The tragic tale of an MSN emo poet.
Ahh, Post Secret does it again.
Talking to John last night has inspired me to spend some more time writing. As such, I present to you:
The Tragic Tale of an MSN Emo Poet
I recently had the misfortune of befriending someone on MSN. She is American, and currently identifies herself as emo. For the purposes of story-telling she will be assigned a name, and for the purposes of anonymity it will be a false one. I feel that Emma would be an appropriate moniker, being as similiar to the word emo as a female name can be.
I'm sure we've all met them at some point in our lives - the MSN pest who assigns emoticons to singular letters, peppering their speech with spangly pictures in the middle of words. They feel punctuation is unnecessary, believing their meaning to be accurately conveyed without such annoyances as question marks, apostrophes and commas. Perhaps they take pride in labelling themselves, finding no shame in declaring "im emo". Maybe you took pity on them, attempting to hold a rational conversation with them instead of merely saying goodbye, deleting them from your friend list and never bothering to think about them again. Maybe you are a wiser person than I.
Emma started talking to me a couple of days ago. A humble "hi how are you". The sentence lacked punctuation but the words clearly formed a question, so I could accurately decifer its meaning. However, there was something else that bothered me, something beyond a lack of respect for the English language. The word "hi" had been replaced with an emoticon, displaying the word in large sparkling red letters. It was at this point I should have aborted the mission, but fool that I am, I continued. I responded that I was fine, and endeavoured to glean the same information about her state. The reply was a simple "OK". Or rather, it would have been a simple OK, had it not been replaced by a large green sparkling version of the word, this time with a Playboy Bunny-shaped hole in the O. A brief, strained conversation followed. At one point, she seemed to insult me, saying "you emo". Naturally I leapt to the defensive, saying I've never enjoyed that style of music, and telling her that I genuinely require spectacles to see all but the closest of objects. "No", she reponded, "im emo are you".
A series of brief conversations followed in the next few days, generally starting in a shining "hi" and finishing with a green Playboy Bunny "OK". This Emma character seemed quite the enigma, being at turns talkative and then intensely private and quiet. The quiet stages were easy enough to deal with, myself having little to do but tell her how I was before she had gone again. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the horrors of her more talkative periods. One such period came later that day, when she decided to start a conversation with "if i told you i love you would you believe me".
Quite frankly, I wouldn't believe her. She barely knew me, we had very little in common and I hadn't been anything beyond polite to her. Above all else, I refuse to believe that someone would use a sparkling red "LOVE" with a Playboy Bunny O to admit their feelings for me, especially in the form of a question without the appropriate punctuation. Naturally, I didn't share all of this with Emma, since I was still sticking to the lowest levels of politeness with her. "Well, you hardly know me..." would have to suffice. This was clearly not firm enough for her, as she began to ask me what type of girl I liked, once again declaring her affinity fpr the emo subculture despite her MSN display picture being one of faux-goth hero Marilyn Manson. She also told me she writes poetry, deciding to share some with me.
Unfortunately, I neglected to save the conversation, so Emma's poetry is forever lost in the dark recesses of my memory. I can assure you that it was truly diabolical. It would be fair to assume that a proud poet would agonise over each stanza, each line, each word, each syllable. Most poetry may not be considered quite to the depths that schooling would have us believe, but there is a certain level of skill in really good verse. Her work was poorly-constructed mindless whining about boys. One line in the first poem speaks of "longing for your kiss", but I was only able to translate this after working out which word could possibly trigger the emoticon of a floppy-haired emo boy with the letter X animating itself across his face. Without so much as an acknowledgement from me, she proceeded to share a second poem, this one co-written by her best friend.
There is a cliché warning that too many cooks spoil the broth. There is another cliché that says two is company. You would think that help from a friend would result in a marginally better poem, perhaps one that gave some heed to conventional spelling, grammar and poetic structure. In reality, a meeting of these two minds resulted in an even more flagrant disregard for the English language. This collaborative poem had no structure to speak of, presenting itself as a single paragraph on my screen, riddled with spelling errors. It was unclear which of the girls had nominated herself as the narrator, or whether the character writing the poem was an amalgamation of the two personified as one. Whichever of these possibilities was the reality, the thought of a boy upset this being so greatly that she could "feel tears comeing [sic] to my eyes". Tears were "comeing" to my eyes too, such was the frustration of wasting my time on such twaddle. Regardless, I was filled with a morbid curiosity, similar to that which is caused by watching the audition stages of X Factor. I could no longer be polite and reserved, I just had to discover what drove her stupidity. I asked her who her favourite poets were, thinking it might help me comprehend, and she did indeed make more sense with her reply than she had with any other single sentence in our entire correspondence.
"i dont read poetry"
Alastair Craig
25.02.2007