Stealing from myself, part II, kind of...

My previous blog touched on the fiction-like quality in some of my music reviews. This one, we’ll do as I teased--almost a cliffhanger but not quite--and show you what happens when you steal from yourself and utilize the words in a different manner.

While reading through some reviews recently--I was sending off a few to my GF, Alessandra, to read; she‘s read my two novels, some short fiction and poetry, but never the reviews--my fiction writer’s brain saw something more in those words, the possibility of shaping them in new and fascinating ways. I’ve been exploring poetry in a serious way for over a year now, so much as to have 3 poems accepted for publication soon in the ezine, Zouch, when I saw…poetry; an abstract form of poetry, at least. Now, I don’t profess to being a poet, still learning (always learning; always learning with writing and everything in this life, actually), but I took the descriptive ambience within yesterday’s review and, well, you can see. I think it's an intriguing manipulation of words into something that stands alone, without the musical backdrop, but as poetry (check the review side-by-side with the poem, it may amuse).

Here’s the poem:

Automate
By John Claude Smith

The future city at night:

Blue ice moon.
Cold shimmer of steel architecture.
Barren streets.
Humanity disconnected.

Underneath the polished façade:
circuitry pulse-beat byways simmer with life.
Connections honed
on the information highway.

Transparent and transient:
pleas for contact from virginal fingers.
Communication dictated by
a vampire called technology

feeding on our inability to feel.

So we patch into slumber via electric dreams,
of a time when a kiss stirred emotions,
embellished contact,
and wasn’t just an impassive x

at the end of an electronic correspondence.
x
　

© John Claude Smith, 2011

I expect to explore more of these, refining whatever they are, and even have set aside a review to incorporate the wild descriptive world therein for expansion in a short fiction piece in progress.

All a part of the fun, of stealing from the best, or at least myself. All a part of the fun of being a writer!