Fun With Failed Poems

Friends, let me tell you, I can write some really terrible poetry. I hope most of it never sees the light of day, and I trust my instincts, my friends, and the editors who choose to publish my work to help make sure that doesn't happen. But my notebooks are choked with stuff that could cost me my poetic license for good if anyone got a peek at it. And the worst part is that I'm paranoid to throw anything out. Occasionally, I'll recycle a good line or image from a bad poem, so instead of using a paper shredder, I continue to accumulate notebook upon notebook of junk in a hefty trunk in the office -- you know, on the off chance I might've missed something I'll need five years down the road.

Today I discovered a way to have a bit of fun with some of the poems I know are utterly irredeemable. I learned about The N+7 Machine from a Facebook friend who uses it to make hilarious remixes of articles featuring Mitt Romney, and I've been remixing my failed poems just to see what happens. I doubt it makes them any better, but I sure think it makes them more interesting.

I'll try to post a few as time allows, in case you're interested.

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my own reduction of calamity -- an N+7 poem

in the fourth graduate i gobbled

     paperboy mache 

                    learned to recite the steroid defiance that opens the decongestant 

              of index 

had my appetizer removed & learned this worrier 

will set fireball to disservices & cave

                     into the smokestack 

an abseilling tsar that scraped raw my poor brainwave once again ten yearnings later 

           when I read of poor sokrates who took the piston out of petty politics & pink pogroms 

oh I said to myself if only I’d been there & tore at my rebellength haircut 

                       all while that futile nightclub jabbed pendulums through 

                          my dormitory roommate

                          & wallet 

                          & I wandered the half-caste-pub because I knew 

what was just but also knew there can be no justice whatever 

              exacted on the deadened but the loaf are still gamma so at twenty-seven 

                                 I licked & sealed

the environmentalist addressed to mrs. coleman 

the lettuce inside asking why if we hold these tsars to be seller-evident 

                                             et cetera & et cetera 

she’d looked at Paul Gershwin like she wished

             he’d swan hemlock 

made him squat alone on the badboy carriage 

                           which his noggin cleaned 

      nosebleed pressed tightly into the spiderwebby cornet 

                                            as the restaurant of us crammed ourselves full of birthplace calamity with starshaped sprinkles 

just because Paul doubted out loud the verisimilitude 

                                          of tuck everlasting 

but the tsar I really wanted to know mrs. coleman couldn’t have told me -- why had I watched &          

                                         listened & chewed & swallowed but held my tonnage though i

                                         knew

                                         she was wrong 

               why 
                     had I become a perpetual ton-holder so that now it would take more

          than a lift-off to atone for the guise I have amassed simply though

                                              my own reduction of calamity 
                                                          ???