Underdeveloped
Original:
A friend appeared, sitting to the right, looking to the left. His eye crossing over, one staring at my hair, one at the birch outside the window. A soil under the nails type of boy, his smile looked as though it swallowed his face. He speaks of fear and David Lynch and fingertips on Windex stained glass. If he’s a person with pink tinted cheeks and strong hair on his arms, who’s voice wavers and lilts like a valley girl’s on LSD, then maybe I’m the fiction, who replies with a voice like desks pulled across linoleum and hips that don’t move while walking, whose chest blotched blood in red with a left eyelid that’s only ever half open Revision One: A stranger she was, her nose, a spotty bulge crossed between her eyes. Red nail polish, a chip on the ledge of her incisor, playing at being lipstick. Her chest blotching in excitement, I know it wasn't the only thing. Smile, with my lip slipped up and over, stretched tight against the roots of my teeth. Her veins flowing even moister. I tell her she should fear that surreal feeling she gets as if in a Lynch film. I tell her maybe if she stopped being caught behind streaky glass and get her hands dirty, maybe then she’d be real. No, her hearing ears retreat, with her eyes glossed blue and blind. Revision Two: A stranger came and sat next to me. A girl with a window shade eyelid, that came glittered with glass specks to blind you from the allure of the mismatched awn of her eyebrows. I spoke of fearing neonism and bloodying the Lynchian way and fingertip grease staining Windexed glass. The prickling draft of the air vented through the hair on my arms standing straight as bouquets on buried ground. Cheeks inflamed, cooled from the stiff breath of her passing, she spoke with a curtain pulled from one tonsil to the other. Muffling the lift of her tongue, she wet the peak of her lip, air in, screaming. Revision Three: A girl she was, straight from the pages of a fiction never read. Towel dry pickup lines. She wore a mask of faded lipstick and freckles covered over. Her words came out a chair skidding over linoleum and fingers that touched forearm and stuck like toothpaste dried on a sink, still gummy and wet, like she just pulled Winterfresh from her mouth. I taught from fear of the Lynch and bribed her to Windex my glass. Maybe if I was one to smile with no upper lip showing, maybe then she'd pretend I was real, with my eyes too dark for her liking, and a middle toe that stuck out farther then the rest. Revision Four: A girl appeared, her eyes crossed, looking at my hand. Focused on the sliver in my finger, her tongue reached out and tasted, tipped back and swallowed, but I didn't flinch. Her fingers squeezed my wrist when I looked away, leaving track marks up my arm. Chasing wind through the birch outside the window, she whistled, moving spit inside her mouth. Her eyes melted two ovals darkened underneath that no cream could ever soothe. Revision Five: A girl appeared, sitting to my left, her eyes stared past my face like she was talking to someone else. I asked her what she fears, and complemented her Lynchian way and argued that Windex doesn't clean fingertips off stained glass. Her voice released the breath that stood my hair on end and I watched her walk down the street, tightwalking on the yellow line, and she could because her hips didn't move while walking and her hands stayed flat by her side, and she was surrounded by cars that couldn't help, but swerve. |
Process Memo:
Underdeveloped was a poem I wrote after meeting this kid who seemed like such an anomaly and I wanted to play with real life things being turned into something that seemed quite fake, but that's how they really were, so really, how could they not be true? After I wrote the whole poem, I started playing with the form because it didn't seem as filling in a single stanza "black and white" form. My original draft was in the girl's point of view, but then I changed the point of view to the boy's because I thought being in the girl's point of view, you had this cliche of the girl's daydream with this boy she almost seems to make up, especially with the "his smile/looked as though/it swallowed his face" and "strong hair on his arms." I thought with the ending of the girl wondering if she was a fiction just played on the thought that girl's put these thoughts in their head and build themselves up/tear themselves down with these thoughts of "loving the flaws" and how fiction writers like to build these flaws into perfection of the characters. I thought moving the point of view to a boy's, it wouldn't turn into this romantic daydream. Revision 1, I gave a tone of the boy too good for this girl, and being aware of this romanticism with describing her nose, "a spotty bulge," and the red nail polish on her teeth and how he wasn't impressed. I tried keeping harsh enjambments out of this revision because I thought it gave the narrator a little more credibility because he wasn't all over the place with his thoughts, each line could hold up itself, except for a two lines near the bottom. Each revision, I wanted to try on a new tone to see where it sat best. The first having romantic ideas and images, the second where it's not romantic at all and you have images and a voice that is rougher than the first. Revision 2, I gave the narrator a more romantic look at the girl, because I think it makes the narrator a little more interesting to the reader. He uses images of "window shade eyelids" that I thought gave the girl a mysterious air because when someone has their curtains drawn, you are always curious what's inside, and when they are half open, I feel like it's practically impossible to not look inside and I wanted him to be curious. Especially with what they spoke about being almost lofty and academically charged subjects, but still something that's human. I found that Revision 2 had that flowery feeling that the original draft had, and definitely not as base as Revision 1. Revision 3, I wanted to try stanzas for the form instead of the blocky one stanza, or the more flippant form of the original version. I wanted the images to be fresh, like her fingertips being like toothpaste still stuck in the sink, like that feeling of fingers that just got done pulling gum from the mouth. I wanted to reverse the feeling, or I suppose the characters of the original version and the third revision, because for this one the Lynch reference was completely different than all of the other versions because it had that historic zing and you were wondering more about the narrator instead of the girl. I thought the stanzas broke up the time period a little instead of it being a spew of thought from this one narrator, you had a spread of an interaction between these two people like you did in the original draft. I'm sorry, but I really don't know where Revision 4 came from, but I thought it was relevant because the reader finally got that really weird feeling from the girl that I kind of wanted from the beginning, like something doesn't sit right with you after and there's nothing you can do about it, and it set up the last revision as I wanted it to. I had a really hard time with this entire website creating the same feeling off a draft because I think I feel that once something is written, there's something finished about it that you can't ever take back, and you can add to it, but you can't change it for yourself. There's always that first draft, so why not just build on it as much as possible and add all you can to the draft you're working on so you collect everything you want that time? I guess I think it's important to save that voice that you had at that moment because I think there's a reason it was there, and you might be able to refine it, but it will never have that effect that first words do. |