Writing for exercise, you lose two if you wish. One should yield confidence building results. She can. Your ideal reflects your definition, as oblique as you know yourself. You do have something strange, some ownership you depend upon. Your erasure in the source material. Exercise some, go far, if you wish. An “ED” to change (it’s a small cheat, but permissible here). Appear in the same method, deleting it again like always. You choose white spaces, erased, conventional, invisible. Exercise is required, it’s complicated, don’t worry. Wave to facilitate erasure. Please consider exercise, at least some brief poetical voyage to try erasing metaphor. You create metaphors of oil, everyday’s menu, we can tell. Exercise may be useful, not just a neglected plant on your kitchen sill. Reveal the light. Evoke a response. You wish things are as honest as what you have seen. Exercise, though you need not love your feelings. Sheen, and heft, they will now resemble a person, another object or body. Suggest something about the “real” subject, nowhere should that subject be named. I failed to avoid personification, just a person plausibly revealing your forgeries. Choose you, be strong. You are permitted to fool me regarding the original. You appear awkward, choose end-words if you wish to be a little more liberal. Be careful not to carry this too far, it begins to feel dishonest. Your refrain must be interesting, this is a story. You need not keep the same length. Choose your borrowed lines carefully. Don’t forget exercise.
*A note on the poem: this is a modified version of a poem created from an exercise in erasure. I love erasure, because I can take any string of words and turn them into something entirely new. To twist instructions into the inner monologue of a fitness instructor from a late-night infomercial proves that despite that there is always more to say with the words that you have. Over the past few months, I have often felt my creative self running as fast and as far away as it could get. The prospect of putting words on a page was and sometimes is, daunting. But, just as you are not in this alone, neither is your writing. Print a Hannibal script or rip out a few pages of Shakespeare, grab a Sharpie, and go to town. Make it your own. Words belong to nobody.
By Lucy Farcnik