Shuffle a deck of cards, pick out two, then explain why those two cards are at war.*
8 of Diamonds / Ace of Diamonds

Ace wasn't looking when 8 bit into a sugar packet, wanting something sweet to go with their cup of mud, too tired to grit.
Ace wasn't looking when 8 tripped over a garden hose, left on the lawn, the evidence of a green attempt, serpentine sort of setting it straight.
Ace only saw the cool in their coffee, the green in their blades, never had to open their eyes up before that dawn.
8 was there, ancestors in hand, ready to claim what it had all been leading up to, where it all began.
8 drew; Ace folded in upon themselves.
8 felt like a winner, a triumph made in the absence of mutual conflict, convinced that only one side was dealt a bad hand.
8 doesn't look when 4 wants something similar, something outside the family, refuses to see a diamond as a diamond, nothing learned.

After a summer of tree-nut allergies, you close your eyes to cross Merrimon Avenue, mouth full of sips, trying to prove that you can stay empty. If your job keeps scheduling you full-time hours for minimum-wage compensation, you will show your gratitude by eating handfuls of walnuts, hollowing your desire to spend a night on the street, with another person, eyes closed, a bed-lump for a passing car.
You spat out everything, when you saw two children running down the double-yellow line; they reminded you of waking up.
Doesn't this feel a bit tedious, some work you don't want to do?
Why have you been practicing winking, started brushing your teeth with a spirit?
You were going to buy a bus ticket for an answer, held a conversation past the minimum. Your job gives you free meals, even if it's killing you. You have places you want to go, people you want to lead away from empty.
They make a peanut-butter alternative, out of roasted soybeans, and it tastes good enough to remind you of everything you can do with a summer.
Get some rest.

You’re never getting those clothes back, the shirts that found their way into her wardrobe, covering a person you’ve seen at their most bare. They don’t belong to you, not anymore; she never belonged to you, only found her way into your covers.
You still wear pieces of her, walking down Merrimon Avenue, in one of her favorite outfits, feeling so warm that you have to go home, and change.
It’s okay.

Describe a place using your 5 primary-senses, without naming the place*

if this is what antiquity looks like, the fraying edges and coveted dust, then where are the eyes that no longer behold it, the obliviousness of their noses, or the skin that best knew this thinning itch? why has the nerve-bitten sleeve been reduced to the slickness of a debit card, the whisking out into a world of new skin, an age of smells to become accustomed to? so vintage, the way we buy the taste of the dead. call it a fresh fit, edgy rend, new frays, until your own eyes itch with dust.

sometimes, I wonder if I'm more attracted to failure than people, instead seeing people as an opportunity to fail since failure doesn't exist unless other people are involved. like, do I want to try to kiss this person because I might get rejected, and, wow, how exciting that rejection would be, to be stopped from moving forward, to have a moment of consequence? success has no consequence, no stop for your body to think over; it's just a vertical plummet, everything on the up and up. failure is what it all comes back to, in the same way a half-empty hourglass becomes a half-full hourglass, only a matter of time. like, if this is how it will always be, I better get attracted to what I attract. like, I failed every person I've ever loved, and they failed me, and in that way, we succeeded, knowing more of what to look out for, more to falsely-believe we can avoid. like, things are going to go well for whatever amount of time, and then it'll get exciting, with all the pain and the time to wait out the pain and the feeling that you'll never be attracted to anyone ever again and the consequence you never believed in and the rejection of self and the half-full hourglass becomes half-empty and this is what I really wanted. it must've been. if it wasn't, what are all those other people supposed to mean to me? they can't have failed. the failure was mine; it's the only thing I can own, or own up to, because it's the only way I can make what happened into a success and not just something that made me less of a person.

To show their opinion of a trivial weather, the snake eats its own rattle, only willing to stand against warning-signs. It is always raining in the snake's mouth, always something in there that won't stop shaking. The snake eats the rattle, then moves up, eating more and more of what they find the most trivial, that being the body that curls so easily. Their body tastes like caution, tastes like the apple they were brought by a body, a warning-sign that knew how to talk about the weather. When they have too much to say, they say nothing; when there is too much to eat, it eats away at them, wanting only to make something out of this shaking, to have something inside when the days are trivial. The snake calls their father when the sky won't stop, speaks of a need for new skin, asks what happened to apples offered when their opinion was enough, as the grass grows too thick to shake amongst.

and so it went, on October 3rd of 2015, the stupid-boy-shape figured out no one would ever again fall in love with them, not until they became a different person, or until they somehow became a person again, or until they were dead. and so they posted their meaningless finding on multiple outlets of social-media, because of the innate-absurdity of everything, and their lack of consequence. and Albert Camus was not there to figure out what was wrong with what the stupid-boy-shape had figured out. and Robin Williams was dead. and Robin Williams was again dead. and the stupid-boy-shape was tired of being correct.