The Pirates are back in town

Photo Credit: salvadorkatz Flickr via Compfight cc 

The Pirates are back in town

Time has come unhinged. Sitting on your threshold, beautiful and empty, you wait for the night that will never come. When the clock struck 15 they threw away your holiday souvenirs and those vinyls you kept hanging onto. They promised you eternal daylight. When the clock struck 14, they erased your laughter lines. These parades and carnivals are mandatory from now on. You know you will never be allowed to cry again. The sun is shining and this singing in the street is here to stay. When the clock struck 13, they took your family albums. They say dreaming is forbidden now. The time merchants seemed harmless at first, but once you started listening, you were doomed. When the clock struck 12, they spoke to you sweetly through the cracks in the wall. It doesn’t have to hurt this much, they said. You were warned to keep away from the windows and you really should have locked your doors. You knew the pirates were back in town and you should have known what to expect when the clocks started going backwards today.

GloPoWriMo Day 22 - "The clock can't strike 13."

I combined today's prompt with the Day 18 prompt ("First, find a poem in a book or magazine (ideally one you are not familiar with). Use a piece of paper to cover over everything but the last line. Now write a line of your own that completes the thought of that single line you can see, or otherwise responds to it. Now move your piece of paper up to uncover the second-to-last line of your source poem, and write the second line of your new poem to complete/respond to this second-to-last line. Keep going, uncovering and writing, until you get to the first line of your source poem, which you will complete/respond to as the last line of your new poem. It might not be a finished draft, but hopefully it at least contains the seeds of one."). I went off-prompt on Day 18 and I really wanted to try this one out, so I revised one of my old poems. You can read the original poem, Time Merchants, here. I have to admit that I twisted the rules a little and I changed things around a lot during revision.