Jump Scare
There’s creepy music on the stair despite nobody being there no boom-box on the landing sits and I am scared out of my wits because I know how this one goes (and every movie villain knows) the ingenue without a clue (as ingenues are wont to do) walks slowly up the steps – so dark – you’d think the family dog would bark at the intruder we’re aware should our insoucient damsel dare ascend those steps where he stands ready (ten knife-sharp fingers has our Freddy) ready to eviscerate our heroine, but now he’s late the curtain falls, relief from dread! Until the sequel, when she’s dead.
Rarely does a prompt yield the best poetry, but it’s good for waking up a sluggish brain. Or, as Richard Hugo wrote, “One way of getting into the world of the imagination is to focus on the play rather than the value of words—if you can manage it you might even ignore the meanings for as long as you can, though that won’t be very long.” Not sure how imaginative this is, but the prompt Robert Brewer gave us to work with, today, was to write a “trope poem.” How is it that we know the tropes – they are, by definition, cliché – and yet, they can still make us feel something like fear or anticipation? It cannot be that we expect something new and surprising. Sequels work precisely because we know what to expect and however bitterly we complain when we get exactly what we knew we’d get, we keep spending money going back for more of the same. Maybe in a world that’s changing so fast, the superficial fantasy isn’t the fantasy at all – the predictability of the storyline is.
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