Not what I remember

*

Introduction

ASiP is set up to force you to accept the bad with the good. You have to learn that you'll produce a lot of bad for a little good.

Main Content

I have fond memories of Greenhouse Christmas which aren’t reflected in the poem itself. I thought it was much better. Although, it does come from the time period where I was experimenting with narrative mode. I like the ambiguity and subtleness of the characters, there’s a shift there that I hope jerks readers askew into experiencing multiple realities. If it doesn’t for you, don’t be alarmed, it’s just a poorly written poem.

I’ll probably never go back to it. But I may get inspired during my Buffy/Angel rewatch—I’m up to BtVS s5 / AtS s2, if anything will help me capture a good narrative flow and otherworldliness it will be those seasons.

I’d like to blather on, but I have TV to watch.

Greenhouse Christmas

Epigraph

This experiment in POV and the sudden flipping thereof is a year old.

Main Content

Walk to the greenhouse,
Sit by the heater,
Enjoy the warmth.

Pull out an iPod and a notebook,
Smile at the rustling plastic,
Lean back to day-dream—

And crash into the heater.

Blackness followed by a growing awareness.

The yellow notebook is buried in mulch.
The heater is on its back.

Jump to your feet,
Lift the heater,
Trip over the chair—

Vague images of hair over eyes,
Close-up of lips.
Strip out the soundtrack and make me
Say what should’ve been said.

The iPod is face down inside a clay pot.
The screen is not cracked.

Dig out the notebook and
Write what you came out here to write.

What’s going on

My recent stuff is my best. One element of that is I wrote it on paper, with pen, in notebooks. Transcription is evil, made no less so by necessity.

In the meantime you guys are gonna be left with the dregs of poems I have in (try not to say cloud, or bits, or electronically. try not to say agh, in a digital, agh form)

We begin with whaat to include.rtf, a richtext file on my desktop. It was created Wednesday, November 2, 2011 2:02 AM, modified Tuesday, November 8, 2011 6:43 PM, and last opened now. It has no label.

The first line of the document is:
a short selection of current poems not stuck on paper

The first poem Driftwood is black helevetica 12 pt. Titles are bold. Some poems are 50% black—already posted. Some of the black ones are really really bad.

But not all, I am posting all the remaining black ones that I can bear. Maybe all of them. I am going to tag them black (until I can figure out if this calls for a new taxonomy, post-type, custom field, or series).

UPDATE: I just tagged the others grey so you can look at the whole set if you want. (that I’ve had the balls to post). The only exceptions is the Chinese Problem is tagged both black and grey because it should have made the first cut.

The Chinese Problem

I wouldn’t be apprehensive about Chinese
if it weren’t all space invading octopuses.

(You should be imagining
a yellowing handmade sheet of paper,
its rough edges frame
a fishing village and its surrounding mountains.

There are 3 to 5 vertical lines of Chinese calligraphy.)