The Game We Played

Billy’s neighbors had an in ground pool put in the year before Billy’s family moved into the house beside them. So on that scorcher July day that they first moved themselves into the new place his neighbors were involved in a blossoming love affair with their pool. It even had a deep end! Their mom had given Billy a tour of their backyard lingering on the pristine new pool because she was sure that he and her son, a year younger than Billy at eleven, would be quick friends.

So the day they moved in, Billy bummed around the driveway in his swimsuit trying to be within view of the neighbors who were already out, splashing and yelping. He stood on his toes and hit a branch against the chainlink fence just to sort of alert them to his presence. To let them know that he was here and definitely ready to swim.

The oldest son, the one that Billy was to be friends with, waved and shrieked as he was pushed from behind into the water. He scrambled out, sopping tshirt clinging to his bony frame, and made his way to the fence. His thin lips stretched wide into a manic smile and as he got close to Billy he shook his longish hair and Billy was misted with overchlorinated droplets.

“My birthday party is tonight, you wanna come?” the boy asked.

“Uhmm. Yeah I think I could come. I have to ask my mom,” Billy said.

“Cool. My name’s Jason. Jason Johns. There’s gonna be girls at my party,” Jason said.

“Ok. I think my mom will still let me go…”

“Cool. I’m gonna go swim. You can’t come over now because my aunt and uncle are here but come over at five. Everyone is going to get here for the party at six.”

Jason turned and leapt back to the pool, diving head first into an inflatable donut that his younger sister was lounging on and Billy laughed to himself as her flailing body was somehow launched whistling and screeching into the air.

Billy and Jason sat in Jason’s cool, stinky basement and played a videogame while everyone started to arrive. The first few minutes were awkward as Billy was introduced to each person as they showed up. He was adrift in their already fluming friendships as they all recited lines from movies he hadn’t seen and laughed in unison. Soon though, he recognized a few of the movies and threw out a few hammy quotes himself and that was that. Billy was in, called upon for his opinion and looked upon to crack a joke at the right time from then on. At least, that’s what he hoped. That’s what it felt like for a good hour before they had cake and opened presents.

After cake, Jason’s mom told everyone to change into their swimsuits. There were six boys and six girls and they were all already wearing their swimsuits and ready to swim immediately. Within sixty seconds, everything was wet and chlorine slippery and Billy had gotten two dive rings from the deep end without goggles on. The phone rang inside and Jason’s mom ran to get it.

“You all be careful! I’ll be right back!” she shouted behind her.

Jason was wrestling a girl on the inflatable donut, a cute girl with wavy red hair and this wide eyed look that made her really precious, but as soon as his mom went inside he stopped and shouted for everyone’s attention.

“I’ve got a game we can play,” he said. His hair hung in wet strands past his eyes. “We’ve got enough goggles here. First the boys put on all the goggles and close their eyes. Then the girls take their swimsuit bottoms off and walk around the edge of the pool while the boys swim underwater and look at them. Then the girls can have the goggles and the boys will do it.”

“That’s sick!” the red haired girl said.

“I’ll do it,” a boy near Billy said. “I’ll do it first, alone, even.”

Jason was already handing out goggles to all the boys and putting his on. Billy got a pair of goggles shaped like stars. He didn’t want to do it.

“I won’t do it,” the red haired girl stood with her arms crossed, outside of the pool now. “That’s a stupid game. It’s just wrong.”

“You have to do it,” Jason said. “Everyone is going to do it.”

He looked over his captive audience as everyone looked down into their pruning hands. Billy couldn’t tell who did and didn’t want to play the game but it was obvious that no one felt comfortable with it.

“I don’t have to do that,” the girl said. “And I won’t.”

Jason marched to the white deck table near the deep end and grabbed a can of coke. He opened it softly as he walked toward the red haired girl and dumped it over her head. She stood beneath the fizzing stream for a few seconds as she realized what he was doing. Billy watched the bubbles slide over her wide open eyes for a moment before she let loose an agonized scream.

She shrieked and wailed and Billy saw her cute face go ugly in pain and she cried and whimpered between animal shouts.

“My eyes! It burns my eyes!” she screamed and collapsed onto the ground, clawing at her eyes. “It burns all my skin!”

“That’s just the carbonation,” Jason said. “Shut up or my mom is gonna come out here.”

