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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Categories: A Thought, Essay, Fragment, Poetry, ReyA', Writing Process
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Tags: essay, literature, poetry, tiny piece, writing process
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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Categories: Fragment, ReyA'
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Tags: tiny piece
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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Categories: Fragment, ReyA'
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Tags: tiny piece
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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Categories: A Thought, Fragment, ReyA'
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Tags: tiny piece
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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Categories: Fragment, ReyA'
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Tags: tiny piece
06 January 2021
by Rey Armenteros
Was it 2020 or 2021? I don’t know anymore. Maybe because of my propensity for correcting people, I would have said 2021. The crowd hailed the coming of 2020 as the beginning of the new decade. Mathematically, that would be wrong. That was why 2001, and not 2000, was the start of the new millennium.
But that is an analytical conclusion, and I don’t support analysis like I used to. I think gut feeling is a greater mode of observation, and if the turning of 2019 into 2020 sounds more like a big change, it doesn’t need to appeal to the loftier considerations of elementary mathematics — and that is enough for me.
However, just this once, it might be better to go with math and say that 2021 is in fact the start of the third decade of the new millennium, because when you look back on it, who the hell wants to start our present decade with 2020?
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Categories: A Thought, Ludicrousness, ReyA'
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Tags: quirky, tiny piece
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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Categories: Fragment, Ludicrousness, Poetry, ReyA'
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Tags: literature, poetry, quirky, tiny piece
11 October 2020
by Rey Armenteros
We were getting work done on the house we had just bought. I would talk to the various contractors for repiping, for windows, for shutters, and every time they asked me for a decision about color or placement, I would tell them I had to talk to my wife about it, along with the price and details and such. And they would make that face and say they understood because “happy wife, happy life.”
When I heard it enough times, I recollected a few thoughts on rhyme poetry during the early days of Modern English, when they were still contributing to the construction of the language we now know. This book was mentioning the power of rhyme when you were trying to place two ideas on the same footing. When words rhymed, it was to accentuate a connection they shared. I had never thought of that before, how in rhyming poetry, you could (and perhaps should) consider the words that are rhyming and their relationships within the wider canvas of stanzas and other words. I liked the idea, but the example of wife and life the book used could clearly not be used today without sounding hackneyed. The fact that those words rhyme give nothing if not that they happen to rhyme in English. What could have been a profound discovery four hundred years ago becomes nothing but a circumstance today, and the connections between the meaning of your life and how it is allied with a person you would call wife could no longer float.
This life-wife poetry is skipping across the surface of reality to make the fasteners that hold them together nothing more than incidental to a language. Perfect rhyme in old western poetry can mean one thing — and that is a strong binding; whereas slant rhyme might give us a slightly skewed meaning. But if the words you intend do not happen to rhyme — what then?
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Categories: Poetry, ReyA', Writing Process
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Tags: literature, poetry, tiny piece
11 September 2020
by Rey Armenteros
The vampires frequented the cafeteria. Daytime haunts were nigh impossible. It was just the way. When the night was over, they’d get together at the favorite hangout spots throughout the Forbidden City. Yes, the sun could sear the flesh off one of their kind, but it was not so bad if you dressed in enough layers. The cafeterias were actually medicinal cafes. Vampires that went to such hangout spots after a feast were conscious of healthy habits. Most establishments carried an array of potions, and each one was brewed to take care of at least one type of ailment. All four humors had to coexist in the body with a fine balance. Blood came in and out, but so did phlegm, sweat, and bile. This was what vampires were truly made of. Taking medicine after a hunt altered the amounts. An order came with a test beforehand. A technician tested the blood intake afterward, but they also tested the other three humors because vampires sucked in all four according to their appetites during any given night, and biting to suck this stuff out was the way to go, the way to carry on life.
A haunting usually happened once a week. The adventurous crowd did it on the weekends when possibilities abounded, and possibilities also meant unpredictable situations which gave way to possible dangers. Danger was the style that these people followed. And the weary that finished by sunrise were prudent if they visited a medicinal cafe. It was the only way to curb the effects. Humans that were attacked only became a vampire when all four of their humors had been invaded. Some survived multiple attacks, but if it were the same humor, they were almost always okay afterward. Nevertheless certain effects would make themselves known, and this depended on the humor that had gotten the least volume in the body of the human. Most humans that turned were not that long for life because it was usually serious mistakes after their transformation that stamped their ignorance with instant death. There were simply things they would not know from the outset. The thing about sunlight had many misconceptions. And if someone were bitten for sweat or bile, they often assumed they were merely attacked by a psychopath.
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Categories: Ancedote, ReyA', Tale
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Tags: anecdote, tale, tiny piece
14 August 2020
by Rey Armenteros
I have given this thought. I think most people don’t realize that if you go back in time, you won’t understand what you are looking at.
In a world of weirdness, you appear in the midst of a place that’s inconceivable. It is not like anywhere you know. You come to think that the people you encounter along the way are dressed as from another time. They don’t speak a language you have ever heard before. They make gestures with their faces and hands, and you can’t register what they mean. They take you in with some reluctance, it seems, and you wonder where you have arrived. You have gone back in time to some other place — or not. This is what you have to piece together. If you witness an actual event that you know about because you have heard about it, how would you ever recognize it? How would you understand that you have just time travelled?
Routine is what makes up our reality, and if you break that, it becomes an event. The event is placed into a nice story later when all the parts you have access to have been given to you, and you have thought about these parts and their relation with each other. That means the story is over. Now, you make the story your own.
A time travel experience can never be like that. You are never sure that what you are witnessing is the event. Or the shadow of an event. Or the mockery of that event. Or a dramatic interpretation of that event, given by a troupe of criminal actors with schemes of robbing the crowd.
You see three men on crosses on some hill and conclude you are witnessing the death of Jesus. You don’t have enough information to come up with such a conclusion. First of all, you don’t know what Jesus looks like. Then, you can’t speak the ancient languages of those days. And in the rare case that you can, a reasonable person would still be in doubt.
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Categories: A Thought, Argument, ReyA'
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Tags: argument, tiny piece
