4 poems by Guy Melvin

Cotton Candy Colored Farts or CCCF

I’m old to this life and new to theirs.

Last Friday we sat down and smiled into drinks.

They farted twice while changing the music

And it’s possible that’s the moment into knowing

I was going to be unhappy

When this later life began.

Pastel violet hair is cotton candy in my mouth.

Of course you do, but please think about me too.

When I swallow them I’ll refuse to fart so I don’t let any of us out. 

On the Nightstand

A Rose Quartz 

Massage Wand  

On the bedside table (Nightstand) 

HD photos of the Horse Head Nebula 

Can't compare to the frequency  

Between these thighs 

Lifting arms is 

Such a surprise 

Understanding others 

Tomorrow's spell 

Drool collecting between cheeks 

Pillowcases, laughter, and sheets 

At zero g everything is perfect 

Annoyingly blue 

Sat atop that blinking light 

Tomorrow's action, tomorrow's fight  

The bass of the voice 

The face of the hair 

Sleeping, humming, hoping, between sleeping  

All combined to one 

2004: T-Pain fell in love with a stripper

2014: We fell in love with a Tinder

There might be a locker at the bottom of the sea that contains your undreamt dreams

Pin-ups of the hottest drag fiends

Because you’re the boy king that’s heard but not seen 

Winding through channels below surfaces is a likeable thing

Especially when it is storming above as the winds and water continue to disagree

Everything is more real/realer on your cell phone’s familiar screen

Drinking, now that’s the American theme

Me? I’m American underneath this skin, and a liar beneath that but also a queen

I’d mostly hate, hate it, but would prolly love to be seen as me.

But who knows? Hard to tell how lonely u r in a twin sized bed

The security of it tho – The security of a nipple inside the mouth of a head 

There are flashes of the monster that fed off of loss and nostalgia’s cool passing.

“It’s lame how used to u I become.” We’re going 6.6 miles per hour faster than when we were sitting. Hand in hand and bottle.

Observations continue
2004: T-Pain fell in love with a stripper

2014: We fell in love with a Tinder

Who you let me in so quickly? Thank you.

We’re mostly just acquaintances, I mean aquanauts tho – meandering through the oceans of mistakes and embraces. My time is had, with you. My face is head between your legs. Flies will linger by the windowsills – dropping to known deaths – they’re fighter pilots at the dawn of war and nationalism, every afternoon until dusk. 

And then we begin again.

Profound Soft Goth Realization #666: There is no demon in me, I am the demon.

The stillness I cared about.

Thinking of what 6 is without George’s 7

Only the number twice of 3 –

Shit sounds “deep” when it’s stupid. 

Anything serious is stupid

Or funny –

So afterwards, following the toweling off, and Gatorade Glacial Freeze sharing

Let’s not share

Later on train: We’ll stare out sunken tracks cutting grass, dirt, rocks

I’ll tell u bout u.

U r worth for all my words, and one more:

I already see u/me 2gether, high up, twisted in bed

EVERYTHING b4u was bright purgatory.

Uneven things and magic are all I notice now. 

But who knows? We’re stupid, sadly/funny enough. 

Poems aren’t one thing. Poems are many things.

Sometimes poems can be funny. Laughing is important. Laughing is healthy. There’s no reason a poem can’t make you laugh. Sometimes I try to be funny. I once wrote a poem about checking gmail often.

Sometimes poems can be sad. Being sad is an integral component of the human experience. And it comes to everyone in different ways at different times. Sometimes I read sad poetry and it makes me feel less alone. Like, a sense of camaraderie or bond with the author. Sometimes I write from this place with the hope of giving that gift to someone else. I once wrote a poem about not wanting to get out of bed in the morning.

Sometimes poems can comment on the state of the world. This world is pretty fucked up all the time. People can be cruel. People can be greedy. People can be wholeheartedly unaware of what it is they’re actually doing. Sometimes I write in a way that targets a person or a piece of culture that I don’t agree with. I once wrote a poem that was simply a list of billionaire Larry Ellison’s expensive possessions.

Sometimes poems can be absurd. There’s a line in a Neutral Milk Hotel song that I’ve carried with me for years, “How strange it is to be anything at all.” Existence is inherently absurd given that no one chooses to be born, no one knows why, and everyone dies. There’s so much mystery everywhere. I like poetry that explores the mystery and absurdity of everyday life.

I stand opposed to declaring any poem “good” or “bad.” I think it’s a real petty assertion that inherently implies some contrived universal standard of literary merit. I don’t think that exists. When commenting, I try to articulate “what I like” or “what I took from it.” Our individual experience of reading a poem is just as unique as each different poem, so I try to acknowledge the subjectivity of the practice.