The girl lay shivering and whining in pain as Jason cannonballed into the pool and re-soaked her. She looked like Billy’s dog right before it died and he saw that she was an animal even as she was human and his head swam as his body sank. Underwater, it was cool and dark and still. He listened to the blood beat against his eardrums. As he resurfaced, Jason was talking again to the group.

“–was rinsed off when I splashed her. Are we gonna play this game or not?”

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Have a Bad Week

Mary was this girl I knew, the neighbor of a friend, back when I was three years old. She sent me a message on facebook a few days ago, I don’t know what to do about it. It said how happy she was to have found me and, also, did I maybe remember that I was her first kiss? Well, that kind of mucked up my own memories; I’ve always remembered my first kiss happening during the fake wedding I held with my friend, Emma. A circus of hollering first graders gasping as we touched lips with our eyes open during recess. So I had to ask my sister if she remembered a kiss between Mary and I and she did. Specifically she remembered a kiss in a kiddie pool, Mary in arm floaties shaped like shark fins and a ruffled one piece swimsuit.

“But, you know,” she said. “Emma was the first kiss that mattered, I think. Especially if that’s the one that you remember.”

“Thanks. That makes me feel better. I was feeling weirdly guilty about misremembering. And I also didn’t want Mary to be my first kiss. She’s like a prude christian girl that always wears knee high socks and takes black and white pictures of herself now,” I said.

“How about Emma? Have you kept in touch with her?”

“Mom still talks to Mrs. Chausin sometimes. Emma’s teaching for her second year at Madison Elementary. Third grade. She has macular degeneration.”

My sister tilted her head to the side.

“She’s going blind,” I said.

“How do you teach a third grade class when you’re blind?”

“I don’t think you do, Chrissy,” I said.

And then I thought a thing to myself that was so cruel and unfunny that it felt like a boulder pushed from the ledge of my forehead and dropping with an acid splash into my stomach. I thought that maybe now she would lend me all those Nick magazines that she wouldn’t let me borrow in first grade since she wouldn’t even be able to see them soon.

Between Mary and the residual meanness from an angrier, teenaged self that had long passed, I’d been spending a lot of time lately with fists clenched wishing I wasn’t me. I figured I’d better tell Mary that I didn’t remember kissing her, and, was it at an October barbecue maybe? Her in a red and black flannel and her hair in pigtails.

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Julie Hates Ugly

Julie has issues with people who don’t chew with their mouth shut. That’s one of her biggest issues with other people but it’s definitely not her only issue with other people. She’s always amazed at how oblivious her friends are. She’s always amazed at how cute it is when they say something dumb, too. Julie definitely has a lot of issues with other people but she’s also pretty good at getting over them and thinking that they’re cute instead of stupid.

Julie thinks a lot about how she feels bad for ugly people. She feels so bad for them that she almost thinks they’re cute. Julie thinks she could date an ugly guy for this reason alone. She thinks to herself a lot that every single ugly guy that she thinks is sort of cute because he’s so ugly, every single one of them definitely wants her. She knows that she’s the hottest girl who thinks ugly guys are cute.

It’s not just ugly guys that get cuter. Julie feels a special sort of sadness for ugly girls, ugly women in particular. Sometimes just the sight of a particularly pathetic looking older woman is enough to make Julie tear up and tell her friends that she’s just got something in her eye. Every time it happens Julie gets scared because she almost feels hysterical about this sort of thing and she has no idea why. She even gets sad when there’s a really ugly person in a movie or a tv show. Julie’s been trying to work on that but she doesn’t even know where to start. She thinks she probably needs therapy but she doesn’t want to really think about that.

Well, so, Julie’s at the store the other day and she sees this really ugly woman. She grabs her boyfriend’s arm, her boyfriend is actually cute, the kind of cute that everybody agrees on, and talks to him about his old friend back in town to distract herself. She feels the woman’s lazy eye spinning and sputtering in her direction.

“Is he gonna be back long?” Julie asked as her eyes welled and burned.

“Yeah, for like three weeks. He’s trying to sell some of his old art I think. That whole bunch of stuff he made when he had that adderall prescription,” her boyfriend said. The ugly woman coughed and sneezed at the same time and it made Julie do a big cartoon gulp that she couldn’t help but sort of laugh at in spite of everything.

