Poem of the Week: 12.1.22

"Excuses" by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira

EXCUSES

by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira

Reasons why I’m not coming in today:
   1)  I took a vacation!
   2)  The flight home crash landed on a sparsely inhabited island; I am now king 
   3)  My tummy hurts
   4)  I wasn’t feeling like it
   5)  I became inextricably aware of my oppressive material reality and have decided to protest the means of production at the risk of my physical livelihood
   6)  In all seriousness, something happened 
   7)  My fringes stagged me in the backfire
   8)  The baby wouldn’t stop crying
   9)  My shoes don’t fit anymore
   10) There’s too much to clean
   11)  I’m writing the next great American novel
   12)  Viral variants running rampant
   13)  The joke went too far
   14)  I'm on peak advantage lemon for a batty acrobat that is threatening to dismantle the promising programming carol I wormed tirelessly to create over the past yogurts
   15)  New video game dropped
   16)  Stayed up late reading manga 
   17)  No clean underwear 
   18)  Starting to see black mold
   19)  Need remediation 
   20)  My email bounced back 
   21)   I didn’t get your emale
   22)  Do I still have to?
   23)  The dogs told me to stay
   24)  I joined a punk band
   25)  I’m avoiding you

Going back to work after a holiday is hard. This week’s poem is one I wrote over the summer and recently felt in the mood to edit and revise.

Did you notice some weird lines in this poem? Look at 7 again. Funky, huh? There’s a subtle twist in “Excuses” through the *~poetic procedure~* I performed: N+7.

Take a noun, look it up in a dictionary, count each following word until you hit 7, use the seventh word to replace your initial noun. If you’re confused, blame 20th century French surrealists, not me.

Here’s an example. Let’s pick any noun: mango. Mmm, yummy. A quick online dictionary search results.

“Mango” is my starting point, or N+0. “Mangoky” would be N+1, “mangold-wurzel” N+2, and so on. Performing the N+7 procedure on “mango” gives us…

Mangrove fish! Whoa! Cool! Surreal! That’s poetry, baby; more or less. “Excuses” is personal while not revealing too much, absurd but (hopefully) somehow making sense.

Check out one of my favorite creative websites, The N+7 Machine, to play around with the N+7 procedure for yourself. It makes for some wild wacky words.

Signposting off, Ricky