Writers Digest: Prompt of the Week - "Driven to Insanity"

Okay, so Writer's Digest posts a weekly prompt on their website, as an exercise to warm-up writers. I thought it would be fun. One writing assignment per week - how hard could it be? I recall the brief time I spent in a writing class a few years ago. At the end of each class, our instructor would give us an assignment that would be read to the class the following week. Deadlines are good.

I was excited to read the prompt of the week - You just run into an old lover - the one that got away - on Valentine's Day. What happens?

I started brainstorming, but before I had time to put a coherent story together, I realized that the prompt was for the previous week. I was too late.

Okay, I thought - what is this week's prompt?

Write a 26-line poem using all the letters of the alphabet, where the first line starts with the letter "A," the second "B," the third "C," etc., culminating with the final line starting with "Z."

I groaned. I think I've written two poems in the twenty years since I spewed countless lines of self-pity during my high school days. Oh well. A deadline is a deadline. I played around with it for about forty-five minutes.

So here goes nothing...

Driven to Insanity

And almost as quickly as it had started it had ended
Bricks from the crumbled façade fell with a thud onto the hood of my car
Cries of the fallen left in my deadly wake resonated in my head
“Damn,” I think. “Now, I’m going to be late for work.”

Eleven dead, thirty-six injured
Far from the death toll I had planned
Gunning my Chevrolet through the crowded open air marketplace
Higher, I thought. The number should be higher. Twenty-six to be exact.

I remember them falling one by one as the alphabet song played in my head
Just a few more, I thought, with my hands griped around the cold steering wheel
Killing by numbers never seemed so easy
Lives extinguished by a writer gone made

Maybe if the writer’s prompt had been more conventional
No one would have had to die on this morning
Or maybe if I had just spent more time, more effort, more tears it wouldn’t have to have been
Perhaps, instead, the fruitless years and countless rejection letters had finally taken their toll

Quincy the mailman screamed in terror as he met his fate underneath my front driver’s side tire
Rachel described the horrific scene to her best friend on her cell phone, until she too became part of the story
Samantha tried to duck to the left, but my reflexes proved better than she had expected
Thomas was oblivious, not knowing that the Miley Cyrus song blasting through his ipod would be his last

Under bright lights the doctors examined me
Volumes would be written about this in the future and I laughed at the irony
What would drive a man to such derangement? they asked each other
X-rays proved negative – oh come on, like you didn’t see that one coming?

Yes, I finally admitted, chuckling to myself– how much had been accomplished over the previous twenty-five lines?
Zero.