Wednesday, March 09, 2005

A Zoo of a Manuscript

I'm still tinkering with The Man Suit. I've been noticing recently the number of animals in the poems. So, I decided to make a tally. I didn't count an animal more than once for the same poem. Goes like this:

Mammal type animals, with hair or wool:
bears 3
elk 1
horses 1
gorillas 1
sheep 1

Little rodenty type animals:
squirrels 1
rabbits 1

Animals with the gift of flight, or non-flight birds:
owls 3
chickens 2
swans 1
crows 1
doves 1
canaries 1

Animals that hang out under water most of the time:
whales 2
sharks 1

Buggy-type animals:
spiders 2
mosquitoes 2
bees 2
crickets 2
flies 1

Sometimes, when I don't know how to finish up a poem, I'll just have a bear maul the hell out of somebody. I do it often, then throw the poem away. One of the poems though made it in. It's called the "Bear Mutilation" and you can soon read it in Parakeet.