“All that metal stuff? The big metal bugs?” Julie asked. “I never liked any of that. It was just ugly.”

“Excuse me?” The ugly woman tapped Julie’s boyfriend on the shoulder. “I’m shopping for pants for my husband and yours are exactly what I’m looking for. Where did you buy them, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Uhmm. Hmm… I think I got them at the Gap. There’s one in this mall, I think.”

Julie’s insides heaved and broiled and her eyes flooded with tears. She turned her head and coughed to cover up a weird little sob that she totally couldn’t help. She was so angry at herself for losing it like this. She started to hurry away and the woman turned to her.

“It was nice meeting you, too,” the woman called out jokingly.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know where she’s off to in such a hurry,” Julie’s boyfriend said.

“Well thanks for your help,” the woman said and turned away.

Julie was in a black tar panic. Her lungs were shut, her stomach flipped, she ran bawling through the women’s lingerie section and into the children’s clothing department before tripping on an oversized Lego piece from a crowded display and skinning her knee on the carpet. She lay there clutching her knee and weeping, big haw-hawing sobs that pinged off the unclothed mannequins that stood above her, as her boyfriend walked up.

“Get up! What are you doing?” he said. He looked around quickly and offered his hand to her. She squealed and sighed as her body wrung itself of the last few cries it had left. She felt like taking a nap or smoking a cigarette.

“I think I need a therapist,” Julie said. “I think I need help figuring this out.”

Her boyfriend pulled her up and put an arm around her shoulder, pulling her in close.

“That was embarassing as fuck,” he quietly said to her.

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The Breathing In Mouth

I’m late to the party
with my shirt on backwards
and I’m reading your book again.

Me, the canker,
your stubbled sore;
the faded shirt you wore for haircuts
but shrunk.

I can’t go anywhere
without asking why I’m there.

And I’m sorry about you
smiling with your eyes closed.

AND— I panicked in the parking lot today.
I threw up in the parking lot.

This new workout tape is really tough.
You would like it.

I most remember you as
the streak of dirt beneath your eye
when you tripped on a hike,
when we were lost and sweaty and scary thirsty.
And I didn’t believe that you knew the way back
but you found the road.

I was so so
totally your grass stain,
me! The slobbering dog
you came home to from camp.

Today I thought of you
asleep in my bed,
the breathing in mouth.
Your legs and the damp hump of sheets
and the grass in the sheets.

Fixing your hair with your sweat in June,
us dizzy in my room with the a/c off.
Lying face down on your back in June,
prone to prone, stacking our bodies.
Intimacy in exhaustion and, later,
a tick on my arm.

I mowed the lawn today and when I looked down
at my dirty legs I thought about being
flecked in grass clippings
with my fingers in your breathing in mouth

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One Tough Brand

aspirin to aspirin, dust to dust,
i’m showing the neighbors who’s boss.

i’ve got grainy video of the neighbors
renouncing their faith.

a wooden bed frame with a wooden end table,
i just started my porn collection,
i’m done ripping pages out of catalogs.
wooden dresser,
i’ll steal the neighbor’s shoes
while he swims in his pool.
most things here match.
listen to the same three songs,
stretch my legs in the grass,
stare at his stupid dirty shoes.

i’ll do it all this summer, i’m not confused.
i’ll watch Def Poetry Jam,
hardly cook my eggs, my neighbor running
off my plate.

even blowing my nose in toilet paper felt like
outdoor education and
having a crush on a girl—
for every action a reaction.

pulling on white tube socks is summer,
1999, my corner room with four windows—
a salt lick rolled
between my chapped palms.

is my hunch a sign of the times?
time signed off? my time and signs,
my toothpaste stains pressed delicate
between the pages.

man i wish God were a dog or something.
God quit trying to
bring me down, man.

i took a picture of the druids,

“very heartwarming and yet quite sexy”
i read that in a porn site forum.

the druids in the sand,
my hand flow over with the stuff.
the crying glass,
my wet paned whiteout.

here’s me— forgetting the pier
and drowning.
my pre-me fantasy,

honey, i’m comin down.
mama, i’m burnin up.

i think,
i wouldn’t be the same person
if i had been born with gay face so
thank you dad and mom
for the too big t-shirts,
No Fear affect,
and mini skateboard.

i hurt myself grifting
but big boys grift hard
and straight guys grift harder,

i learned that from my neighbor.

i think i’m always me,
ten years old and mowing the lawn– crying.

mowing the lawn and hitting a snake
and being proud of blood that wasn’t even mine.

