Free-Writing Exercise
Based on "Intelligence Test" by Alberta Turner
By: Andrea Miklasz, 1993
Preface, 2016
In my undergraduate program at Knox College in English-Writing, we'd do mind-sparking exercises upon which to build lines/phrases just from our minds (no books allowed, e.g. thesaurus). I came upon this scrappy paper leftover of thought whilst cleaning my room, looking for a tax return statement. Poems were supposed to come out of these random-mind-statements or visualizations.There is other free-writing in the folder I found, and some of it did generate very good poetry. But this batch--come to your own conclusions.
Which begs the question...Obviously, I was clinically insane in college--why'd it take until my 30's for someone to freakin' diagnose me in a mental hospital? To preempt your question, no...I was not on any drugs when I wrote this stuff, street or Rx'd. Read these, enjoy, but if you steal any of them, I'll have you hunted down by a very hungry grizzly bear (read: my brutish son).
Ideas from 1993:
1. Catching butterflies on my tongue
2. Rub my hair with wet oatmeal
3. Advise a balloon
4. Sell a hen a lottery ticket
5. If I could lay an egg!
6. Eat pasta with an ax
7. Small silver bells in a giant berry basket
8. Eating bullets
9. Breathe milk
10. Molesting screwdriver
11. If I shrank to the size of a pea, I'd eat myself.
12. If I had a tail I'd use it as a (paper ripped, line unfinished, God only knows)
13. I offer him his money back if he can tell me what my first name is
14. His hands are bulky, wrinkled as his memory
15. Crank bugs
16. And Harry slid under the table
17. And a table of woe
18. Playing Vatican Roulette
19. With me as the booby prize
20. Stop scratching them
Untitled
Wooden monkey doll
Reflection in the lamp
Fishless fishbowl hammer sticking out of it
Skeleton is someone's wife waiting for him
A card game
The window sill needs paint
