Jon Ureña's Blog, page 55

Revised: 'A Chaperone for Hybrids'

Link for this entry on my personal page, where it looks better

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I'm at the last stage of revising the novel I wrote mostly back in May, because I want people to pay four bucks for it whenever I finally upload it to online retailers. Meanwhile I'm also going through the poems that will be contained in a poetry ebook that I'll also try to swindle people into paying for.

This time I was eager to revise the first one in this book of what I consider my 'epic poems', longish short stories in the form of free verse poetry. The original version of 'A Chaperone for Hybrids' suffered greatly from my stupid decision to do away with periods when writing poetry. I had no idea why I thought that was a good idea. Anyway, I have cut out a few sentences here and there, have added a few others, and obviously sharpened what remained, but this poem was essentially perfect as far as I am concerned. The current version is considerably stronger, and especially clearer.

The concept for this strange story came from me hearing years ago about some psychiatrist that wanted to meet people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. The psychiatrist thought the whole thing was a delusion caused by the collective unconscious or some shit like that, but after processing many of such clients through hypnotic regression, the psychiatrist changed his tune: the phenomenon was real, and we should be very afraid. Some of the stuff that transpired on those sessions is reflected on this poem I wrote, but I won't mention it, because that would involve spoilers. I have no idea if I imagined this whole backstory, but it doesn't matter, because it served as fuel for this story.

Anyway, I've always been into aliens and UFOs, ever since I was a child. I had that common delusion in autists of believing that I must have come from another planet, because I didn't feel much in common with humans. I even saw a UFO when I was thirteen years old, along with my parents and sister. We were coming back home from McDonalds when we spotted a big triangular UFO that was hovering over the local mountain. Three big lights that glowed yellow, orange and green, if I recall correctly. Otherworldly is the only way I can describe it; it simply wasn't man-made.

We lost sight of it for a moment, but as my father parked the car, I just felt that I had to look up, and I suddenly saw the UFO again for a split second. It was hovering in the sky over my street. When I got out of the car excitedly, the craft was gone. I could have hallucinated the whole thing if not only my family but also four random, baffled people hadn't witnessed it as well. It didn't appear in the news; I doubt it had stayed around for more than a couple of minutes.

Anyway, the link is below.

A Chaperone for Hybrids

Revised: 'I Wish I Were Wet'

Link for this entry on my personal page, where it looks better

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I’m at the last stage of revising a novel I wrote mostly in May of this year, and that I intend to publish on online retailers. Meanwhile I’m also going through the poems I’ve written, because I have realized that they could be distributed into three distinct ebooks, which I will also self-publish in the future.

This time I had to revise ‘I Wish I Were Wet’, which is mostly about the art of writing and my personal fears about becoming sterile. This was one of those poems in which I mostly updated the punctuation and then cut out a few sentences here and there and added a few more. The rest is reading through the text a couple of times while listening to your inner voice, that alerts you about the opportunities to sharpen the sentence by exchanging a verb for another or deleting a few words.

The link is below.

I Wish I Were Wet

A Human Like Them (Poetry)

Link for this poem on my personal page, where it looks better

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If I'm lucky, in a few days I'll be unemployed.
I will be able to dedicate myself to writing,
And I will limit my exposure to humans,
Because above any other hope and goal,
I just need to be left alone.

For the first time in any job,
I've tolerated my current one enough
That I think some coworkers are fine,
In the sense that I can deal with them
Without wanting to kill myself.

I've had interesting dialogues with some,
And I can stomach the opinions of a few,
But no matter how closely I work with them
Or the personal details they readily shared,
I clearly avoid getting close to any of them,
And whenever my contracts have ended,
I have never missed any of my coworkers.

I wondered whether I had ever missed anyone.
No matter what kind of person they were,
They all seemed to have disappointed me.
I no longer retain the echoes of how it felt
To be in a romantic relationship that lasted.
I don't know if I looked forward to seeing them
Or if I dated them because that's what you do.
They never were interesting enough to me.

When my longest one ended, it hurt like a bitch;
I found myself wandering to known places
Like a beast following the instructions in its genes,
But in a few months, those aches faded away,
And I identified that trial as withdrawal symptoms:
I had become addicted to the pleasurable feelings
That trying to fulfill life's purpose provides,
But it was just a run-of-the-mill addiction,
Like with any other drug.