 

 

 

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Short Sick Poem

Hey, me with my window open
and my nose stuffy,
hey from over here
next to the window.

Check me out–

I’m two hands out the sunroof
having a good time.

Now I’m rolling out flat
trying to decongest.

I think I’m cheesing in a picture
of your birthday party
and I think it’s all in the wrist.
I’m killing it, man.
They like me.

I’m going to record it every time my neighbors fight
with the window open.

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Why Games Make Sucky Art

Wait! Don’t get mad until the end of the post. Hear me out on this because even though I think most games make pretty sucky art, I acknowledge that most movies and books suck too. Most everything sucks in the context of artistic merit but there’s always room for art in a creative medium. There’s a common thread in every single game that succeeds at transcending the public expectations of what a game can be; these games have subtext and cohesion.

And there are quite a few games that are beautiful pieces of art. Shout out to Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, Proteus, Full Throttle (I might need to make a separate post later to explain why Full Throttle is Art As Hell).

Subtext is defined as an underlying and often distinct theme in a piece of writing or conversation.

Subtext is reading between the lines.

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See what I did there? LOL

If you’re as manipulative as I am in your daily interactions, you should be pretty comfortable with conversational subtext. But lets talk about subtext in writing. Subtext is an incredibly important part of our experience when we observe good art whether we are consciously aware of it or not. It is what informs our pathos, shaping our emotional reactions to a situation or idea. Think about the subtext of the Grand Theft Auto games; the underlying satire in the narrative distances us from the emotional impact of certain scenes. The silliness outweighs the heaviness by its force of subtext.

Too many games are happy to tell it like it is. They tackle themes too broad to wring nuance from. They give us what may be complex stories sure, but they’re complex stories that won’t allow us to invest in their characters. A really common complaint about Grand Theft Auto IV was that Nico was trying to be the good guy in cutscenes while the player rampaged through the city on a murder spree as soon as they were given control. It was a complete role reversal every time the mode of storytelling switched. Which brings me to the second thing games need to have in order to be considered “high art” (ugh).

The reason we have a problem with stories in games like GTA IV is that they completely lack cohesion as they switch between modes of interactivity. And this is something that I think drove the creation of a three character system in GTA V. Trevor is almost unanimously agreed upon as the Most Fun Character in the game. That’s because his character is consistent in thought and action. He is Rockstar’s answer to our complaints about Nico.

There was a problem for a while in videogames that I’ve noticed clearing up a bit over the last few years, and that was their awful predilection to disregard the connection between interactive and cinematic moments of gameplay. When you’re beating ass in a game and then three tiny bitch enemies (the kind you literally just killed like thirty of) just cut to cinematic, knock your ass out and drag you to their lair… That’s not okay, y’all. It’s called ludonarrative dissonance and it’s yucky. It also applies to the actions of characters in and out of gameplay.

honey-dipper-honey-17390074
We can do it if we stick (each design element of videogames) together!!

The thing that wrecks cohesion in a lot of modern games is dissonance on the part of the characters. Games are based on characters interacting with each other, be it through violence or conversation, but often the interactions are strikingly different in and out of gameplay. This is, presumably, to advance the story. This also completely destroys any emotional impact that would have been built up by previously stated subtexts.

This means that we should be thinking about gameplay and character development and story as pieces of a bigger puzzle. There will always be a place for shallow games that are fun as hell and have absolutely nothing in the ways of artistic value just as there will always be summer blockbusters at the movie theaters. It is good to remember that most movies and books have nothing of interest to say and exist as unabashed pop entertainment. This does not discredit the few that transcend their mediums and become valuable art. The common thread between all of these important works is that they are fully realized. A beautiful movie is a marriage of all things cinematic, from screenplay to cinematography to acting, into something that is more than the sum of its parts. If we continue to ignore the role of interactivity as a part of the whole, as an extension of the story itself, videogames can only hope to be pulp.

