The whole thing's been slightly edited for readability, mostly punctuation marks and I've made each cycle a separate strophe.
If you don't remember the order of the people , I don't blame ya. Here it is:
The finished product
From the sky the ground is small.
The skylarks wait for rain.
For fat worms turned from loosened loess;
alike, we turn in sleep, starlings stapled to a dark dawn.
We dream in synesthesia, our names are yellow
as the syllables coalesce and radiate through our adrenal glands
we mate with words, the sonics and the sky.
Names are birds. Headphone music.
Children are birds, are running toward the sound of fiddles.
All sugar-rushed and sunshine-hyper
as children, hungering for a Ritalin fix,
monkey-swing their mothers arms, sleep discarded
with fae-child verse and forgotten toys
and the faces of boys in the rain.
Are they crying? Who knows. It doesn't matter.
Cheese sandwiches mattered more than mostly everything.
Except the girl on the morning bus who smiled, once.
The world: a perforation of sidewalk, of signs, through pane.
Spun-on-its-head, your antenna hands unable to signal me,
I run blind and deaf to every warning bell
a nautilus shell indifferent to the tide
that has washed it on different prehistoric shores.
It is the flint under sand that toes have stepped on and walked away from.
It is sand in warm coleslaw after a day at the beach.
It is the water, receding as a wing, the saline wind
the traces of existence, ripples
a silken aphrodisiac among stagnant pools
and a drooling, fragrant man
stares out with vacant eyes, his face pocked from age
and his head bald, from too many winters, and shiny, because of too many summers.
He licked his lips and tasted last February.
How many months, how many words have slipped, bitter
your open mouth, I put my fingers into--the white of your orange-peel
smile, a child's misplaced caricature
bounding down the street on all fours.
<3 <3 <3
So awesome I think we should do it again! Anyone up for Round 2?
Same rules as before:
Each person is shown only the line before. The first person starts by writing the first line, then the second is shown that line and writes the second line which is shown to the third and so on until we reach the last person. That's one complete cycle. Repeat again from the start depending on the number of cycles we'll do.
The order will be decided by a list randomizer!
We'll be using the Notes system here on dA so this means that you'll send the note containing your line to the next writer and to me, since I'm moderating it. I'm participating as well, so I promise not to look at any of the lines I'm not supposed to be looking at until everything is done and over with.
Sign up for Exquisite Corpse Round 2 by commenting here or sending me a note!
We'll start next week Sunday, August 21, 2011, so register before then!








Oh, and definitely in for a second go.
You should post the results in a deviation, IMO.
This turned out so loverly!