#maybe i should just beg people on reddit for the last few pieces and pay them in gold roses lol | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

oceangl1tter · 5 years

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unpopular opinion: mac and cheese is only proper if you eat it with a small tiny spoon that can only fit one mac at a time

derivations://

I don't really know what's the point of writing all of these poems besides wanting a personal comfort and having an easy way out. Or is it an easy way in? I can't seem to stave myself off of it even though there's no return profit. My ability of spacing out lines in a purposeful way is really not something I could show to a potential employer or anyone around me. Or maybe that's just the South Node appeal calling to me. I want to find a way that could commercialize what I write. Package it in plastic wrap and present it to customers in an aesthetically pleasing way. But shouldn't the words be enough?

There are so many things I want to learn but it still feels like I'm going nowhere. The website I try to code looks like graphic design is my passion but unironic. I'm only 15% into the course and we've only slightly cracked into front-end development—(the visuals, so not back-end/ server-side coding). The process is like puzzle pieces that you mix and match together or a recipe book (and you have all the ingredients) but anything I make ends up freezing into a catatonic mess blaring with random RGB hexcodes I subbed in. I assembled an IKEA drawer with my housemates and ____ a few days ago and sometimes.. things just don't fit until they're in someone else's hands; I was talked down like a baby about finding "holes that fit into other holes" and while mentally infuriated, my fingers fumbled around like I was dealing with a Rubix cube blindfolded or something—but really, I'm just allergic to Swedish design. In a laughter I tell everyone in the room that I thought and asked myself what language Swedish people speak; at least it could boost my alibi of just being dumb and not dumbfounded by Swedes.

The things that I'm excited for deflate my sense of purpose but they really do send a rush of discovery. I turn to Reddit to scratch these itches. Watching people's motion reels are both a blessing and curse. I look at aesthetically pleasing sketchbooks that got people into the dream _______ I never knew people could have. I unfurl my optimism yarn until there's none left. Scatter small pains. I recognize that I just don't have the ardor and would rather be hidden in observations than cast my rod; but I do try! But I know when it's not enough—when it's not right. I think I should make things pretty until I realize that unpretty things are perfectly fine. I have ideas, that's all. Am I any different from my dad? Art for the sake of beauty has a single purpose of gratifying. My first draft for visitation was devoid of any real emotional labor and just caked on a cold stew of edgy, depraved imagery. It's fucking empty! How is that any different from my art/motion design things that I follow along by way of YouTube tutorials? Yeah I make a cool thing. Why do I give a fuck about this cool thing if it has a temporary purpose of gratification. Slightly pretentious. I also talk as if I'm fucking Picasso. Just kidding, Picasso would not fuck me. I also would not want to fuck Picasso. Actually, I don't know what I want. Maybe I just want to git gud. Not to denounce any of the great, amazing creations I see that take hours/days/weeks/months/years to do. I just don't know if I'll ever be satisfied. Also, I'm probably just jealous doing all this thinking in a glass room. I needa just get out. I needa be okay with starting out. I need to be okay with being bad with things I find important to me. I need to be less careless with things I don't think I'll be good at. Maybe I should apply this to everything else in my life.

When I was enrolled in Abacus class a millennium ago, we transitioned from the physical Eastern calculators to paper print-outs the size of half of an index card. The transition was to ease into calculating with simply a mental image of the abacus with the help of muscle memory. We would stand in a line, all of us next to eachother, and we'd hold up the card in front of us as equations flashed on a light blue screen. Crying because I just couldn't get it. Held that card up, my arm tired and shit, with nothing to wipe ‘cept that paper sheet. The instructor pulls me aside and I tell her that I can't do it. I don't think I've changed since then. At least I can calculate groceries now in my head though.

