Finding Inspiration on Twitter

A fun, Thanksgiving-themed hashtag showed up on Twitter tonight: #LiteraryTurducken. The concept is to take the titles of three different literary works and combine them into a single title. ("Turducken" is the turkey-chicken-duck combination that John Madden always talked about on Thanksgiving football games.) This leads to some bizarre, quite clever combinations: Charlie and the Chocolate War and Peace; The Unbearable Lightness of Being Gone with the Wind in the Willows; Tender is the Midsummer Night's Arabian Dream.

I came up with a few of my own that I'm fairly proud of: The Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Restaurant on the Edge of the Invisible Cities; The Book Thief's Guide to the Life of Pi; Harry Potter and the Giver of Mice and Men; etc.

After I had exhausted the novel combinations that I could think of, my mind ran, as it usually does, to Star Trek, which led me to combining three episode titles into this: The Savage Curtain on the Edge of All Our Yesterdays.

That's probably the best #LiteraryTurducken I can come up with, but it might be more than that. I have to say, that sounds like a line from a poem I would like to read, maybe even one I would like to write. Who knows if I'll make time to write it, but the potential is there. And the inspiration for it came from "wasting time" playing around on Twitter.

I Speak in Code

I speak in code
a cleverly constructed combination
of white words and black pauses
hiding among the colors I can’t control.
My focus fractures and my message meanders,
waylaid by specters of previous
mistaken miscommunication;
and my code shrinks and deepens,
becoming less apparent and more permanent,
until I’m sure you won’t understand.
And I keep speaking in code,
writing messages only for myself
because they make me feel special.
I never suspect you’d do the same.
I would speak plainly,
without distortion or degradation or defense,
but I’ve forgotten how, if I ever even knew.
I speak in code
animated by the permanent pressing possibility
that someone might hear,
someone speaking the same coded language.