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Friday, June 15, 2012

Draft Process: Preparations for the Transfer of Control

80º ~ some gauzy cloud cover but the heat seeps through, a bird that I swear is saying "tweet tweet, tweet tweet," dead calm in the tree outside the window, but some upper branches moving to the south


Day 15 ~ the halfway mark

Ah, dear reader, the draft and I are at odds today, although I do have a draft to speak of.  I began by glancing back at the most recent draft for the healing speaker and opened up my journal thinking about what steps must happen for her to be released.  I so want her to escape rather than be released but I'm not sure how that's going to happen or if it will.  So, this morning my brain went to her possessions.  Does she have any?  What might happen in a long-term care facility when the person leaves?  Wouldn't there need to be some kind of accounting?  This led to the beginning of the draft:

Today is marked for valuation, a day
to catalog my earthly estate. I am dressed
in donated clothes, cheap cloth that chafes

The draft goes on in eight tercets that feel clunky and too much like prose, but this is one of my difficulties with narrative; I am so much more comfortable in the sheer lyric.  Also, this draft is clearly filling a place in the plot and that makes me suspicious.  The poem feels less inspired.  I know that sounds hokey and I'm the first to deny the idea of the muse, but still I missed the electric spark of the language today. 

The title came from following the word "possessions" through various synonyms, leading to "dominion," which I really wanted to use but couldn't figure out, and finally to "control," thus "Preparations for the Transfer of Control."  This works on many levels for the speaker but most profoundly on the transfer of control over her own body back to herself and out of the hands of the whitecoats. 

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