Loved, (8/8/05)

Your penguinous kindness was
unnecessary adjective

which, lack of word,
was, in this case,

only yours
and only mine.

This one is an oldie, but I found myself thinking about it the other day.

It's built on this idea of an 'unnecessary adjective'. Sometimes an adjective is the entire point of the sentence: 'go down to the second street'. But in some cases ('he is a fucking jerk'), the adjective isn't necessary, but it sort of makes the sentence worth saying.

This is line of thought came from a quote (or something) a friend told me: 'verbs unnecessary. nouns necessary. adjectives, wonderful.'

Around the same time i was pondering this, another friend and I invented the word 'penguinous' to describe Fred, who is black and white and sort of shaped like a penguin when he sits.

I discussed these things with Scott, who also encouraged my writing a lot. So, the poem is about sharing a language with another person, and it sort of plays on describing that person in that language.

The title is an adjective, and then after the first two lines, the rest of the poem is an adjectival phrase. Also, most of the important words (penguinous, unnecessary, only) are adjectives. Part of the reason this one is so tight is because I used the technique I've described before of eliminating things after writing. In this case, I literally took out everything, including 'necessary' words ('for lack of a better word' becomes 'lack of word') to leave only the adjectives and the highest impact meanings.

'In this case' is also an attempte to use the linguistic meaning of 'case' and refer to the concept of subject vs. object -- who is speaking and who is being spoken to or about.