I never felt an impulse to socialize,
I didn't want to go to bars or parties,
I just wanted to get lost in my imagination.
Interacting with people made me antsy,
Not just because it caused me anxiety,
But because humans are fucking boring.
I could have been daydreaming,
Or assembling a fictional story,
Or remembering some show,
Or just enjoying the silence instead.

As a child, I struggled with unlikely nemeses:
I had to be wary of tender-hearted ladies,
Usually teachers or social workers,
Who loved words like 'compassion' and 'empathy'.

The teachers resented that I was alone,
So I needed to be properly socialized.
They wanted to add a good deed to the list
(It seems to me that feeling like a good person
Is for these people another kind of drug),
So they pushed me towards other kids,
Whether they were loners or settled groups.

I could have been spared meeting such kinds
Like a kleptomaniac and pyromaniac
With the strangest tic I've ever seen,
And who either killed himself or OD'd
Before he reached the fabled twenty seven
(To be fair, he wasn't that bad of a guy,
Just doomed and truly fucked up,
But it doesn't mean I wanted to know him);
Several girls who used me as a prop,
As in 'look how good I am that I deal
With this gross, worthless, retarded loner';
An overcompensating, anorexic girl
Who derailed every conversation
To remind people about how fat she was;
Coke addicts and hashish traffickers;
A boring sociopath who stole to steal
And hurt others for the plain fun of it;
A jock for who bullying was an instinct
Which he obeyed without malice,
And he was also a lying sack of shit;
A malignant narcissist who became a politician,
Who tried to ruin my life for many years
Just because I stopped hanging out with him
(Luckily he took himself out of the way;
He crashed his car on his way to a meeting).

There were others I either have forgotten
Or my brain has ended up blocking out,
But my point is that I first met those people
Because some soft-headed fool
Who wanted to feel like a good person
Smiled as she pushed me towards someone.

The less I say about social workers, the better.
In my experience, they are all Grade A morons
Who mostly see the world in 'positive' prejudices;
I had to be a good person, a social worker said,
Because I am a high-functioning autist.

You are also a good person by default to them
If you belong to other protected demographics,
No matter the horrible crimes some commit;
Start having babies of your own, idiots,
And stop babying adults.

Maybe I wouldn't distrust humans so much,
Nor be so anxious whenever they are close,
If I had gone through good experiences with them,
But when even romantic partners have exploited
The very private pains I shared in confidence,
I just want them all to fuck off for the rest of my life.

Today I ventured to watch a movie at the cinema,
Which I had avoided since this virus thing started;
I have little interest in the garbage Hollyweird spews
(They don't want to tell stories, just propaganda,
So I gravitate towards manga and anime instead),
But that new Dune movie seemed decent enough.

The movie was fine, the people were shit;
A group of tweens talked the whole time
Although adults kept shushing them,
But it's true, these generations are hopeless;
They know they won't get any consequences.
So I had to endure the rest of the movie
While I fantasized about walking up to them
And pushing their eyeballs into their skulls
(I often daydream about murder for relief).

Afterwards, as I walked my way home,
I tried to avoid the noisy multitudes
(I felt like I was being strangled
By a bunch of screeching cats)
As my brain wondered pointlessly again
Whether I'm a human being like them
If those people truly enjoy such tumults,
Are eager to surround themselves with others,
Want to get romantic partners, and have kids.

When I was a child, I thought they pretended
That they enjoyed interacting with people;
That's what they were supposed to do,
Like my mother, and teachers, insisted to me.

Now that I'm much older, a grumpy man
That girls sometimes refer to as 'sir'
(I hope they mean it in a daddy sense,
But it hurts because I feel eighteen inside),
I have accepted that I lack a part of my brain
That in others makes them want to socialize.

I guess those humans act like nature intends,
And most of them are properly happy,
While I'll always remain an alien creature
That can't connect with this species.

I'm a society of one, if such a thing exists,
And when I die, this whole history ends.
A man alone can never change a thing,
But I guess I can keep writing.

Revised: 'Fly on the Wall'

I'm at the last stage of revising a novel I wrote mostly back in May, because I intend to publish it as an ebook. In the meantime I rearranged my poems into three distinct books. I'll also put that stuff on online retailers as ebooks.

