I don’t share a lot of creative writing here, so feel free to give this one a miss if it’s not what you signed up for. There are some more regular posts coming down the pike, but something more experimental seemed to fit the bill for re-establishing a more frequent schedule.
Some brief notes as to tone and process follow the list rather than precede it.
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0
a couple lies, summarized in a couple lines
under covers, suffocating stomach butterflies
1
tell me when the apocalypse ends
and I will take my finger off the trigger
of the finger-gun pointed at you to say hello
2
I don't think friendship fades
it does wither
but it might not die
if you pull him up out of the ground by the roots
until he has solid enough footing
to kick you in the crotch again
3
they say I need to bleed onto the page
but when I slice my blisters open pus comes out
4
sometimes I think to myself: somber somber somber
so I laugh a little less
5
I tell myself I'm not the only one
telling myself
that I only get melancholy when I try to be
6
what kind of robot
needs moisturizer on his face?
7
I am well aware that I sound goofy
but words are tools
and I want to whack things with my hammer
8
there once was a man from ithaca
his name was underlined in red
when I typed it into the travel app named after him
9
every day
there are more similarities between
christmas lights and captain crunch
10
once, staring at the ceiling, I saw the center of the universe
just the once
11
it's kind of cliché by now, but
my heart did sort of skip a beat
like an animated character dies between the frames
12
if you surprised me less
I would have fewer
record scratches up and down my back
13
I'm sorry
you have to be more of a punchline
to be less of a slap in the face
14
I couldn't help but notice
that your doodles in the margins
never had me in them
which is a little conceited
but then again we talked a little
about a lot of trivialities
15
'we should talk more'
is what I should send
so that you can choose not to reply
16
definitely bundle up
but stop stealing my sweatshirts
they will not be useful for any of the fights
until the climax in the clock tower
17
you should carve away the extraneous words
so I can speak my piece without your raised-hand footnotes
and your dash-set interjections and your bracketed asides
because if you shut up
then I can call you an idiot
on level ground
18
you are all so broken
(braces and splints, crutches and casts)
that I wonder
how you hide those baseball bats behind your backs
19
just remember
photographs are like shipwrecks
so skirt the bends with practiced ease
if your savior takes your breath away
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I think there’s something to be said for art standing on its own. While I’d like it clear I don’t presume to claim the label, inevitably there may be some reader who ascribes my words to it on my behalf. It’s on that basis that I’ll keep the remarks as perfunctory as the poems.
I sat down with the intention to do a longer one, then a few shorts, then twenty-five shorts, of which five were boring enough that I discarded them before they saw this limited form of print.
It’s most appropriate, in my view, to think of these as abbreviated vignettes. Each was sketched out in a minute or so from a core idea: a phrase, a funny word, an observation that wasn’t substantive enough to suffer being stretched into observational humor.
Then add line breaks, shuffle each around a little until the order is less jarring, and you’re done.
This is the lowest form of poetry, in the sense that a pun constitutes the lowest form of humor, but it’s the kind that gets read out loud at bookstores and inaugurations.
Some of these, in some interpretations, are arguably a little dark; on the off chance that you feel concern for their author, please chalk it up to the plausible deniability afforded to more erudite equivalents.
Hopefully this is entertaining, though I welcome feedback which gently informs me it isn’t as I welcome praise and more specific criticism.
For completion’s sake, here’s the only time I think I’ve posted anything poetry-adjacent and longform, and the same adjacencies in shorter chunks.
Barring unforeseen circumstance, there should be more —and more-thought-out— content soon.
Best wishes,
Orion