First reply, yay! (I hope I'm not jumping in too early or anything...) O.o

This is my first time participating in the FWG! *waves* Hi!

I decided to take on the poetry prompt. I'm not really into "twoo wuv" or romance, but the challenge of writing something about it without those words was too fun to pass up. And the prompt fit perfectly into my idea of a good romance, so I ran with it.

The poem is mostly free-verse; no particular structure or anything fancy. Just words. I tried to make it rhyme at first (I like rhyming ones), but it sounded too forced so I dropped that. I'm not sure if it's over 40 lines or not...the words wouldn't stop coming out and I never bothered to count them... *cringes* (I hope this doesn't disqualify me from the prompt or anything. If it does, sorry!)

Anyway, hope you enjoy it! And please give me all the constructive criticism you've got! I thrive on it! =D

Love

Ours is not made of roses and candles
Or daydreams dipped in sunset's gold.
Ours is not spun of fairytale's flax
Or starry gazes to fix and hold.

For candlelight flickers and roses wither
And dreams, however sweet, will yield to dawn.

No.

Ours is the unromantic romance.

Sprawling, stubborn, untidy,
Covered in bruises and grass stains.

But
A soft and subtle warmth creeps in,
Slowly,
To temper the rough edges.

We swallow back fear to taste the change;
And with clouts and embraces applied when necessary,
We steer our friend-ship into deeper waters

For ours is the journey
Comprised of pain and promises,
Tears and joys,
Arguments, denials,
Reluctant realizations, awkward steps,
And a few quiet moments
To drink in the delight of
Knowing another Self.

Ours is the dance
Of blindness becoming sight,
Brokenness being healed,
Strength filling weakness;
Two wills
Entwining together
To be forged, ever stronger, into
One.

And ours is the mountain, firm and forever;
Standing through the storms of Summer
And the snows of Winter,
Taking the beauty,
The glory,
And the hardship
That comes with every season.

Thanks for starting this writer's group and coming up with the awesome prompts, harold! (And anyone else who was involved!) I can't wait to see what everyone else has up their sleeves. =)

I'm working on my submissions still; just a bump to remind people: 2 days left for postings this session!

Edited to check the current Fanpop time.

I'm waiting until the submission time is over to respond to your post, Dearheart.

*****************
The jokester

"Then you show up and drink my poison!"

Barnaby laughed with the others, but his heart wasn't in it. He was concentrating too hard. Should he have picked one that was more ribald?

"You didn't tell it right!"

He'd heard that one before, but Jim really had a good delivery, and got a big laugh. Barnaby thought he was ready, but just couldn't interject into the flow of jokes of the older guys.

"Don't worry - it'll stretch!"

Every year his brother Al would meet with his friends for their reunion. They each made a point of coming back to Gull Cove the same time each year, just for this night. Al was ten years older than him; Barnaby had grown up modeling himself after Al, always trying to be like his big brother. Al, for his part, had taken the kid under his wing and never tired of his tagging along during his teen years. So Barnaby had become something like a mascot to these reunions, long before he could understand most of the conversation, playing in the restaurants or sitting on a stool watching the men play pool.

"That's not my dog."

That was how they bonded, how these men had bonded with one another all his life: they'd get together, eat, drink, and tell jokes. Not all of them were in comedy professionally, but they all had a connoisseur's appreciation for the art of telling a joke. Good jokes, bad jokes, raunchy jokes, outrageous jokes, short jokes, long jokes...by the time he was seventeen, Barnaby had heard thousands. And every year there were more.

"Iceberg, Goldberg - same thing!"

He'd gone away to university in New Hampshire, and so tonight was Barnaby's first reunion in four years, his first as an adult. The guys (he wanted to think of them as "the guys" and not the men) were noticeably older, but they joked and talked with each other as easily as ever. They accepted him, too, but this time was different. Barnaby was a man, now, too...he was determined that tonight, he was going to tell a joke.

He just had to work up the nerve. And then not blow it.

"Don't see many of them around nowadays, do ya?"

Barnaby laughed at that, one of his favorites from his childhood, watching old "Dave Allen" reruns on TV with his family. He took a few deep breaths.

"Hey, buddy, why the long face?"

