An observation… I went on to a website (syllable count dot com) because I wanted to verify that galleon was three syllables (in my head, my bastard tongue and speech can quicken and make the word sound like two: gal yun). Most of the ads on the site were for a website called money metals which sells gold and silver coins and proudly boasts an A+ BBB rating since 2011. Quick tip, if you feel the need to show your BBB rating, you might be running a shady business or involved in a shady industry. The coins they feature have Donald Trump’s image on them and one coin has the Don’t Tread on Me snake on the back. We’ve all come to recognize those images as appealing to a particular political crowd/demographic which got me wondering about a) the demographics of the people who buy from money metals (perhaps preppers stashing gold and silver), and maybe more interestingly b) why are those people the target audience for a syllable counting website? The only audiences I imagine for such a web site are kids being forced to scan and diagram sentences and poets trying to figure out where to break their lines… I would think whoopee cushions and snarky tee might be more appropriate. Then it occurred to me that perhaps these ads aren’t targeted to the users of syllable count and are targeted to me based on my own browsing history – in which case, the algorithm has really missed the mark.
Why galleon? I heard a song lyric that mentioned being the captain of a galleon and I thought it was an interesting dream one might have – swashbuckling on the high seas. Then I started thinking of how I like the phrase “tangerine trees and marmalade skies” in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” which made me wonder if I’m a man with an affinity for three syllable words: tangerine, marmalade, galleon. Wait, does galleon have three syllables? I can be a bit of a geek when it comes to word play, and I’ve been trying to up my game on imagery and word usage and surrealism… I’ve been trying to think of ways to use nouns as verbs or adjectives. The man with the wavy back ottered down the marmalade sidewalk on Juniper Street. Sure, walked or ambled and pock-marked, gum-stained, or crooked sidewalk might be more straightforward, but where’s the fun in that?
Yesterday morning, I spent the early hours revising three poems and then read through notes I’ve left for myself on my phone. I was looking for a series of notes that I had been thinking of making into a series of poems – I couldn’t find them. As I read, I found several snippets that made me think I might actually be kinda maybe a little ok at this writing thing (I will stop short of claiming to be good). Now if I could just wrangle my words and snippets into something more coherent. This tepid acceptance of my own writing was an extension on my thinking about wanting/avoiding attention. It’s part of the internal conversation over the complications of voice – you have to, in some respects, be in love with your voice. Yet, if you’re at all self-conscious like I am (afraid to seem like a self-promoting narcissist), being in love with your voice is also uncomfortable. In my notes, I came across funny little statements like, “we were a mess and running low on paper towels” or “a cadaver in waiting.” I also rediscovered a lot of soft versions of wistfulness – that, for me, describe the tiny angles of emotion, love, and life: “I mostly remembered joy, but sometimes I got tired.” “She was mostly locks with very few keys.” Apparently, I use the word mostly a lot (welcome to my mental world of uncertainty and qualifiers where nothing is absolute or quite what it pretends to be). And then I found this one that could be the opening of a short story or novel: “The chocolate stain on the yellow golf ball at Marty’s mini golf made me think of the remnants of another family’s ruined vacation.” That was it, no other sentences to follow that up. On one note, I have a series of words that… well… maybe don’t make sense but I kinda like “starfish earring / corporate turtle / sandpiper reflected in the water.” I should probably add a word like brackish to describe the water. I really like the image of a mid-50s or mid-60s era corporate turtle – suit jacket, tiny red tie, briefcase, glasses and hat (though maybe I just described a newspaper reporter turtle). Grouped like that, the phrases could be a beach haiku or something.
The poems I was revising (none of which employ the words marmalade, galleon, or tangerine) are ideas that I’m trying to play with. One is about the many business cards (my business cards) I have shoved into books as bookmarks – a near-literal inserting of myself into the text. Another is about a clay-like figure (I imagine a lanky and shuffling giant), a representation of a human, who loses pieces of himself but adds pieces of other people he finds along the way – as though we’re all walking mixed media art pieces. The third poem is about two valley towns separated by a mountain ridge. Because of the shadow of the mountain, the sun sets earlier in the one town than it does in the other. The residents each long for what the other has – the one town would love more daylight, the other town says you don’t know how long our days can be – only the trees at the top see both sides of the story.
It’s getting light out and I should walk the dog… here’s as good a place as any to stop abruptly amidst the breaching of the ship – the pirate swords of mixed ideas, the sound of cannon shot, and the hazy smoke that is the galleon of my morning.