really knowing how to shut the thing down. Hundreds of bottles would explode before he could stop the line.

    Pat’s wife Pat was perhaps the ugliest woman I’d ever met in that town. She too sounded funny when she spoke. Maybe she took on Pat’s voice the way couples take on the queer patterns of their partners. She was shorter than Pat and wore glasses that fell off her face. She was short, with short blond hair, average body, bloused in work shirt and pants one couldn’t gauge much. She was smelly up close however. She worked on the line somewhere else. She and Pat barked at each other on and off work, in the warehouse, in the break-room when we played spades. They were a freakish couple, but had senses of humor. One afternoon Pat put a live boa constrictor someone found in the warehouse inside Pat’s locker in the break-room.

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  9. So I was with this guy who, all of a sudden, had trouble getting it up. It happens men, right? But you don’t like to talk about it, so we women get left in the dark, trying to figure out what happened. Anyway, I’m dating this guy for quite awhile and he gets stuck, he just can’t get it up, and we can’t discuss it because it’s definitely not ‘up’ for discussion. It’s just not UP at all these days.

    One night, I go over to his place and we get naked and move to the bedroom. I pull back the covers on my side of the bed and there’s an earring there. A woman’s earring. Just one. A little dangler, gold with a shiny stone, and it’s not mine. I pick up the earring and really look at it. Definitely not mine. I’m standing by the side of the bed holding this little dangler, looking at my boyfriend laying there with his little dangler, and I don’t even ask. I just put the earring back down where I found it, and start to get dressed. I’m out of there.

    He sits up abruptly and says, kind of panicked, “Wait, don’t go.”

    “Wait for what?” I ask. “A lame explanation?”

    “Patrick (his best friend) told me to plant the earring in bed to make you think I could have sex . . .” he trailed off.

    “ . . . with other women?” I finish his sentence.

    “You’re a moron,” I yell as I slam the door behind me.

    But he’s a creative moron and I know I’ll miss him.

    Then, a strange thing happens.

    I don’t miss him.

    I don’t miss him at all.

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  10. I was at a little neighborhood bar in New York City with some girlfriends having a drink, when we met some guys.

    My guy asks me, “What do you do?”
    I decide that I don’t want to say I’m an actress because the next question is always, “What have you done?” and I don’t feel like listing my resume tonight.

    “I’m a nurse,” I say, sipping my drink.

    “Oh, that’s interesting,” he says. “Where do you work?”

    We’re only a few blocks away from Doctor’s Hospital so I tell him I work there.

    Then he asks, “How do you feel about the strike?”

    Shit, what strike? I freeze. I haven’t done my nurse homework. I don’t know anything about a strike. I’m stuck in my lie, unable to find any creative way out, so I opt to come clean. I even volunteer why I lied. He buys me a drink. The conversation gets more interesting after that.

    We go back to my place, where I get to play nurse, without any worries of a strike.

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  11. In repose
    Questions, ponder
    in reflection
    Memories, with clear vision
    of once, and how it was
    and, then
    this, "fanciful piece,"
    of romantic, nomadic nuances
    Blessings child
    May unrest
    plague your veiled
    awareness
    Somehow, reality will
    and surely awaken
    those of us
    deeply in denial

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  12. I haven't posted my lies, but I have been writing....

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