Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Continuing to tinker with the freewrite

I found a passage I liked in that recent freewrite and wrote it all out in lines of three words each. (I took out one word along the way.) I was amused to find that it divided evenly by 3.

[EDIT: Oh, crap, never mind. The first line is four words. This is why I don't do formal stuff. Also why they stopped letting me be the cashier at the library book sale in 1985.]

The tail of the
caravan sweeps across
road, effaces. What
is the point
of travel if
no one knows
where we came
from? What is
our ruse? Why
do we dare?
Where do we
dwell? In paper
patterns, painted houses,
crooked doors, gates
that sing open.
God bless America.

Then I started looking at the first word of each line. I couldn't get a reasonable phrase from the whole list, but I found a couple of intriguing bits:

The caravan road is of nowhere.
where dwell patterns crooked that God

"Crooked that God" what?

"smudged with his finger while juggling the planets"?
"ordained for crooked travelers"?

So many fun possibilities.

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