hear me out://

A few days after I find out, I'm having a lil tear session in the dorm showers. If the shower drain could talk, its narration would probably go like this:

day 273

-she hasn't even turned on the shower on yet and she's already crying lmao

I don't know why it hits me. One moment I feel fine and the next I feel a bit of a bitter twinge. Maybe of how much I had poured my heart out in ways I hadn't before; perhaps as an atonement. My impulsive Xylitol javelin-throwing had other reasons. Perhaps an affirmation that everyone I had ever ______ _______ . In hindsight, it didn't turn out that way but who else would listen so ardently? so selflessly? pay to be the audience? even if it was divisive? sit here past twilight in an empty building? and silently watch a tantrum unfold? I've written and shelved, written and shelved. Some things have a passtime. Other things I wouldn't want to return to. Now, it's obviously different. The occupations of the mind are different. There are no words left unsaid but there are gestures I wish I had done better, I could still do better but I deem too late. I don't try to find replacements because there can be none. —- E And L Five Ps: Final reflection://

St.Vincent's crooning in her Strange Mercy album takes me through Winter. I "steal" a concept from her 6th track, Strange Mercy, that explores the concept of how it can be "cruel to be kind". It's the perfect tenderness I need to raise frailty back to life and to properly transition the deadness of Winter to a more sweet and dewy fragility, one more aligned with Spring. For my first revised poem, I returned back to ‘visitation’ and tried to establish the poem’s center of gravity. After re-reading it again, I realized that many of the images I wrote, though they were descriptive, masked the poem from progressing in its work beyond creating a sense of atmosphere. I knew that the poem needed a spine to hang its imagery flesh off of but I did not know where to start, so I went back to my critiques and looked for lines people read as most interesting.

The first line "in winter, the sound of your skin is screaming" was the one that stuck out the most, so I took that line on its own and brainstormed on how I could ground my poem with this line. I asked myself questions like: Why winter? Whose skin is screaming? Screaming in what way? Why the sound of skin? I initially had chosen winter because I wanted to fit it into the theme of frailty, decay, and death but nothing had really transformed from beginning to end because of it.

The original poem would still stand on its own even if I took out the season. I found that it would be more interesting to use negation and have it play a more integral role, so I changed the season to Spring. This created many doorways. From the poetry collection I read, Half-Lit Houses, I noticed that the poet describes the “outside” world before zooming in and I compared it to my poem, where I start off already “zoomed-in”/magnified and the reader is thrown in with no context. Every line that follows is then trapped in having to connect to it, too magnified for the reader to navigate the bigger picture. With this in mind, I did not stick with the original format of this line opening the poem-which took some time to actually do because I really wanted to force it to be for its unsettling effect.

Another critique I got was what work the title was doing and how it connected to the rest of the poem. I’m not sure why I thought of visitation the first time I wrote this poem but after changing the poem’s descriptors from subtle decay (“quiet unmoving/and breathing”, “patient’s kneading”, “a carcass”) to more physically present feelings (“Lacerate”, “savory blood cracked”, “wailing at Hospital Walls”), the poem was no longer the ghost it originally was and instead birthed a more visceral feeling, a beast, alive and begging to be heard. I wanted to mask the setting up until the end which would make that final connection of visitation hours at a hospital. Had the scene been introduced earlier in the poem, I think it would be more of a dark cloud looming than the delicate freshness I was trying to go for—the kindness of the grass and the cruelty of its blades. The setting in the first few stanzas is left open and how it moves to the hospital location is not explicitly clear but it's the drifting airiness I like that are reminiscent of Spring days and walks surrounded by rustling, blooming trees.

This poem came out rather naturally after figuring out its premise but I made several alterations to the movement of the words just before the last stanza. I knew it would be revolving in an arc, circular as if blown away only to return back, and I wanted something that would encourage an analogous reading—cognizant of the way ones eyes would read it when scanning.

The poem itself pulls from different memories; some I was not there for, and others I noticed. My favorite line of the poem is: "He stands there."

circadian rhythm://

I knew, relatively, the parallelism but I didn't know exacts until my dad told me to scan his medical reports for a checkup. There's a likeness of timelines. The event I pulled from happened on 1/1/2001, 9 months after my birth.

Coincidentally (or not), it's winter.

#mystuff

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