buffering

All right so I have skipped a day because I possibly may have been a bit too drunk last night to figure out what my password was to log in to my blog...or I may have not even made it to my computer and passed out on our carpet. Either way I had the taste of gin and dust bunnies in my mouth this morning. So because of this I need two poem ideas.

I'll be honest I didn't think that I would be struggling this soon to develop ideas for poems. This shit is pretty hard.

So one idea that I have was the use of the term buffer in a show called the Riches. Buffer is a phrase used to describe ordinary people by clans of gypses/grifters. This was also a term used by the great historian Howard Zinn who used the term to refer to the middle class of capitalist socieites. Either way the term is used by a person who finds themselves stuck in the middle. though it may feel as though they are free in fact they are completely confined within their position in society and have very little choice. It is only within the extremities that one can find true freedom...or some bullshit like that.

The second idea I have is to have a poem that uses literally interpretations of really bad pick up lines. I am not really sure how this would work but I think it could be really amusing. I will have to flush this one out later.

Reanimation

Recently I have been reading a book called Stiff by Mary Roach. It is the curious history of human cadaver research. The topic, though a bit macabre, is extremely interesting and treated with an air of respect by the author. Roach's writing style is extremely accessible to any reader and keeps a very light-hearted tone about a subject that pretty much deals with death and dead bodies.

In one of the sections she discusses what European doctors in the 17th and 18th centuries used to do to verify if a patient was in fact deceased. some of the more interesting ideas was to fill the mouth of a patient with warm urine, place an insect in a person's ear, or stick a red hot poker in the "rear passage". This idea of a person unsure of a person's state of health also got me thinking of a song by the frames called "what happens when the heart just stops". According to Roach a person who is brain dead can still be kept "alive" in order to retrieve organs from the body. Perhaps I could do a piece on being so detached that i need someone to perform some of these acts to verify if i am actually alive. Either way there is definitely a poem somewhere in this story.