Poem of the Week: 10.4.24
"What's the point of us? (Anagram)"
WHAT’S THE POINT OF US? (ANAGRAM)
by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
Everyone is losing their fuckung mind, I wrote in a text I hoped she read with that eely grooviness in her it-fund mucking, nights ago, before she left my bed for his, she whispered ask not what your country can do for you but ask whatnot racy noun outcry foo our yd, so I told my undergrad students write, write until it becomes true, write what you know until you know how to want, but they know officers with guns standing on top of the mental health services building, they know mime offices, whin of roofers’ guts, fading nonstop to lethal man, the blessing virucide, over and over again, we trade desperate words for stability in smoothing, grasping for some routine routining we know is over and a given oar, hitting symbolization or else let an ennui riot routing—everyone is finicking their gun molds, and she still hasn’t texted me back
A poem on the state of things.
First of all, hey, how are you? I hope you’re as well as you can be, considering. I’m back to skool and back to wurk—year 2 at UCSD. This year, I hope to write weirder, read everything, work with everybody, and make no compromises. I’m diving in head first!
This week’s poem is in that vein. The first line is a text I typed out to a friend—typo included—in a mood of stress and frustration. The news is a bummer, we’re all getting older, and the distance is starting to creep. That’s where most of this poem is coming from; the line about “officers with guns standing on top of the mental health services building” comes directly from a recent response I wrote to a “survey about campus climate.” There is much disgruntlement.
But this is also a poem that is as absurd as it is serious—many phrases are anagrams of the previous phrase. (Shout-out to Inge’s Anagram Generator for helping me to write this poem.) Notice how “their fuckung mind” shares the same letters as “it-fund mucking.” Do I know what it-fund mucking is? Of course not! But that’s not the point. Even when we misspell in a text, we get the idea across. Even when we struggle to find the right words to say to express what we want, our moods and memories and actions say them for us. Trying to understand chaos can often be futile—like waiting for a text back you know won’t be coming.
“What’s the point of us? (Anagram)” went through a few different iterations—at one point it was lineated like a standard poem; at one point it had more sensible punctuation than the wild list of commas—but it finally came into its current form once I decided what I wanted from it. (And thanks to D. and J. for reading it over and giving me assurance that it wasn’t too was the right amount of crazy <3.)
Finding it, Ricky
