A love song

I was told to write a love song. This was in May of 2003. This is what I wrote:


Dead Plums hang from
a dead branch, and there
is a freezer full of ashes buried in my back yard.

They hang there, as though
they might fall without
notice, just drop to the
ground, falling far enough
to destroy any desirable
quality they might have had.

And they might not
have had any such
quality.

But they won't fall.
They will hang on that
dead branch inexorably,
and inexorably, inscrutably, intolerably,
you
will desire them.

Tenacity binds them
to the branch and to you.

If only I were as tenacious.
If only I were among the ashes.


The story behind this is a very long one. I could write a novel and still not explain it thoroughly. (Theoretically speaking, of course - I don't know that I could really write a novel at all, other than by copying and pasting. There was nothing in the rules against copying and pasting. And I was the original author of everything copied and everything pasted. [This is another long story, and a very sad one if you ever read the novel that came out of it.])

These are the final paragraphs (with some slight edits and omissions) of that "novel":

As I was walking home, I thought maybe a car would hit me and kill me. Or maybe the bus could have been involved in an accident earlier. And either way I would die. I imagined that you would read the paper in the morning and see something about my accident, and you would come to my funeral and would cry...

As I was walking home, I thought maybe a car would hit me and kill me. Or maybe the bus could have been involved in an accident earlier. And either way I would die. I imagined that you would read the paper in the morning and see something about my accident. And you would be surprised and shocked and would think for a moment about how fragile life is.

And this is the logo I won for "finishing" my novel:


I titled it Self-Portrait as a Day Dream. The subtitle is "A cut-and-paste novel mostly never to be read." I've read everything in it, but not every time that it all appears. That's the benefit of cutting and pasting. You write one page, and with a few clicks, suddenly you have fifty. The rules never said anything about not cutting and pasting. Or copying and pasting. Which is really more what I did. It all had a purpose, though, in theory - the idea of repetition with small changes here and there.

Anyone who reads this 'blog entry' is welcome to ask for a copy of the novel. I'll probably turn them down. But I will write a novel about the love song for anyone who wants it. This is the advantage of a blog about rounders with visqueen. I can make any offer and not worry that anyone will take me up on it.