Or the day my phone turned into a needy surrealist and developed an obsession with otters!

In case the title of the post didn’t give it away, I have been experimentinf further with this predictive text found poetry idea. I have had some quite interesting results.

There are quite a lot that don’t work, you get an endless string of “I have not I have I want to no seem…” etc but I have discovered that the way to avoid this is to play with the rules. In traditional found poetry you can take words from a page or pages and put them together, this allows a degree of selection of words. So in the construction of these predictive text versions I am allowed to take out words and sometimes give the phone a startign letter. but not add words which were not suggested. This is what happened yesterday:

I hate it when people think they know me
I have been thrown away
It does not matter

I hate it when you don’t think of me
I have just noticed the otter
It seems that there is no such thing as Tuesday

That could have been a very depressing poem if it hadn’t turned suddenly, into a surrealist, near future expose on a world with otters peering at you from behind the impending destruction of tuesday! It has been pointed out to me that the juxtaposition of an otter with the emo-angst of the first 4 lines adds a playful tone to the end of the poem (thank you Lucy for that one 🙂 )

I thought that would be the end of it…but in my next attempt the otter put in aonther appearance…

During that moment you can tell me how you feel
Yes it was meant for you but I am not
Soon I will be honest with the otter

It would seem that I have been lying to the otter. but what about and why? Was it about the destruction of tueday, which really can only be a good thing and I am not sure why anyone would lie about it. Was it soemthing else? Something I was not sure that the otter could handle. Maybe I was concerned that the otter would indeed tell me how he felt…

The next installemnt looked like this. I did encourage the otter with the addition of an O at the start of the second line, but that was the only medeling i did. It is in the rules…and I had to find out why I lied to the otter!

I don’t know what you are
Otters and I have gin and tonic
I am just so ready for a new wildcat

Well…I guess the otter didn’t know about the new wildcat. It would seem that he has gained some otter friends too, possibly to balance out the afore mentioned wildcat. Everyone seems to have gin and tonic though so I think the honesty went well!

Mind you…I have a feeling the otter left me in the end…

It does feel better when you are my friend
It was ok to go back in time for a while
I am sure it would be nice to see the otter