Silicon Beach : a micro excerpt

- Where have you been?

- I ran out to the beach so I could keep the rhythms going.

- Another walking poem?

- Maybe a slow jog poem, or that was the goal. I wanted to run to the beach and keep the aerobic element engaged with the writing, so I kept jogging and scrawling with a perfectly broken stick I snatched up as soon as I hit the sand.

- Walking and writing is hard enough, but jogging, that’s something I would have loved to see.

- Sorry... but you looked so calm and peacefully zoned out in your dreaming, and I had this amazing nervous energy that was percolating out of the top of my head, there was nothing to do but run to the shore and provoke the water’s edge.

- How long did it take?

- About seven minutes to the shoreline and then the poem itself took another, what, ten minutes? Twenty?

- Did you capture it on your iPhone?

- Of course! That’s the parameter, always, I have to walk and write while hugging the shoreline with my spontaneous measure and, somehow, with my free hand, open up the camera and take a pic before it gets washed away.

- But this time you ran.

- Yes, which creates a different energy, a different affect for the writing as it plays out in form.

- It’s like a weird kind of selfie etch-a-sketch, perhaps a more nuanced take on what a selfie can be.

- Everything I do is a nuanced take on what a selfie can be.

- Maybe you should be more selfie-effacing.

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The most recent walking-poems from the Silicon Beach series:

Silicon Beach 1
Silicon Beach 2
Silicon Beach 3
Silicon Beach 4
Silicon Beach 5
Silicon Beach 6