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ADAPTATION Chris Campanioni
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& for a long time By straps Still I In the back of cars Rather than through it To feel thirst Lungs huge Expectation today Please change I would never do a thing My insides Each time I make something Writer of Cuban and Polish On the Internet My name Of associations Into a metaphor Into want Water the sadness Bodies, et cetera To live for You said I said really That counts
__ Lately I had been thinking about writing a memoir because everything else I’ve ever written is a memoir while pretending to be something else and I figured it was time I did something else, which was a memoir. So much of my life is predicated on pretending or performance. Language has become another performance for me, one in which I can show off and show myself, at the same time. "Adaptation" plays with that idea; the versions and perversions that reveal but also alter a life, and also my girlfriend's insistence that I alter her name in this book, which I haven't. Emily Fragos wrote a great poem titled "The Sadness of Clothes" and I had that image in my mind when writing the turn of this poem, a moment where expectation, associations, and the utopic landscape of creation all sort of collide. The tension that exists in the break between one line and the next is what makes poetry so great, I think, and what most manifests want. Everything that happens will happen in a moment. |