I'm going through the poems contained in the first of those poetry ebooks, to fix their punctuation (I have no clue why I ever thought that doing away with periods when writing poetry was a good idea) and hopefully expand and sharpen them. This time I worked on the poem 'Fly on the Wall', mainly about an old amateur rock band I loved. I didn't need to expand it in any way. I cut out a few sentences here and there instead.

The link is below.

Fly on the Wall

Revised and expanded: 'A Spider's Song'

I'm at the last stage of revising a novel I wrote mostly back in May, and that I intend to publish as an ebook. In the meantime I also rearranged all my poems into three distinct books, which I will upload in the future.

I'm going through all the poems contained in the first of those poetry ebooks, so I can update their punctuation and hopefully expand them and sharpen them. This time I took care of one of my lesser poems, 'A Spider's Song'. It was much weaker before this revision, but it remains one of the weakest links of the book it belongs to, I'm afraid.

Anyway, the link is below.

A Spider's Song

Revised and expanded: 'Three Trapped Souls'

I'm at the last stage of revising a novel I wrote mostly back in May (first one in English), because I intend to publish it as an ebook. In the meantime I'm also going through all the poems that will be contained in a poetry ebook that I will release one of these days. I need to update the punctuation of most of those poems, but I'm also expanding them and sharpening them if I can figure out how.

I found my old poem 'Three Trapped Souls' to be far shittier than I had expected, to the extent that these days I wouldn't have uploaded it as it stood. Thankfully, I managed to cut out half of it and expand the rest. It's now 1,443 words long (from an original that maybe was cut down to 250 words or so). I ended up liking this new version a lot.

Anyway, the link is below.

Three Trapped Souls

Revised and expanded: 'A Caring Touch'

As I keep saying, I'm at the last stage of revising that novel I wrote mostly back in May of this year. I intend to publish it on Amazon and other online retailers. Maybe someone will pay four bucks for it (doubt it). Anyway, I have also rearranged all my poetry into three books, which I'll release in the future as ebooks.

I'm going through the poems that make up the first of those poetry ebooks. I need to update the punctuation (for some reason I thought back then that not using periods was a good idea), and I'm also expanding and sharpening each poem if I can figure out how.

This time I worked on a small little poem about ASMR. Link below.

A Caring Touch

Revised: 'Sasquatch Goddess'

I'm at the last stage of revising my latest novel (first in English), which I intend to publish as an ebook on various online retailers. I also rearranged my poetry into three distinct books, which I'll put together as ebooks and release in the future.

This time I've revised one of my favorite texts I've ever written, the poem 'Sasquatch Goddess'. I thought about trying to expand it, but this was one of those cases in which I love the original so much that I can't figure out how to improve it. It was better to just fix the punctuation, remove extraneous sentences and sharpen the remaining.

I recall how this poem came to be. I was unemployed at the time, so I could stay awake until early in the morning if needed. However, I also struggled with insomnia regardless. It was one and a half in the morning, and a thought came to my mind: "What if sasquatches are responsible for my insomnia, as they attempt to control my brain?". To elaborate on that, I spent until six in the morning writing this poem.

The link is below.

Sasquatch Goddess

Revised and expanded two minor poems

I'm at the last stage of revising that novel I wrote in May, which I intend to release as an ebook, but in the meantime I'm also going through the poems that will be contained in one of three poetry ebooks that I'll release in the near future (certainly once 'My Own Desert Places' is up on Amazon).

This time I focused on two old poems, some of the first ones I wrote. The one about tennis isn't that good, although I like it well enough, but I think I ended up improving the second one significantly. Both are about obsessions I had.

In any case, 'If Only My Penis Were a Racket' is silly, 'A Magician and Her Assistant' is heartfelt. The links are below:

If Only My Penis Were a Racket
A Magician and Her Assistant

Revised and expanded: 'Dinosaur Apocalypse'

I’m at the last stage of revising the ebook of that last novel I wrote (first one in English), and in the meantime I’m also revising and expanding if necessary the poems that will end up in one of three poetry ebooks, which I’ll release sometime in the future. This time I wanted to work on my poem ‘Dinosaur Apocalypse’, which I felt was just okay. I think I rushed it back then, didn’t bother improving it as much as I could, but I’m glad I could do it now. The new version is maybe twice as long, much sharper, but retaining the disturbing silliness of the original.

If you read this poem when I first released it, and enjoyed it, you may want to read it again. In any case, the link is below.

Dinosaur Apocalypse