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Category Archives for: Fragment

Essay versus Poem

13 February 2022 by Rey Armenteros

What’s the difference?

Oh, there’s a difference!

You type one and hand write the other one.

One should come out with facility, almost like thought, and the other is to be built like an object of sound structure and appealing form.

If one is your involuntary signature, your handwriting, as they say, the other is your thoughtfully-conceived drawing technique.

One is hit or miss, and the other one is hit when enough time has passed between each episode of shaping and deliberating and searching and toiling.

A successful essay is a thought on a line, unbroken and moving on (and not necessarily forward), and anything else attached to it, such as a clever rhythm or sound structure is nothing more than a bonus.

A successful poem is a thought on a form that may at first seem to be on a line, that takes any shape, disposition, or length within a conceived structure, and which may allow any bonus to be added to it for the benefit of added fascination but at the expense of precluding any possibility of attaining perfection.

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Dream Interrupted

31 October 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Immediately after closing my eyes, five men were in a line up growling and yelling at the unseen authorities, who were volubly commanding them to stay still for the camera. The second from the left was brandishing a middle finger in a large hand, vehemently continuing his noises. Next instant, that man’s scowl was gone; hoods popped over their heads. The middle finger had also been shrouded, and loud noises woke me up.

Were those noises in my room? I picture cars falling onto our yard from a height of dozens of feet. Three such bangs.

I meant to take a look outside.

I concluded it was in my head.

Where could they have taken the hooded men.

I was going back to sleep, but I was really not, because the thought of returning to the hooded men kept me from returning…

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26 September 2021 by Rey Armenteros

A bull horn goes off in the distance. It is actually a train. It was not something processed through your senses but something absorbed into your understanding. Reflecting on that train sound in this quiet, gray morning, I look at the birds landing on my back lawn, and it is not just another thing taken through your eyes. It is completed in your odd mind, and it is made to create feelings in a most particular way.

There are new wrinkles forming from pink folds of anger searing into my forehead. I look at these in the mirror, forget about them, and get ready for work.

When I was walking past the college E7 Technology Building, I pondered the wooden and metal structures now rotting along one side of the building. They have been standing there for years. Were they tech projects, you know, like popsicle stick bridges gone gigantic, or parts of the building they changed their mind about, or maquettes that no longer have a use?

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The Order of Points

26 July 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Writers of the line versus writers of the object. Writers of the object continue the thought on the next paragraph by going into the first point after introducing the three points in the previous paragraph. Writers of the line place the first point in the same paragraph as the introduction of the three points and then do not hesitate to place a point across two paragraphs or conflated with another point in the same paragraph.

The kind of writing that propels forward through an adventure of unknowns is the type that is following the line. But when each paragraph is a discrete piece and the writing places ideas in their right place, then it treats the verbal forms as the objects they represent.

Writers like Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis reside somewhere in the middle, because they do place the first idea in the same paragraph as the introduction but they move forward by placing everything else in its proper place.

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Dream Impressions

14 March 2021 by Rey Armenteros

At the second story of a coffeeshop makeshift library. Giving tests to kids who couldn’t make it. At a table, a couple of tables forward from my view, I watched myself administering papers to the attention of a child. A hauberk of linked ingots later presses into view. It was intended as a sleeve to the same delicate flat matter on sheafs of envelopes — like life’s early day photo albums.

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The Poets

18 October 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The lives of today’s poets will be forgotten. I can’t think of a handful of names that have made it through the 20th century, people whose lives will be known by a small throng of others who bask in the light of rarified thoughts, eagerly seeking transient miscellanea of the most esoteric and mind-flowering sort — that of a poet, clearly.

I wish it were not so, but if I ever not make it in all the other creative career paths that have haunted me, I will then become a lyric poet who is only concerned with the day-to-day, and I will live my life for myself and my thoughts, and when I die, I will leave behind a sordid life that the world shaped for me, through my own physical (ergo, economic) limitations.

It will be humorous to plumb the trite passerby day-to-day of my life — what I disliked and what I was unreasonable about. How fascinating — how my life lit up the moment I had found my arch nemesis over a fender-bender the guy was willing to go to court for, and how I plotted to kill him, to perform that fictional inanity, the perfect crime. How my life shot through circumstance upon circumstance beyond my will not like voluntary breathing but like the unstoppable beating of my heart, and how it was released into a chamber that held only my volition.

How I was given no choice, how the world was not made for such thought, and how it still makes room for it somehow.

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A Motorcycle Dream

03 July 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Out from our travels came our time. We ended up in Japan. A new life, a new bike, more times to come. My wife was off with friends. I was studying my new motorcycle, getting a lay of the land from our home. The upstairs room was no larger than a cockpit, but it was cute. I was in it, studying the little keys. They were toy keys, like the type you can bend with three fingers. They were for the motorcycle. You could actually take the handlebar off, I guess for security reasons. I was playing with it outside, wondering how we were going to make life with this motorcycle work. Downstairs, the one lavatory was nothing more than a toilet taking up center space, surrounded by patterned curtains in mostly red. I was getting a phone call. My wife was telling me about her time. But then, two men entered our habitation and went into the bathroom together. My wife was describing the half Japanese singer that sang well, even though he smelled bad, and I was trying to talk to the two guys behind the curtain. They were taking turns defecating, making a virtual party of it. When they were bowing and thanking me as they exited, I noticed all the shit stains covering the toilet bowl. I had hung up, and didn’t know what to do. I felt the motorcycle would be in danger. I went out to try to take it for a spin. It was not easy since I was not a motorcyclist. When I came back, it was evening again, and our residence was now acting like a restaurant. Now I understood why there was only the small space upstairs and the toilet in the center of the communal living space. The owner was giving me a sly look from behind the counter. He was reprimanding me in a jocular fashion because they had quite a job cleaning the bathroom. I was giving him my best facial expression for such an event, almost explaining to him the two homeless guys, but I then started to go through mental math about why we couldn’t live there anymore, and then I woke up.

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(fragment)

19 April 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I try to start with something that is indescribable — that is something almost frail — and see how far I can take something like that. And after I take it far enough already, I look back at it later and see if I can do something with it when I’m sober from its initial effects on me and no longer taken in by the words and colors I conjured in writing or art. If it can transcend a million moments, I have made a work of art. And if it doesn’t sing with life, as I digest it when considering this type of viewer and that type of reader, it’s not worth anymore consideration.

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