The idea that poems “can be anything” is becoming more and more pronounced over the years. I’m not saying curated lists of Tweets are poems. I’m not saying curated lists of Tweets are not poems. I’m saying that the art, and how the art is interpreted, is incessantly changing. I keep an open mind. I keep it fun.

Now

just opened my eyes

now checking gmail

just realized i fell back asleep

now checking gmail

just took a sip of coffee

now checking gmail

just checked twitter

now checking gmail

finally put clothes on

now checking gmail

walking over the river

checking gmail

just made eye contact with a squirrel

now checking gmail

just sat down on the grass

just felt the sun

just felt the breeze

now checking gmail

just read Alexander Shulbin’s entire wiki page

now checking gmail

just checked gmail

now checking gmail

just stood on my head for thirty seconds

now checking gmail

just noticed the purple stripes on my skin

now checking gmail

just noticed the dots developing

just itched the dots

just started bleeding

just watched the blood change color four times

just realized the blood didn’t change color

it was my eyes that changed

four times they did

and now i’m staring at my stripes

i see them gradually fade away

and then reappear

like a pulse

each time they reappear they seem to grow

they’re getting bigger

yes, wider

but even more strikingly

they’re beginning to protrude out from my skin

getting more and more pronounced

and more robust

and i’m captivated

and it’s out of my control

and they grow

and they grow

and they grow

and now i’m checking facebook

Poetic Examinations Regarding the Metaphysics of Guidelines in Critical Theory, pt. 2

Poetic Examinations Regarding the Metaphysics of Guidelines in Critical Theory, pt. 2

“The band keeps almost starting.”

I'm sitting in a bar about to watch a band, and there are things people say.

It's really just the band sound-checking, but everyone is cued to beginnings.

When we are offered something to pay attention to, it is difficult to ignore.

I can stare at an empty wall for hours and hours in silence, it does me no good.

How do you feel when you are confronted with emptiness?

How much of your life do you actually remember? Boil it down to a percentage.

I imagine my percentage is something like 1-2% but this seems real.

Ask me what day I wrote this and I will shrug.

When did you read this? You will probably shrug.

In 31 years, I learned not much.

One day, something will stick out in your mind. Even though you don't know the exact points and facts and times of what you did yesterday, something will ingrain itself into your brain with such clarity that you will never forget every atom of the event for as long as you live. And in the vast blur of life maybe there is a dream you had, maybe there is a random conversation you had and never met that person again, maybe you were so stunned that someone would dare treat you that way that they did, or maybe you were so stunned that you could have it in you to do that thing you did.

That's what's real, and this only seems real.

“The world is everything that is the case.”

Every memory you can hold on to is a beginning, and we are

a poem and a short story by Alexandra Naughton

sad story #4

I want to ask I don’t want to ask but I want to tell I don’t want to tell I need to show you I don’t need to do anything

life is really just a series of pressures and scenarios in which to embarrass oneself

I make my bones exposing myself

making bones

I have nothing to achieve from holding it

I have little to squander from embracing it

some apologist’s respect

I am trained for this

have it harnessed so sexy

sad story #8

am I special oh my god why do I always do this like torturing myself but I want to be validated in a sensitive way I mean I don’t need it to survive or even function or feel good but if you’re going to occupy like this I’d like to feel a similar impact because otherwise what’s the point. my affections are capitalist. writing this in a notebook in fat sweeping lettering but it looks clean and almost in lines almost like I have decent handwriting I guess I’m calm because what if this is only legible to myself but I am confident a stranger could find this notebook and read my every thought as if it were printed but maybe not I have terrible handwriting haha I write that in a letter to you or you write that in yours and I guess we’re both so self conscious or maybe it’s just me I guess it’s always just me but I really can’t tell. keep pressing that little button on the side to see if you’ve replied to the message I sent to you itself a reply to something you texted me writing we’re always talking about writing it’s like the only way we can talk about sex because they’re almost the same thing especially when it’s frustrating.

sitting on my feet. my cat is next to me and we’re listening to Turn on the Bright Lights. I loved this in high-school but now I associate it with another time in my life riding the bus trash bags full of clothes up steep streets and leaning forward to stay balanced to keep everything from falling out. it’s comforting in a grimy way. alone besides my cat and I don’t mind it I actually like it I mean I like being with friends but not all the time. like time to sit in bed or at my desk with my cat and it eats at me when I can’t have this like I wish I could quit my job.

but seriously or just anyone. like can you tell me but I don’t need you to say anything I just want to say it to you to kill it you don’t even have to look at me but I tend to do this with so many questions I want to say but don’t want to know the answers to. wonder if things were different like I wish I had given myself some time like at my desk or in my bed with my cat. Jesus Christ. sometimes I find myself in a near catatonic state I don’t know if that really is what it is but it’s kind of like that hot tub scene in Ferris Bueller and I just sit and can’t move not even my head or my hands and I think about doing something like standing up or rolling a spliff but not even that I am really just staring at some odd point on the wall like a picture of Al Pacino or the bottom blind in the row and I wish I had a plan.

