Verses and Tips
Prepare the Altar w/ Faylita H.
In today’s issue:
Verses and Tips Intro
Tip of the Day (Week? Month?)
New (Unpublished) Poem: The Kraken to Their Spear
WHAT IS VERSES AND TIPS?
Every week, I’ll be dropping an unpublished poem for my subscribers to muse over. Sometimes these poems will be completed—other weeks they will not. The goal is to let you in behind the curtain, let you get a peak at what I’m working on now. As well, I’ll be offering up some unsolicited advice about writing and revising poems.
Tip #1: Make room for your readers on the Tardis.
I love weird poems. Poems that try to take me on a trip through the esoteric or the scientific, try to stretch outside of the canon’s formal techniques and do something new and fresh. I love the odd little time machine-like poems—and I can’t stand them. Most of the time, the reason why I might not like a poem is because, well, there was no room for me on that strange little space ship. The writer, in the throes of their passionate creation, somehow forgot to leave a door open for me, the reader, and as a result, I’m unable to find meaning.
Now, I want to acknowledge that there is a whole pantheon of writers and artists who do not believe that all art or literature must have “meaning.” The argument about what it is to find or not find meaning in a creative piece is centuries old, and frankly, I don’t have enough coffee to get into much here, but I’m of the opinion that any human-made creation shared with another person inherently holds meaning, as even the act of sharing said creation is an act of communication, and the purpose of communication is to convey meaning.
That was a mouthful. Geez. Simply put, why share a poem with me if it was only ever for you to find meaning in? If it is shared with me, I will receive and interpret it, whether I intend to or not, because it is only human of me to do so.
Think about how we might receive a poem. Some of us will read it with our eyes, our brains translating the words and their universal or personal meanings, the use of space on the page, the grammar—all without our conscious effort. Some of us will hear it with our ears or feel it with our hands, our brains still going through the motions that lead to meaning-making, only pausing when logic fails or the message is too convoluted.
To share your work, in my opinion, is to attempt the communication of an idea or a concept with another human. You want me to feel or experience something—for it to have meaning—for me as the reader or viewer.
So, dear writers, before you go on that weird little poetic journey, remember to make some room for your readers by giving us something concrete to hold on to before take off. Some of us really like the heights that you’ll take us to, but we still need to know we’ll come back to the ground safely afterwards.
ABOUT THE POEM
This week’s unpublished poem comes to you via the obsession I have with text messages and their strange contexts. You ever watch the Key & Peele episode where two guys are texting each other banal questions and answers but each of them are reading it with either angry or apathetic tones? Yeah. Think that but for pseudo Greek-tragedy fans writing post-social media poems about digital love.
Written after a break up with a long-distance lover, this poem suggests that the prolific use of emojis harkens back to the age of hieroglyphs, and carrying some of the same kind of emotional weight that one might expect from love letters. I also wanted to try writing without a focus on gender when writing about sex. It was hard—so I had a whiskey and went in.
I hope you enjoy!
***
The Kraken to Their Spear
There is only one pixelated capture of us—the wily tentacles
Of our fat octopus grins slipping quickly under the swishing wheels
Of the hungry vessel that took me then. Our strange emergence of affection,
A deuce-bodied monster decapitated by a Greyhound leaving Baltimore.
You were so angry with me—for not having had faith. I had hoped
You were referring to my diet, to my need to fit more joy into my skin.
I knew I could do it. I would prove it to you, my ability to expand past the point
Of definition. I can crest over & over & over. If I want. See. I have always had faith.
I can see you shaking your head now. No, not the kind I was thinking.
We—we were never to be monsters. Yes. I know. But, love, I was. I cannot apologize for having not been easy. It is how I first found my way to you,
Through the watery slip of a harvest year. Then came the fracturing sound from my body,
A bowl of striated light untangling itself from the blue sheets beneath you.
I was not what you expected—nor should I have been. Why would you
Wish me anything small or easy to kill? Don’t you love me? For what I am?
I am not an octopus or a womxn or you. Don’t you love me? This text—this question—
It becomes a scattering of hieroglyphic reasons we can never be together
Swimming in the basket of my back pocket, swishing through the radioactive air,
Sickling through the shadows of my bedroom, in the dark, circling my empty
Bed, like the delicate bulbs slowly untethering themselves from my ceiling fan
with every spin. When I first said I love you—I was saying I would always love you.
These legs have a way of moving in every direction. Given enough time, I can evolve.
I was saying: One day, I’ll come back to you. I could see our return:
You, in a cloud of silver. Me, in a belly of red. But now—