The thorn in my eye makes it weep, not bleed. I cover it with my hand, to watch, one-eyed, a gigantic white-haired man who ages years as I look. When I can see again two-eyed – the barb withdrawn from an eye dimmed but not entirely wrecked – it is to observe glass flowers shatter in front of me, suddenly. This upsets me. I forget about the man who loomed so large; forget how, daily, hourly, he is shrinking even as I fail to watch.
[See revised version, posted 3 July 2024.]
The Na/GloPoWriMo prompt for day three was to write a surreal prose poem. It wasn't hard to find the material in the day I've had. To decode: friend drove me to another town to catch the movie The Trust Fall, about Julian Assange, on the big screen. I already understood his heroism, vilification and persecution, but this revealed it in horrifying detail. Grasses growing along the way activated my allergies; by the time we got there one eye was so sore and weeping, I had to watch the movie one-eyed. Home at last, my prescription drops eased the symptoms. I accidentally knocked one of my favourite glasses, incorporating a decoration of flowers, on to the floor, where it well and truly broke.
Belatedly combining the NaPoWriMo prompts with the Poem A Day prompts from Poetic Asides, I'm stretching things just a little to backtrack and make this one fit the PAD Day 5 prompt to write a poem with the title 'Tell — ' [and fill in the blank].