in the bathroom I stand in front of the sink and look in the mirror open my mouth and grimace and notice something I ate in one of my bottom teeth did anyone else see this I pick up the green handled toothbrush and clean up looking around the bathroom looking at the pair of old underwear in the trash the ones with the birds that I bought in high-school that I kept way longer than I should more holes than fabric faint blood stains I can’t wear these or show them to anyone and they even feel dingy when I wear them so what’s the point. looking at my teeth again I think of a song lyric for an emo band and think about writing it down spit and leave the bathroom and look inside my notebook reading the last line I wrote and immediately forget what I wanted to write down.

walking on the beach insects buzzing in my eyes a dead raccoon something in the water that I think is an animal swimming or bobbing up and down but it really just a large rock the water splashes over broken glass in the sand the train tracks just to the left with the commuter train coming quick around the bend almost out of nowhere how I thought about parking on Carlotta street and calling it in my head the whole time mad Carlotta street how I almost instinctually walked toward the tracks just before the train to put out a cigarette how I thought about how if the train had caught me you might be sad for a little while but not long probably and I wouldn’t want you to be but I think I would want you to remember me.

WORD THEFT: Why did 2013 become the year of the plagiarists?

Paisley Rekdal got two Facebook messages last January from fellow poets who had some disturbing news: a poet in England by the name of Christian Ward had taken an old poem of hers and published it, barely altered, as his own. Her first reaction was to wonder if it was some kind of experiment. Perhaps by changing the gender of the author of a poem about infidelity and infertility, he was teasing out new meanings?

Then she saw the “new” poem, with its new line breaks and minor but grating word changes. It was obviously a work of deception, not conceptual play. “That’s the thing that enraged me,” she said recently. “If he had just plagiarized the poem and published under his name, I would have been less annoyed. When I saw he wanted to take part in something I had done myself and claim it as his own, I felt kind of violated.”

Rekdal, who responded to Ward with a righteously angry blog post (and later a more melancholy one), is not the only one feeling violated these days. The poetry world experienced something of a plagiarism epidemic last year. CJ Allen withdrew from the shortlist of England’s Forward Prize in September when it was revealed that he had plagiarized some of his past work. Australian poet Andrew Slattery was stripped of three prizes when it turned out he had cribbed from Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, among others. When caught, he claimed the poems were written in the cento form, in which each line is pulled from another source; he also called his work “a cynical experiment.”

The list goes on: British poet David R. Morgan admitted last spring that many of his poems, stretching back to at least the 1980s, had been plagiarized. Rekdal’s perpetrator turned out to have stolen from several other poets, including Helen Mort and Sandra Beasley. Graham Nunn, longtime organizer of a major Australian poetry festival, was accused last September of at least eight instances of plagiarism, which he defended in part as “sampling”; on his blog, he wrote that “[r]eading and listening to music are a vital part of my process” and that “parts of the original text are creatively appropriated in the formation of a new work.” These are all published, and often prize-winning, poets—they are not students or amateurs. Why did 2013 become the year of the plagiarists?

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Writing is a dance that involves imitation, inspiration, and originality. But all things considered, writerly disapproval of plagiarism has remained remarkably consistent over the centuries—really, even over millennia. The Roman poet Martial accused his rival Fidentinus, whom he called a “miscreant magpie”: “My books need no one to accuse or judge you: the page which is yours stands up against you and says, ‘You are a thief.’” Martial was particularly galled that Fidentinus had mixed in his own inferior work with Martial’s original material. Yes, approaches to borrowing and attribution have shifted over time, but wholesale copying has never been kosher.

T.S. Eliot, who relied on other sources for much of “The Waste Land” (plagiarism or allusion?), famously wrote, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Less often quoted is the next line, “Bad poets deface what they take.” This is what seems to gall many victims of plagiarists: to see their poems reprinted in weaker versions than the original.

Ruth Ellen Kocher, a Colorado-based poet and professor, recently learned that her 2004 poem “Issues Involving Interpretation” had been plagiarized online by an Australian named Vuong Pham. Pham kept her line breaks intact but changed a few words and added some new lines. “When he stole my work, he didn’t make it better,” Kocher said. “If my work was going to be taken and pilfered in that way, I would have loved to see it undergo a transformation and evolution.” Instead, she said, it reminded her of a “reverse revision”: his small changes actually made the poem worse.

