Rearranging Death

I’m now thinking that using only the words from Death/Metal would be too limiting and too much like the previous poem. Outside of the animation, the idea is the same—there are other poems ‘trapped’ inside this one. If I used words/letters from all the other poems too, it might give me some more leeway. Words from other poems could come from outside the text.

To make new combinations of the words from the entire quartet, I made a list of all the words in a Word file, separated by commas, and then pasted them into Excel, where I could sort them alphabetically, each word to a cell. The procedure created an interested array of words across rows and down columns. I got some pretty amazing results, like this:

Nihilists fiat about the crap, if in thing of Hoppin truck then rising:

Oh Year’s is skin and can in my Oklahoma, in Days, into nothing

it believes is townswept, find The and know Midwest, a more

sun, as they believes, hoped water need not the oneself, the it—

Day wonderful steel lawn, believe and make it old, kind loving

you dry of believe, the above, about skin can, if crazy, think

New warm, Lower watered oil of—of Death—away, over and

within gin, scarfing everything, waiting days, hands, and for one say.

Canals my how But here when doesn’t riff-raff That city—by any

Then metal—know born The Tulsa in the one think severed.

Do shakes which the shake Satanic Model They else up bounds off

the you, dirt biggest sense—it—something—death severely of newly

the mainstream canal in You type tolerate of be, must like go, one in

outside Venice, Middle killing then how from love righteous it, Ford,

submerged a you, one’s, if dirt, you, my difference on Satan, the End.

Dip it, middle Caboose, honestly, that they little toe scarification

from the Dig doesn’t matter more sand, chokes it, wings it.

And that poem I simply transcribed from the Death/Metal column, which got cast in that arrangement when I sorted the first (or first two) columns alphabetically. Anyway, the concordance really makes it easier to take the words out of their original contexts and create new, interesting combinations.