Wanting to have a reliable, enjoyable way of testing whether I'd been ghosted by women online, I invented this approach. Begin with this message:
"Hope you're okay. I'm going to write you a 4-line poem...slowly. If I hear back from you before it's done-- great! Let's go to the beach. If not, I'll assume I've been ghosted."
Then start improvising your 4-message countdown... by the end, you either have a response, or a new poem. Win-win (and NOTE: the 'win' is almost never a response, so make it a good poem for yourself)
[Ghost1 – beach girl]
“I dug my feet in the sand, and a small white crab...
scaled up on my foot, like a mountain's shelf...
I laughed down, 'You're so lovely, it makes me wish...
that I weren't at the beach by myself.”
[Ghost2 – hippie]
“Rosemary, they say, was deodorant…
and garlic was medicine…
back in the day before touch-screens, when touch…
was hands laced, walking barefoot, kissed by wind.”
[Ghost3 – artist]
“Do you see, in this stroke, how the layers beneath...
show their skin, where the firm bristles pressed?...
From a distance, looks smooth/monotone, but lean in...
here's my soul, between words your gaze missed.”
[Ghost4 – animal-lover]
“Few things reflect like a calf's dark eyes...
all the blue light and green stems, as we...
stand at the center of those rolling pearls...
and wonder, in vain, what it's like just to be.”
[Ghost5 – philosopher]
“Words and their opposites, dancing like swords...
bending themselves on each other, because...
what is is a moment, so full-up with substance...
that no word can scrape it by saying 'It was.'”
[Ghost6 – crafter]
“Wood, you be my Valentine...
pulp turning to paper, sheets drinking red dye...
one feeling a rolling ball, inking its line...
'All the best, darling.' And then going dry.”
I have made my fair share of digital commentary, and I have no plans to stop anytime soon. Though allowing perpetuated falsities through internet networking, this non-tangible domain also stimulates highly-concentrated modes of creativity. These mini poems have drawn out my favorite part about the internet and my inner explorer has been enticed in a multitude of ways. I have never been against an action our generation calls “trolling” online. In fact, I have admittedly been a common frequenter of communicating through a plethora of non-serious ways– I am notorious (as well as positively looked on) for my daily, inherent sarcasm and lack of taking things personal. I blame my restless craving for entertainment, curiosity, and creativity for this. I do applaud myself for my ability to make any questionable situation a simple plot point on an intrinsically hilarious timeline of events. I have found endless ways to make anything and everything online a research motivation in this unwritten Internet experiment that I hope to actualize one day: it has been going on for several, consistent years. The ability to make something that is our era's way of offending one’s personhood– ghosting– and turning it in to a light-hearted, interactively, and objectively fun activity is something I highly resonate with, and I actually laughed out loud at the delicately-implied irony of these four-line mini poems. I appreciate the incorporation of each suitor's obvious, stereotypical and two-dimensional personalities into these poems and the literal objectification of them as being just another "hippie" or "animal lover" of an indiscernible crowd of archetypes. These responses are products of confidence and self-respect and highlight the perspective of a thrill-seeking and beautifully-bold artist, and I strive to maintain this level of “hopeful carelessness”– a term I have just now decided I would like to coin as my own.
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