Weeeeeeeeeeeek+TEN!

==So this week is a looooong week. I encourage you to write more than one poem, and fill up our miscellaneous page. But seeing as this is a looooooooong week, I think we should all try to memorize a poem. One of your poems, of course ;) we would love love love to hear it when you get back.== ==And as a further challenge(if you're up to it)write a poem about someone you have never met before. You can either make them up all on your lonesome, or do some people hunting which is great fun. Look for the little details, the one sentence of dialogue, the life they have hidden in their eyes. And write them==

So this isn't poetry per se...but It fits with the prompt and I wrote it with that in mind, so heres a slammable flash fiction!

Gordon thought that maybe, just maybe, this time she would fall in love with him. For truly he had looked dashing in Egypt, when the buggy was spilling rocks into the sarcophagus caverns and he, in rippling leather three days unshaved face, had pulled her from her seat and made the jump. And sweating shirtless on the banks of Amazonian steam, with thick hands wrapped firmly around that anaconda’s head he had cut the perfect figure. Once again in India, while she held the precious Monkey he had risked his life and ribcage on that twelve story clothesline. But never had he ever driven a motorcycle. And now, for this, he thought surely she would fall in love with him. Rose was the type of girl you only find once. Gordon, the type of man you might possibly find everywhere, had known this when she bought the hot chocolate with peppermint that was bigger than she was, and for the backpack she wore which really wore her. It was leather, or it had been, but now was so patched latched and cached it had its own smiles and crags. “Life is Short: Take Risks!” said the bag. A canvas scrap. Gordon put down his paper on economics. He threw away his coffee. Life is short, take risks. What he failed to notice was the accompanying pin on the fated bag. “The World Is For Traveling”. But ten days later as he sat in the adjoining hotel room, trying vainly to push the images her hissing shower brought so colorfully to his head with the history book pictures he had studied for years, Gordon couldn’t believe that he was about to see the places he had only told his middle schoolers about. And he knew also that he had sold his car, his house, his job, and his life for this. And he tried to tell himself it was for the pharaohs, and the temples, and the ruins, and the things he thought he loved more than it all. But the shower hissed truth. This morning, in another adjoining hotel room, while she took another shower, and while he sat holding yet another photograph, Gordon thought that maybe he missed his car. Eight years on the run is a long time, and even though their safe-house in Switzerland was piling up his soul was melting slowly cracking popping from the heat of foreign beaches. Rose’s had their thorns, and his Rose had many. She didn’t know he carried a picture of her in his pocket. She didn’t know a lot of things, and secrets were filling up the spaces he once juiced with love. The shower turned off. Gordon put the picture in his pocket and tied his shoes. But now her hands were clenching his colander heart and every so often a wisp of her scarlet hair tickled his face. The old motorcycle drowned out the sounds her mouth made, so close to his ear, so close, he knew that for all his stupidity it was the lipstick that made him tingle, not the ricocheting bullets that pinged about them. And the cars that chased them down, three black and sleek and all too deadly, were still only the ambience for something Gordon knew might be the finale. The bike took the Venetian corner all too quickly. Hair on face. He didn’t miss his car anymore. Cobblestones rattled their way at impossible angles to the end, to the canal. He thought a thought he would never have written on the chalkboard. And he knew Mr. Connelly, twenty years math teacher, would have told him not possible. A bullet shattered Mr. Connelly. Her hands tightened. Life is Short: Take Risks. The bike cleared the canal like an angel, a miracle, an arc of triumph. Gordon closed his eyes, and entwined in his Rose he ascended to a heaven you would never find in the sarcophaguses. He thought maybe he should be worried about landing. But suddenly it seemed it didn’t matter.