Since the 19th century, when the Romantics embraced what Marilyn Randall, a professor of French studies at the University of Western Ontario and the author of a 2001 book on literary plagiarism, calls the “authentic poetic soul,” borrowing has become even more cemented as a literary crime. (Rekdal refers to her plagiarist as a Romantic, because “he was trying to tie his own imagination to the poem and claim it.”) Even in our age of collage and appropriation and “intertextuality,” it’s only at the extreme edges of such experimentation that you’ll find even mild defenses of outright plagiarism.

Despite the fact that plagiarism has always been taboo, readers are often more forgiving of historical offenses. As Thomas Mallon puts it in his insightful 1989 book on plagiarism, “Stolen Words,” “Everyone enjoys a good scandal in the present…. What we seem far less able to endure is that plaster cast falling from the library shelf: Its shattering somehow bothers us more than the live body going off the cliff.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, was an inveterate thief, but he remains firmly in the canon. Hart Crane borrowed heavily from a lesser-known poet named Samuel Greenberg, most notably in his early poem “Emblems of Conduct.” (“No doubt he meant to acknowledge his debt,” James Laughlin wrote in 1939. “It simply slipped his mind.”)

More recently, the British conceptual poet Ira Lightman, who was behind many of last year’s revelations, got involved simply because he didn’t see anyone else doing it. “The poetry world is genteel,” he said. “People don’t like to make any kind of stir.” Lightman has taken it upon himself to comb through suspect work, alert the victims, and publicize his findings.

But even Lightman, who spent untold hours last year ferreting out violators, doesn’t want to banish them indefinitely. “I don’t see them all as these sinister, plotting, Machiavellian characters,” he said. “I see it as a corruption. And we’re all vulnerable to corruption.” He suggests that transgressors retreat to self-publishing for a few years, prove themselves honest, and then return to the fold.

If plagiarists are not sinister and Machiavellian, then why do they do it? This question gets asked every time there’s a fresh revelation of plagiarism, whether it’s in the literary world, journalism, or academia. There’s never a satisfying answer, but there are at least lots of guesses, often somewhat at odds with each other: laziness or panic, narcissism or low self-esteem, ambition or deliberate self-sabotage.

In poetry, at least, everyone agrees it’s not about the money. “One of the hardest things is that the stakes in poetry are not very high,” Kocher said. “I’m not a rocket scientist. I’m not going to cure cancer with one of my poems. I don’t get paid an extraordinary amount of money, and I don’t have any great notoriety outside of the writing community. So to take something that most people engage in as an act of joy and sully it this way—it just seems one of the most egregious offenses.”

But does anyone write just for the money? Laurence Sterne, the plagiarist author ofTristram Shandy, said he wrote “not to be fed but to be famous.” Now, of course, he is. It worked.

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The Internet has made both plagiarism itself and its detection much easier for everyone. But the major cases that came up in 2013 have all concerned British and Australian poets, often, but not always, cribbing from American ones. Despite some speculation that our national character makes us less likely to plagiarize—Americans are obsessively respectful of private property! American egos are too big to rely on other people’s work!—there’s also the possibility that Americans have simply been lucky enough to not be caught in the current dragnet.

For one, the primary detective is British, more familiar with the Commonwealth scene than the American one. And it’s not as if Americans haven’t been caught in the past. An Iowa poet named Neal Bowers, a former editor of Poet and Critic magazine, wrote a 1997 book about tracking down the Illinois elementary school teacher who published work copied from Bowers in 13 journals over the course of a few years. “It’s a very uneasy feeling,” Bowers told the New York Times at the time, “a bit like having a stalker.”

The gut reactions of the plagiarized are hard to predict. The poet and essayist H.L. Hix, for example, found out in October that his work had been lifted by Graham Nunn in an Australian anthology of love poems. He said his first reaction to getting the news from Lightman was sheer surprise: “As a poet one gets used to being completely ignored.”

Some victims feel moved to reach out the perpetrators. Kocher sent a note to Pham through Facebook after he posted a brief apology, which has since been removed, on his blog. She hasn’t heard back. (Pham has defended himself by saying he was simply naive and not taught about proper attribution; he also recently wrote that he has become a victim of cyberbullying.)

After Paisley Rekdal posted her open letter to Christian Ward on her blog, she also asked online for an apology from him. She got one: a one-sentence email that she recalls as something to the effect of “I’m sorry, I’m not this kind of person.” It’s the kind of open, vacuous statement that could make you hate someone, or feel sorry for them, or both at once. “He gave me what I asked for,” she said, “but he gave me no more than what I asked for.”

Is there such a thing as a resolution to a plagiarism story? Plagiarism isn’t a crime, there’s no universally accepted punishment for it, and the perfect expression of contrition may never come. Hix, for his part, says he has no plans to get in touch with Graham Nunn. “These were love poems that are being stolen,” he said. “I don’t have any more interest in speaking with Mr. Nunn than I would with the person who had broken into my house and stolen my property.”

In the end, we all have to ask ourselves one question: Who cares?