young man reaches out
to touch a sunflower
but an angry, giant
hedgehog
sorta got in the way…
he says, why is it, man,
that we gotta get up
so fucking early every fucking day?
rush to wake, rush to eat,
rush to shit, rush to beg,
and then oh so early
to get back to sleep…
bottlenose dolphin tells the sailor
she’s self aware,
asks him why his people haven’t
returned to the water yet…
not sure, the sailor says,
but I must get on with the fishing
or my family will starve…
Lantern Lady cries out at night
because she feels like she
is going blind—
but she isn’t, it is only
getting dark outside…
why must I be forced to sit
in a cube all day for nine
straight hours until
my eyeballs bleed?
why do idiots get all
the respect?
why do some children
never truly get what they need?
giraffes don’t snuggle
at night on the
couch watching streaming
television — their necks
are much too long for that…
why does everyone ask the
wrong questions?
and no one ever likes you
for what you want to be liked for…
the rhino’s horn is
made of keratin,
and that’s a little different
than the unicorn’s
Garbage Notes:
I remember I had some major writer’s block when I sat down to write this poem. Sometimes I just sit and stare at the page. Sometimes I’m really not in the mood to write anything.
I love the act of writing. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t always naturally spring forth from my psyche. And since I quit coffee, I’ve actually been finding it much more difficult to ignite the sort of frenetic flow state that is sooooo much easier to attain when you’re hopped up on caffeine.
I’ve had to resort to other strategies to get my mind going. Sometimes I have to sit and calmly visualize things. It’s almost as if I have to reach a zen meditative state first before the ideas flow. Other times I have to find my way into the story or poem by writing little fragments of things—little oblique bits of dialogue or imagery or description. And then once I’m mentally into it, I can find a more direct path to the core of it, and finally I can get everything to coalesce.
On this particular piece, I remember being really stuck and had to resort to a tactic that you’ll probably think is borderline childish. But I think there’s something to it. It uses another modality to tap into something more unconscious. That’s right, I resorted to doodling…
What I’ll do sometimes, when I have absolutely no words coming to mind, is I’ll start drawing random lines which haphazardly turn themselves into these crappy little drawings and then I just keep doing that organically until I can put words to it. It’s like I’m channelling something more subconscious and ineffable from within me and then often that will ignite more complex ideas.
In this case, the man reaching for the sunflower got me thinking of waking up early and how much I hate doing it. How I hate to rush to get ready in the morning, and why people all around the world force themselves to get up early to go to jobs they hate.
The dolphin doodle led to the idea of self awareness, which ultimately emerged as the title of the poem. I’ve always been fascinated by the extent to which dolphins possess self-referential consciousness like human beings do. From there the notion came to me that if they could talk to us, I wonder if they’d ask us why we never returned to the water the way they did. Perhaps allowing them to live a more free, wild, natural life—unlike ours.
Things just flowed from there. Feel free to read into the rest of the imagery however you like. Even I am a little stumped sometimes when I try to analyze the connections between the latent and manifest meaning of some of my word choices. It’s all tied to my internal psyche somehow.
There’s imagery of workers suffering in cubicles, of giraffes not watching netflix. The juxtaposition of the rhino and the unicorn. I see a lot of conflict between civilized post-industrial human life whimsically set alongside ideas of nature and evolution and the rest of the wildlife we share the earth with.
It all makes for a mix that is I think both thought provoking and absurd. And that’s probably one reason why I think this poem did so well when it was first published. It ended up tallying record high viewing totals for me on Medium at the time. And I remember it all felt so ironic because it’s a piece that in many ways shouldn’t have existed. I wasn’t at all in the mood to write it and it was born out of these ridiculously unplanned doodles. So there you have it.
Franco Amati 2023
A lot of the mythology around the unicorn stems from explorers encountering the rhinoceros for the first time- and then, gradually, the image of the horned being shifted...
Interesting how what we feel and see as well done and what others perceive can be so different. I loved this poem. It is alive, vibrant and full of questions and metaphors and enlivens my mind. I love your drawings. They remind me of Story People by Brian Andreas.