Now that I look at the title of this post again, I'm a little scared that I can't live up to the overconfident grandeur that it seems to promise so cockily. (Note to self - look up 'cockily'. If it doesn't exist, use it with such devastating frequency and arrogance that it'll just be easier for everyone to go along with it.)

So here's another poem from the dusty old vaults - about two years ago I wrote this short piece, and although not one of my best, I thought it was worth throwing it in now to explain - well, the profile name for one. A bit of a change in style and substance this time, see if anyone bites; because I think that while many established poets really work to develop and maintain a sort of dignity by unifying the style of their work, it's so much more fun for us madcap unpublished nobodies who can really mess around with poetry. I mean really mess with it, with ideas that we ourselves fervently and breathlessly revere with all our tender, aching unplumbed souls in one poem and then spitefully, maliciously, horrifically tear a gory literary new one in the next, leaving all our previous notions of form and linguistic ornamentation in bloody tatters by the roadside for weeping CSIs to some day tell their therapists about. We have no dignity to maintain, and no rules - just words, and endless possibilities for fun.

Crap - now I feel like the poem I was going to post doesn't live up to that in the slightest. But for continuity's sake I'll try and slake your literary bloodlust by stating that the previous barrage of verbosity that seemed to promise some kind of Tarantino-esque entrail-spilling slaughter haiku was just a metaphor for the way we can change style and substance a hell of a lot when playing with poetry for our own appetites. In short - this one's a little different from the last, folks - I hope someone is amused.

(Note to self - do not start typing 'short' introductions to poems at 3:45 a.m. Also, write a Tarantino-esque entrail-spilling slaughter haiku.)

The Meaning of Things

I found a baggage tag today,

Two years’ degraded memories

That prove only that a girl who was once me

Went to a place that certain people call New York

And ‘time’ - then, in a place that could be home

A slice of blue card surfaced in the trash

With trapezoidal recollections

That stroke a vagrant stain of meaning  

In some current cad who’s not all there.

To briefly (and I mean it this time!) summarize the commentary I made on this when I wrote it, I was exploring issues of transience and things being given meaning via context - even a person’s character, their 'self', which is perhaps a composite of thoughts, experiences, and memories, however long forgotten. Thanks for reading it - and if you're less of a fan of the simpler language and modern rhythmic discrepancies, I'll pick something deliciously linguistically twisted for my next post. ;)

- The current Cad.