Look at that sun, it's like a pad of
butter melting into mashed-potato
clouds.
Not really.
Look at those flowers: bright purple flames shooting out of that tree.
They don't look anything like flames. They look like goddamn flowers.
Explosions. Tiny purple explosions.
Flowers. They are bright purple, startling when you look up from gray cement and see them blooming out of dark green, but they are clearly not pyrotechnic in nature.
You're right, I'm tricking myself into believing my own bullshit again... thank God I have you.
You're not Holden Caulfield. You don't want to be him.
That's true as well. You are spot-on today. I should be happy that I am able to deceive myself enough to get by.
You deceive yourself more than enough to get by. You think you're obsessed with truth, just because it's on your mind a lot, but you're faking even that. Maybe you ARE Holden Caulfield.
It's interesting, though, about the flowers. They are just flowers, that's true, but people don't understand it if you just say it to them like that. They look up "flowers" and cross-reference it with "purple" and they see that the meaning is filed somewhere under "dull" and they're content to believe that you just made a coherent statement but they don't bother to really think about what you're talking about.
What the hell are you talking about?
I'm saying you have to fly in under the radar. You can't just describe something in plain, flat detail, that's not how people see the world. People contort what they see around their own beliefs, their own context, you know? And everything anyone says to them has to be contorted in the same way, according to the same code, or they either misunderstand or just don't get it. So you gotta speak their language. I don't mean language as in "English," I mean their emotional language. You have to say the flower is an explosion or somesuch because then they really think about it. Part of it is just shocking them, making them cautious. It's about grabbing the attention. Then when they really think about it they realize that the flowers-as-explosions idea really appeals to them, if they're on the same wavelength as you, and they really get it.
So it's about flying in under the radar and grabbing the attention...
Yeah, I'm not explaining it too well but give me a break, I'm freestylin'. So this is poetry I'm talking about. The only problem is, it's not platform-independent. If you say "I saw a purple flower" anybody who speaks English will have a basic, non-emotional understanding of what you're saying. But you gotta be careful with poetry. You have to make your words full and alive, the way people see the world, without committing too much to a particular viewpoint. For a long time I didn't understand poetry, but now I think I'm having kind of a revelation.
Have you ever considered that maybe you still don't understand poetry?
Of course. You're my subconscious or something, after all. Or maybe you're that Slim Jim I ate earlier.
If I'm your subconscious, and I'm telling you that the flowers look nothing like fire or explosions, you should probably believe me, no? If that concept doesn't appeal to me, it clearly isn't part of your "emotional language" or whatever. You're just bullshitting again.
I never claimed to be a poet, but I can try... maybe those comparisons are unsuitable, but they were the best I could come up with.
You probably heard it somewhere and were just repeating it.
Maybe. Let's drop it, this endless introspection is exhausting. In fact, would you mind just going somewhere else for a while?
Eat me!