Friday, November 6, 2009

Blind Review Friday


The author shall remain anonymous (unless they chose to divulge themselves in the comments.)

Those commenting are also welcome to remain anonymous if they wish.

Incendiary comments will be removed.

If you would like your piece thrown to the wolves send it to salinger@ameritech.net with "Workshop the hell out of this poem" as the subject line.

This week's offering is from a Clevelandpoetics the Blog contributor.





Perky Flarf

Before I begin I just wanted to take a moment and

make your butt as perky as you want.

In a society where baby-boomers seem to be the ones

engaged in noisy recreational activities for nearly 50 years

even learning how to flirt,


opponents twice a year,

goths, perky goths, cyber goths, mopey goths, traditional goths--

their goal remains to make a difference.


Jennie pointed you my way,

you get to breathe deeply a few times and then cough.

Studied, poked and prodded,

the market is not for the hard truth.


Desperate to see

this should be a fun week for me.

Moral panics rip through cultures,

and the "right-thinking" folks

find out what others are saying about you.


It just offends me

the canny folk

laughing at the paranoia.

Cover your mouth and nose.

Good-bye can be painful, but the pain is intensified.

3 comments:

Rob said...

Grade "A" flarf, not homogenized. When the path is a rabbit trail, you can end in Wonderland or Neverland or Dante's Inferno!

Cover your nose and mouth! Wash your hands.

Geoffrey A. Landis said...

I wrote this one trying to capture some of the energy and surrealistic humor of the found rhythms in flarf.
The main tool for this was google-- I put in a term to search and then went to the tenth page of google results (the first few pages of google search are pretty predictable-- by the tenth page, google starts to do a bit more free-associating on the search term). Then I'd look through the results on that page, grab any lines that caught my attention, and picked out one word from that line to "seed" another search.
That gave me a pile of lines, which I then arranged to suit.
For reference, the seed terms were: perky, baby-boomers, prodded, cough, mouth, saying, intensified.

Pressin On said...

This is like hearing people cough at an opera.

Cited...

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~Jean Cocteau