Maybe longer. It’s not very good but it was the best I could do, and I could never bring myself to go back and revise it.
So today it goes out, the way I wrote and felt it then.
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Spam poetry
A few years ago, I worked for the University of Waterloo as a computer science tutor. As a result of this, my email address was published in plain text on several very public pages, and was picked up by pretty much every spammer on Earth (read: India).
This was the first time I encountered the “let’s generate tons of random pseudosentences to escape the spam filter” trick. While most of the sentences were painful to read, quite a few of them were oddly beautiful. It occurred to me that someone, somewhere, must have gotten the idea to write poetry based on this stuff.
Clamped
It’s funny what pops into one’s head when one is folding laundry.
Melissa: In Life
This is a story about the absurdity one feels when one thinks about a distant, unspecified ending.
I.
The bedding was slick
and formed black mountains of her limbs
Melissa could not sleep
Watch for Bees
Everything is squiggles
except the sounds, and the slide
that he sits upon
He thrusts out his knee
in which there are holes.
Those holes are filled with cotton.
“It’s a bee sting,” he explains;
he is featureless, but for a pitted knee
“The white stuff is the sting,” he says, seriously.
He pulls some out to show me.
I am confused: I always thought that stings were angry,
and red
I leave him be, then
and everything leaves me too
except that tension that I feel
as I watch for bees