From the dictionary prompt game!
Words: cuneiform, bird, repulse, extensible, candor
10:55—11:20 PM
A/N: I think I edited out the word candor when I typed it up, but it was involved in the process! Tabbing doesn't work here, so imagine the line of words falling diagonally.

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The poem could take up an entire page, depending on where he broke the lines. It could fall with discursive disjoint (like his tripping inner monologue) if he would only seize these scattered lines and

SNAP

them

like

frozen

sticks. Frozen, because the lines were no longer green and supple. Gone were the hours of weaving twines of words into wreathes elegant and dangerous and satisfyingly whole, like a snake biting its tail. Now he clipped away, a gnarled old man at a gnarled old bonsai shrunken and mottled with the stale air.

These thoughts lurked as Ian utterly failed to gaze out his kitchen window that morning, a window pasted shut with opaque frost. He tapped the peeling frame, half-startled in his sleepiness to find that the sheer melodrama of his pre-morning diatribe did not sear away the seal of winter. It had melted the foggy film from his mind, at least. Ian pressed his palm against the sharpness of the cold glass until his pulse throbbed at every contact point to reproachfully remind him that his pain receptors, if nothing else, were in working order. His fingers twitched reflexively away from the pane. Pulse and repulse. The kinetic energy in his hand triggered the rest of Ian’s body; he regripped his #1 DAD coffee mug and forced open the window, sloshing a bit of hazelnut brew onto the vanilla bean floor tiles. A breeze blew spearmint into the room. Outside, a bird jabbed at the papery layer of snow on the ground.

Everything is a medium, Ian thinks. His hand had gone numb with the conflicting sensations of cold then hot, stagnant ice then searing flame, repulse then pulse. He leaves the window open to meet the stifling kitchen air. When a cold front meets a warm front—thunderstorms. In the sterile white snow with eyes as blank as its medium, the bird jabs its own cuneiform pattern, an ancient ritual of all living things. In the warm brown kitchen, Ian unravels at last in verdant, twining cursive, messy but vital. The automatic joins the introspective.

Pre-history ended when humanity learned to write.

Not entirely disregarded, the poem that is not quite a page is finished with a coffee-stain wreath. Ian Braeburn, M.D., plots a romance novel on the back of a science journal over a bowl of Cheerios; lightening is forked in tongues of extensible human speech.