Blame the Ugly Mug, particularly Steve Ramirez, for my newest obsession: Ok Go. Yes, yes, I am behind the times, out of step, calendar deficient, day unplanner, and time deficient.
For the next prompt, I want you to use the the following line from Ok Go’s song “Upside Down & Inside Out” as a ghostline: “Yeah when you met the new you, did someone die inside?”
Think about all of those former selves or even the phases you went through during your teen years and various periods of your life. Did you have to kill a former to become the current version of yourself? If so, did you feel pity for that self as you murdered it? Was it a violent destruction? A mercy killing?
Or do all of those former selves follow you like a shadow, longer with each passing year as if you are moving through the late afternoon of your own consciousness? Does the weight of all that self history sink you lower to the ground? Is it hard to keep your head up when it is so full of echoes?
Or use one of the other lines from the song as a ghostline:
“Gravity’s just a habit that you’re pretty sure you can break”
“So when you met the new you / Were you scared, were you cold, were you kind?”
“Don’t know where your eyes are but they’re not doing what you said”
For the next prompt, write a conversation among your former and present selves and maybe add a future self too. Will it be an argument, an interrogation or accusation, an explanation, an apology, or advice? What do you wish your former self could tell you? What do you wish you remembered? What advice would you give a past self? Would the knowledge erase your current self as if un-birthing your present consciousness ? Would you share that advice anyway? Or would that death be your intended purpose?
Here is Ok Go’s video for “Upside Down & Inside Out.” Write a poem about being in zero gravity. Try to narrate the video as a sonnet or pantoum. Or write from the perspective of one of the piñatas. Write. Discover what happens.