Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Slurkett #1, Adam in the moon

I sat down today and decided that I was going to write a slurkett, a form that Timmy invented. He said to me one time that the first one he wrote was a bit of a disaster, and so that makes me feel a bit better about my attempt. I wrote a little review of Timmy's blog and this strange and challenging form that you can check out here if you want to give one a shot yourself.

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Adam wears a bandanna every second day

but cannot tell you why.

Could it be with sorrow he forgets he lives on the dark side of the moon?

Does he know he will be forever alone,

endlessly seeking

for cheese and for anywhere like a Gouda place to hide?

"Go," seeps from lips, pitiful moan.

"Help," he whimpers to the stars, for in despair no one else is about to spy.

Is there no one around who can show Adam the way?

Just a friend to call him home?

Keep a place on the next shuttle -- he had a big bank account so you know he can pay.

Look now how you doom him to creeping.

Make a free seat for the misunderstood -- the boy whose wish is to fly

needs no more than a sail for his pontoon

or another bandanna on the moon, and one sunny day.

10 comments:

timmy said...

congratulations! well done! that wasn't so hard, was it? now do about 50 more and you can publish a book of them

Jon said...

timmy,
HA!!! Do you want to have a race?

;)

Unknown said...

Oh yes Timmy...person of interest is how I believe law enforcement terms you for inventing this tortured form. I have the format copied from the other place and when I find idle time I will try this as I throw my self off slurkett cliff.

Although now that I see Jons example I do like the freeform nature the writer apparently is forced to adopt to conform to the format provided.

timmy said...

jon,
um....um... perhaps competitiveness is not in the true spirit of the slurkett (he chuckled uneasily)... i've been averaging about one a month - that seems more than enough...

mark,
exactly! the key is to forget saying or communicating anything and let the form dictate the content - i hadn't thought of it that way but the content becomes completely "free form"

The Scrybe said...

Wow, and such a challenging form to write in... :)

Chris Benjamin said...

love it!

only line i got stuck on was 'dark side of the moon' - just reminds too much of pink floyd so i get stuck on the image of that album, which probably wasn't what you were going for.

otherwise, it was a great ride.

Jon said...

Scrybe,
Thanks for stopping by again... good to make new friends in the blogosphere. Hope to see you again

benji,
Yeah I know... there's a bunch of the lines in this poem that I'm not 100% on... but it's a tough form and all that I wanted from this one was to get something that seemed to fit... but it's kind of like me trying to fit into a pair of 12x pants!
And anyways... who can ever deny the impulse to floyd???

;)

Mariana Soffer said...

Nice poem my friend, you have very intersting sentences in there. One comment. Regarding he going to be alone forever, well I guess we all are and will in a certain way. No other person can ever get into our real selves. So it is just the same as every body else, except he did not realize it yet.

Jon said...

Mariana,
Hmmmm... interesting...

though i'm not so sure about the "all of us alone in our own selves" idea... even though it is just me in my head... there seems to be a few voices that I'm answering to... know what i mean?

and no... i guess that adam didn't get it yet... and he is (after all) trapped on the moon... and yes... that is like so many of us and so many of our fellows...

maybe some of this post came from some of the reading i'm dong lately... you ever read Paulo Freire? and some of his ideas about consciousness?

seems like something that would be right up your alley...

thanks a lot for your comment... always happy to see you around

:)

Jon said...

** oops... "doing"