I hope
I think
I stutter.
I blink
I shall be
temporarily preoccupied
I have
vaguely disappointed.Coming “straight out the gate” with some self-deprecation!
Wanna see me hedge my bets? I’ll give a demonstration:
The first person pronoun even looks like a crutch
(if I start really simple, you won’t expect quite as much).
I’ll admit that it’s strange reaching out with introspection
(I’ll fall back on myself if these words only find rejection).
I even structured it so it would rhyme (oh, that old trick).
And if you hated it, at least it ended pretty quick.
There. That’s out of my system. For today.
I’ve seen a handful of examples of blackout poetry – doing it this way just kind of made sense to me. Back to the first person bit: the book I’m using, as far as I know (I didn’t read it before I decided to creatively destroy it), is all going to be this narrator. So hopefully that will continue to be helpful and interesting for the duration of this project. I’ll try not to overuse it, in any event.
I really liked these fragments. On the one hand, I kind of connect to them (as you’d imagine, based on me selecting them). On the other, they’re sorta robotic. Do you get a Marvin, the Paranoid Android vibe or is it just me? A bit of a powering down noise at the end? Whenever I reflect on comparing myself to a robot, I think about some of the stories I’ve heard that came out of the 1972 Summit Series. Mostly how the Soviet players took being called “robots” as a compliment. How’s that for CanCon? And loosely tying in some Eastern European flavor to boot. He shoots, he scores!
For the sake of these things not getting terribly repetitive as well as introspective, I’ll leave it there. There’s only 17 words in this poem. Gotta make you wait for the excruciating self-analysis, right?
this poem without commentary
all poems in this project
all commentary posts
all posts related to this project
You can learn about the impulse behind this project here.