The straits be dire. I was actually cruising MySpace for poetry groups that’s how badly I want some near-professional criticism on my work. I’m sorry about my previous entry. Amazing what an overnight sleep, a cuddle from a cat and little purple pills can do to somewhat restore the balance. I’m still heartbroken and fucking want to leave this horrid, cursed place (my parents’ house or Australia? haven’t decided) but lack of funds prevents that from being a reality.
So anyway, ages ago, I handed out a copy of most of my verse novel (novel where the chapters are poems) to some friends to read. The idea for at least a few was that they read it, write notes and comments, then hand it back to me.
That never happened. So I thought I’d come up with some amusing theories as to what happened to the paper my work was printed on.
- Someone’s dog ate part or all of the manuscript.
- It was all stapled together and then donated to Japanese businessmen who are filthy rich but choose to live in cardboard boxes to have a simpler, unfettered life - they used it as a blanket of sorts.
- That guy in one of my musicology electives accidentally got hold of it and tore the pages into strips which he then ingested (I’m not kidding).
- Someone’s dog ran out into the garden, decided to get into an altercation with a household cat and ran around the house like a whirling dervish, smudging so much mud on it that it was rendered illegible (this happened to one of my poetry assignments at uni, would you believe).
- The blank side was much more useful and a draft of something else got printed on it.
- All its pages were used in some weird Dance of the Flaming Arseholes orgy - you roll up some paper, stick it into your plughole and set it alight. I once knew a very fat and very rude (that’s a quotation from Four Weddings and a Funeral so I’m not being gratuitously nasty) girl who claimed her hippy father did this.
- Became cat litter. For a cat that lives in a Melbourne suburb called St. Kilda with an IAMS obsession in desperate need of an apronectomy.
- Became emergency toilet paper in scungy male sharehouses. No, not all males are scungy - in fact, the neatest people I ever lived with were all male. It was the females who were somewhat…festy.
- It got published in a parallel universe…sigh! No, that would make me happy, can’t have that.
- A really lame grindcore band took it, changed some words here and there, and turned it into mediocre commie song lyrics.
- A black hole got it?
- Lastly, it was placed in a coffin and busted out before the person was buried, and became famous in the same way Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market is supposed to have become known - I think. Or was it her entire oeuvre?
It wasn’t a wasted exercise - two professional writers took a look at it, one was even a published poet here who said it had some merit about it. There were only a few people whose opinions really mattered to me who didn’t give feedback as expected. Some meant to, but you know…more important things come along.
Poetry, why oh why did I have to start writing poetry? I could have a happier life as a punk rocker or something, but it had to be poetry. Probably because it’s so connected to music. But there’s so many other bad poets out there, I don’t fancy adding to the bunch! Hmm. I should start working on my verse novel again, I really miss it. It might not be any good, but it’s been so much to work on.
