The Stories Behind The Fly Girls, VI.

I am well at work on the second book. The best way to send me suggestions for poems is to go to the myspace page, but you can also go ahead and e-mail me. Or leave a comment here.

And don't forget to buy the first book.

31. Prehensile Toes and Von Zipper Sunglasses -- Written for the amazing Angie (seriously, she's insanely amazing), this poem came to exist in about fifteen seconds. I fell back on the haiku, as I always do when in doubt. As for the back story, it's about prehensile toes and Von Zipper sunglasses. I'm not sure I even know what Von Zipper sunglasses are. Damn Los Angeles.

32. Office Tension: A Sketch -- Man, I'm not saying I know anything about inter-office romances. But somehow, someone decided that I was the right person to write about such a topic. Seeing as how I know nothing about the topic from personal experience--NOTHING, I SAY--I decided to handle it with a sketch. The hope was just to catch that moment after the initial attraction, after a late night of getting to know each other better, let's say, when you see each other and realize you'll see each other everyday. I'd imagine that's kind of exciting.

33. Bounce Bounce Swish -- This was written in an exercise conducted by the infamous (not really) Aya Ogawa, who happens to be a genius and way smarter than me and makes art in ways I wish I could. She had several of us (including Christina Anderson, our fellow Van Lier Fellow) create poems based out of a series of phrases and feelings and items that we all came up with collaboratively, and this is what came out. Then we gave each other massages, but I had a broken thumb at the time, so I think she got only half a massage, really. Anytime I get to work Derek Jeter into a poem or play, I take advantage of the opportunity, so that explains a lot of this, I think.

34. Fly Girls: Three Sketches -- This was written for wray, who gave me a bunch of answers to one of the questionnaires I made available to, well, Fly Girls. There was so much there in her responses that I couldn't settle on one approach, leading me to come up with three quick first-impression sketches that, I think, complement each other in terms of tone and rhythm, if not content.

35. Love Song -- The request was to write a love song. And man, I hate to hear that as a request. I'm generally anti-love songs, not because I'm anti-love (if anything, I'm anti-anti-love), but because it's so damn hard to write a love song that doesn't sound like so many other damn love songs. I don't think I accomplished quite what I wanted to with this--I'm not sure that the real story I'm trying to tell comes across--but the feel of it was tolerable enough that I didn't want to slap myself for cheesily trying to squeeze the feelings of love into an awkward little box. I hope that people who buy this book use the pages of love song to scribble notes, draw pictures, and do whatever else one does when one is in love. Make those pages sing.

Man, those last two sentences don't feel like me at all.