 

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Physical Memories of Digital Spaces

My memories are all tangled up. After the age of 9 I was given a lot of control over how I spent my free time because my older sister had gone to college and my mom was single, trying to raise my brother and I and still work full time. We spent our summers outside and they were, in my remembrances, the platonic ideal of a suburban childhood. We had a trampoline and a big yard, neighbors with an in ground swimming pool, and enough bikes piled in our garage that we could ghost ride them into trees with reckless abandon. Those summers that I spent so much time in the sun that it frosted my tips (very desirable 1998-2001) I was building an affinity for the outdoors that led to a brief stint in proclaimed paganism when I was 12.

The winters of my childhood were very different though. We still got outside every few weeks to roll in the snow but winter had its own special pursuit. Winter was when my brother and I played videogames. When we built blanket forts that took up our entire room. Invariably, there would be a thick blanket draped over the tv to create a sort of gaming womb. It was a sensory deprivation room plus videogames.

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In our little gaming womb, my brother and I were outside of ourselves. The still dark of our blanket room was an amazing intensifier for our gaming experiences. I’m not strictly talking about a heightened experience of the atmosphere of a game although that was also an effect that the blanket fort had. I really felt each game I played in there. In depriving myself of the outside world I was lending physicality to what would otherwise have been a fully digital, intangible experience.

The worlds within my tv, the trees and grass and mossy stone ruins, were real to me. As a child I experienced them in a way that I can’t begin to replicate as an adult. There was a sense of being there, of inhabiting my avatar, that was so vivid and immediate. These physical memories from a digital unreality are difficult to pin down. I can feel between my fingers the waxy leaves of the trees in the front lawn of Super Mario 64’s castle when I think of my time playing the game.

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My memories of waxy leaves and itchy grass come from experiences outside of videogames but they are not confined to defining physical trees. Maybe a big reason for my mixing tangible and intangible memories is to act as a way of connecting with nature during a season where it was otherwise made difficult for me. I do know that as recently as this last winter I was pulling out the sunny old games of my past and basking in their rolling prairies. The cold snap outside was easier to bear when I stopped to smell the pixellated flowers.

How about you? Do you find that you have physical memories attached to digital occurences? Do you ever stand at the edge of a canyon and think “This feels just like Gerudo Valley”?

 

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My Big Fear Of Caves

I’ve been working on this story for a while now! And also it’s not done. And by working on I mean I’ve been sitting on it for two months. But I’m starting to finish it up and I thought I’d get the beginning onto here as a nice little teaser to the whole thing. It’s very consistent with a lot of other things I’ve been writing lately in that you can expect it to start sunny and rain quick. I’ve been feeling very dark lately. Hot Topic on wheels. Also this story is Not Funny.

geologist

STILL LIFE IN CAVE

In his bedroom upstairs Luke hunched with his shoulders wide over his keyboard. He tapped an even rhythm against the keys making progress in the wireframe system of caves he traversed. The desktop’s insides clicked and hummed in concurrence with his leisured taps. Leaning back into a deep stretch he let himself fall onto the bed behind him, burrowing his head into the comforter; stretched out then fetal, a bleating sheep in a bed of hay.

A clattering of pebbles hit against his barely open window and he half opened it and stuck out his head. Jimmy Collins and Little Michael Johnson stood with their arms wrapped around each other’s necks; they wooped and jumped at the emergence of Luke’s head.

Continue reading

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Writing In Our Neighbor’s Voice- Flarf Poetry a decade later

Let’s think about Flarf poetry in the quick moving context of social technology. Flarf was, at its inception, a movement in poetry that took phrases generated by Google’s search algorithms and juxtaposed them in order to create a quasi-space, to give physicality to what would otherwise be an awkwardly phrased grouping of non-sequitors. It took the unpoetic language of the everyman and repurposed it into something that touched the depth and otherness of traditionally crafted poetry. Two decades ago, our neighbors were nearly unknowable in comparison to the information we can mine about them now from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and every exposed crack in the internet in between. We saw them use their above ground pools and barbecues. We would sometimes catch the flicker of their television screens against their blinds and wonder what movie they had rented. Maybe it was the same movie we had rented. They were constructs made from our own sense of self, made in the likeness of their creators. For a long time, our neighbors were just like us and the media that we consumed reflected that belief.