The guys groaned at that one. If that wasn't his cue, he didn't know what was. Barnaby stuck his hand up in the air, drawing attention as he finished his beer, then leaned forward to set the foamy glass down on the table. He brought his hand down, glanced at the older men on either side of him, waiting expectantly, bemusedly for what he would bring, and then he began, his voice pitched low so they had to pay attention to hear him.

"Joe was driving down a country road late one night when he came to a four-way stop." One thing you did, is you always gave the characters names, to engage the audience.

"He slowed down at the stop sign," Barnaby paused, holding his hand out on an imaginary wheel, and looked both ways. "He looked both ways...nobody there." He shrugged, put both hands on the wheel, "So he drove on through. BAM!" He said this last a little louder, a little faster, to pump it up a bit.

"Suddenly there's a cop car, with the sirens and lights." Barnaby mimed turning the wheel, looking over his shoulder.

"The cop gets out of his car and walks over" Here Barnaby sat up straight, shoulders back, and swayed from side to side in a parody of a highway patrolman, mimed tapping on the glass of a car window, and then resumed Joe's more slouched body language as he mimed rolling down the window.

"Uh...what seems to be the problem, officer?"
He sat up straight again. "You failed to stop at that sign, sir."
He slouched, grinned, looking up and out the imaginary driver's side window, "Hey, I slowed down, but there wasn't anyone there. So I kept going. What's the difference?"
He sat up, mimed removing sunglasses (never mind this was supposed to happen at night - Barnaby knew that all highway patrolmen wore mirrorshades): "Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to step out of the car."
He slouched, looking furtive, his voice getting a little shrill: "Why, what did I do?"
He sat up, mimed opening the car door, "Get out of the car, sir!" Then he resumed his narrator voice: "The cop grabs him, hauls him out of the car" here he did a quick mime of Joe flailing as he's picked up bodily by the cop: " 'Wait - what?' Then the cop throws him on the ground, pulls out his night stick..." Barnaby mimed doing just that, then started swinging it like a bat "and starts beating Joe about the face and shoulders. 'Now...'" Barnaby punctuates each word with a mimed swing, "'Do you want me to stop, or slow down?'"

He got a polite laugh out of that, but he felt elated nonetheless: he'd told his joke, it had gone off well, and now he was one of them. All the tension went out of him, but the adrenalin was making him a little jittery. He went to the bar and ordered another drink, but Al stepped in to pay before he could. Al's big hand clapped him on the shoulder and squeezed. Barnaby smiled, nodded. Here's where Al was going to tell him how proud he was of his kid brother, how he did good.

Al got his own drink, then leaned forward, smiling, and said "This drunk walks into a diner..."

*********

Edit: to make up for insufficient proofreading before posting to Fanpop.

Whoa.............................That's Alot Of Writing.............I Can't Type That Much. How Can I Get In The Fanpop's Writer's Group????? Please Answer! ????????????

Simple: just read this article (link) and post something in this forum, and/or the next session once it starts.

There's about 4 hours left for this session. You can post anything, not just stuff from the prompts.

Edit: it's just over four hours left for submissions.

One hour left!

So now it's time for discussion, responses and critiques of this session's submissions.

There are only two submissions and both are great. Love by Dearheart is amazing. Don't worry Dearheart I counted it for you, your exactly 40 lines. I have nothing bad to say about your poem, it didn't include the forbidden words and it's amazingly written.
The jokester by Harold is also fantastic. At first I didn't know what was going on, but then my brain clicked on and I love it. I don't have anything bad to say about it either, maybe I'm too nice or just can't find any flaws. Either way great job and how did you come up with it? Its so good.
Congratulations to both of you.

Thank you, liissaaxx! I'm looking forward to seeing more of your writing.

Just a few more hours for critiques before the end of this session...

Dearheart: I like it. I see that you also posted this in the Love club; I'm cross-posting my comments there, too. I have to admit I've been putting off providing a critical response, because there's so much there. But my procrastination has almost run me out of time, so here goes...

Your poem does have Love in the title, but that's more my mistake for not being explicit. I actually think it's kind of a clever misdirection to have the title be "love", since the poem reads to me more about the journey - the relationship starting as friends, sometimes antagonistic, and then developing over the course of the poem into something more of a trusting partnership.

