the snatch

it comes as no surprise to writers that everything is grist for writing. even snatches of conversation. obviously, but we live in an era when people do this thing involving talking into these hand-held devices called mobile phones and the words i hear from these conversations are divorced from their context. sometimes the words can sound quite lame and unemphatic, a lot of yeses and uh-huhs. other times the words sound ominous. while sometimes the language is quite like the dialog from a sitcom. especially so that the language i hear is from one voice talking into, from my perspective, dead air. august kleinzahler suggests, in an essay, that a few people might be talking into dead mobiles. who knows. i don't have a phone so i can't say what the habits are of people using these phones, and it seems the users of these devices might be everyone as i've seen even the homeless talking into these marvels of human technology. yet, we live in a world of words, textual and verbal and visual. my radar is attuned to language. i can't help it. i love words and i hear these snatches of living language as if they are pieces of an unfinished poem. perhaps that is part of the postmodern condition to be caught in clouds of words often divorced from context. what we don't know we make up. here i am with these words and applying it to my own half-conceived concepts of writing and what i don't know i make up. sometimes it becomes a poem.