My House Plants are Sarcastic

My second literary stop of the day was “In Our Nature” at The Green Arcade.

It’s adorable in there!

This discussion, as detailed in the 2013 Litquake Festival Guide, centered on “human nature, the unrestrained nature that surrounds us, and where they meet.” The Fresh Ink, a group of Bay Area Writers, began the discussion with some quick writing exercises. The first prompt was “In my previous life, I was your…”

I was stumped. I started writing about being someone’s pen and how they used me to express their thoughts, opinions, and innermost desires… until it occurred to me that I was writing about myself using myself as a pen. PENCEPTION! And then I was like “I was your shoes…? I give up.”

I was stumped by penception at a discussion on human nature…

My second attempt was more successful. We had a few different prompts to choose from, all with the theme of nature, and I chose “What would your houseplants say to you if they could talk?”

We had seven minutes to write, and this is the drivel that I scribbled on my paper:

If my houseplants could talk, they would say…

1. Now that you’ve put me on this hard-to-reach shelf, how do you propose to water me? I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but you stand at a staggeringly unimpressive 5 foot 2. And don’t give me that “I’m 5 foot 2 and a half BS.” Real talk… you’re a shrimp. Oh, and don’t try to compensate by watering me in your high heel shoes. Heels are not step ladders and you are not a green-thumbed hussy.
2. You know… I feel quite at home in your bedroom. Your carelessly strewn clothes on the floor are like the grassy hills my ancestors used to know… before we were painfully uprooted and moved to the nursery. Sometimes I think I see movement in the autumnal heaps of clothing. I think you may have an animal living in here. Or perhaps it is YOU who is the animal.
3. Why did you place me in an old bourbon bottle? I’m not an alcoholic beverage, BUT if you keep ignoring me long enough, I may actually ferment.
4. Have you ever heard of the sun? From what I’ve been told, it’s a pretty fantastic phenomenon, some might even call it life-giving. I hear it’s warm, provides light, and helps living things grow. However, I would never know…. Ahem.
5. I know you think the cat is a doll, but let me set you straight. When you’re not looking, let’s just say she thinks I’m her territory… and she likes to mark it. But since you never water me, I’ll take what I can get.

Apparently my houseplants are snarky and sarcastic and they hate me. Who knew?

Molting, dried up sarcasm.

After our writing exercises, we listened to the featured poets read their work. I must say I was absolutely BLOWN AWAY by one in particular: Tung-Hui Hu. He was pure poetic genius stuffed into the form of a little Asian man.

His work was hard to find on the internet, for copyright purposes, and for good reason too. This man’s words are like gold and must be treated as such… guarded diligently, traded for cold, hard cash to those with the presence of mind to seek it. That being said, I found some excerpts online:

http://www.minepoems.com/

After that incredible reading, I was off to a writing salon to write some gold (hopefully) of my own.