Early Flarf poetry (think turn of the 21st century) was illustrative of a changing social dynamic. Poems, and art in general, were no longer created outside of the influence of mainstream culture. The internet had woven a view of a much stranger world for most and a much more inclusive world for a few. We wondered then if maybe our neighbors weren’t just like us. Maybe they were freaks. Maybe while we were fingering a deeper understanding of the natural world and human relations as we matured, maybe our neighbors were just making collages of horses because they loved horses. Maybe with our different vocabularies we were still experiencing the same valid emotions. It was these sorts of ideas that served to carve the first notches into what would later be Flarf poetry. They were built from the bones of our neighbors, their real thoughts manipulated and skewed in a self serving satire. There was an anarchic quality to the Flarf poetry being produced in the movement’s infancy; the very first Flarf poem itself was a deliberately shitty piece of work titled “Mm-Hmm” submitted to borderline scam site Poetry.com by Gary Sullivan. Flarf was the distillation of the mainstream, the unalternative, into poems that were easy to laugh at and even easier to scoff at. It was a middle finger to the under educated masses, a reclamation of their ignorant utterances as something useful. But the poetry was still a product of the author, its ownership could not be denied. Although the phrasing was not theirs, words were often changed or rearranged in order to punctuate meaning more efficiently. The awkwardness was cosmetically altered and in doing so the poetry retained its affect in spite of its concept. There was, in early Flarf poetry, a glimmer of humanity that made the sometimes acerbic social commentary palatable.

In recent years, Flarf has undergone an evolution that has led many of its originators to claim its death. I’m inclined to agree with them. I think that the cause is that our toolset has been expanded with the advent of social media sites. With new social media sites like Facebook and Instagram that encourage constant sharing we can’t anonymously attribute various quirks to our neighbors anymore; we are privy to many of their innermost desires and fears, publicly broadcast in an attempt for validation.
There has been a practice in the alt-lit community of creating poems from the various groups and fanpages that you can tag in a post on Facebook.  On Facebook, if you begin a word with the @ symbol as you type out the word you are given a dropdown list that updates with each keystroke, an algorithm that constantly attempts to guess what page it was that you were tagging in your post.

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This type of poem is the logical descendant of Flarf poetry but in changing the social and visual context and the subtle rules that governed the original Flarf poems something is lost in translation. I had played with this method of creating poetry as a way to jog my creative juices, never considering that the cheeky contradictions I had created were anything more than fun phrases. I was impressed with the uncanny images that I was able to conjure by happy accident but was never left feeling satisfied with the overall tone of the work and I think that is where the problem with this method of poetry creation lies (I’m still reminded of the image of myself hurdling the setting sun, an image I stumbled accidentally across during the creation of one of these poems). Facebook’s tagging algorithms are strict and clumsy. Sometimes an added space between words can bring about an entirely different drop down list of suggested pages. It is nearly impossible to add connecting words such as but, then, and, etc. without adding a disparate phrase as well. You’ll never find a page on Facebook simply titled “and” but you sure as hell will find “and i’M nEvEr TalkING TO YOU again!!”. When I’m talking about hurdling the setting sun, skidding across low tide, it’s only amusing for a second to wreck the tone completely with some inane, prototypically teenaged exclamation. The satire of it all loses emotional resonance when authorship is relegated to the assembly of phrases rather than the construction of full thoughts.

This isn’t to say, though, that our tagged page poems are without artistic merit. I’m just suggesting that maybe they are better left unowned. That it is better to not claim these as “poems” so much as curated collections of the public ideal. The hyperlinking of each phrase gives these works a vivid sense of place at the expense of full creative freedom. Working within the confines of this rule set can be inspiring. It gives us a sense of camaraderie with our neighbors that was absent in early Flarf poetry, allowing us to create content using the voices of others that is not necessarily immediately mocking but instead acts as an homage with a sidelong glance. It is so banal to hear but easy to agree with the sentiment “dont touch my hair, face, or phone.” though. It is a comfort for us to be reminded that our insecurities and inequities are the wireframes of our humanity, that the interpretation of these ideations is the defining skin stretched over our strikingly similar, and stupid, human experience.

Here, then, is a very short poem I had curated a year or two ago using Facebook’s tagged pages, hyperlinks surprisingly all still intact. It’s very stupid but it’s not my fault. I didn’t write any of the words.

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