At the same time, the title needs to be something definite like "Love", for the "ours" references to work consistently. As it is, most of the "ours" references can stand alone, as an archaic syntax saying that those things belong to you: the dance is ours, the mountain in ours, the journey is ours, the unromantic romance is ours. The only place where it wouldn't have worked (without a definite object as the title) is in the first stanza: "Ours is not" can't be read as "Not belongs to you"! So, again, nice. Given that, you might consider playing up that misdirection aspect even further, by holding off on references without the syntactical ambiguity until the end of the poem, so that the reader is unsure which reading of "ours" in intended until the end.

That's all broad idea-spinning, though. The actual sense progression of the poem is well done indeed. Starting from a rejection of typical lyric tropes, then presenting a gritty, dirty and definitely physical relationship as a contrast. The people have fear, which resonates from the incipient and scary emotional intimacy, change in general, and the experienced physical harm (bruises, clouts, pain, tears, arguments, denials, etc). Then you go further and present hope and trust, despite the fear and pain: the relationship isn't lovey-dovey, there's plenty of argument and conflict, and there's no expectation that that's going to get better. But despite that (and because of that?), the two are growing together, knowing each other, and being the stronger for it. The relationship isn't a fantasy of romance and longing, but it is committed. It's like a love letter written by an old married couple, knowing that each isn't perfect and also un-perfectable, but still adoring each other.

The physical imagery is compelling: sprawling and untidy suggest the inevitable degeneration of the masks that new lovers present to each other, trying to impress. Eventually, though, they end up without makeup, unshaven, half-dressed, unbrushed teeth, lolling on the sofa, asking "Honey, can you get me something to drink?" The clouts and bruises suggest that the conflicts have become physical in the past, supported by the fear. There's a lot of language that could be innuendo, too: grass stains suggest rolling around in the grass, and word choice is often deliberately sensual: firm, embraces, warmth, taste, drink, entwining...

At the moment, I feel like this may be one of the top five love poems I've ever read. It should be read by committed couples on their anniversaries. Certainly I would love to be addressed by such a poem.

It's not perfect, of course, but I really like it. While I enjoyed the accent on the pun, I didn't feel that you needed to hyphenate friendship. I'm not sure that you need to have all the punctuation that's there, either: the line breaks are sufficient, usually, to signify a slight pause, both in reading and in sense. The first stanza's sense is "Ours is not spun of starry gazes to fix and hold." That feels a little awkward to me, both because one doesn't spin a gaze, and because I'm not sure how gazes can be expected to be fixed and held in order to make something. That is to say, I understand how one can fix your gaze on something, or hold the gaze of someone, but those are actions, processes that don't parallel the objects in the rest of the stanza. The second stanza - I should say a couplet - has a wonderful cadence; it rolls off the tongue as golden syrup. But it suggests that the couple has rejected the romantic ideas and feelings because they won't last. Or is it that they felt these things, but those feelings did not last? It's not clear whether it's a rejection of fantasy, or a statement of the impermanence of infatuation. I don't know that it can work as both, for me. I'd almost rather the "comes" in the second-to-last stanza read "come", so that it would refer to the beauty, the glory and the hardship, all three coming with each season.

I love that the poem feels so intimate, and yet we finish reading it with no sense of the attributes of either party. Are they male? Female? Young? Old? Beautiful? Homely? None of that matters to the sense of the poem, and that's beautiful, too.

Sorry for taking so long! Me and my family have been doing a lot of housework and getting ready for vacation, so I haven't been able to really sit down and think about the submissions, lol.

Anywho...obviously, the only other submission besides mine is yours, harold. And I thought it was very clever. I wasn't sure what was going on either at first, but like lissaaxx said, something clicked. You painted a very fun, vivid, down-to earth picture; I could see the group laughing and joking with each other in my head so easily...and of course, Barnaby was a great character.

The punchlines put in between the first few paragraphs was jarring at first because they didn't seem to match up with anything, but once I realized what was going on and read the story through a second time, I really liked it. And the ending was cleverly done. Overall, very nice job. I enjoyed it a lot. =D

Thanks. Half an hour, and we'll be looking to start the next session.

The next session is posted here: link