Saturday, November 26, 2011

He drives rain slicked streets in his Deliverator's car,
Fat, sticky tires clinging to the road like a slug to a leaf.
His machine crouches like a beast stalking it's prey,
As it accelerates and weaves through the concrete jungle.
He is ONE with his car, a perfect melding of man and machine.
The pizzas WILL be on time.
The sudden SLAP of a "poon" alerts the driver that he's picked up a stowaway..
Some brave entrepreneurial idiot is using the Deliverator to get themselves somewhere FAST.
He does NOT like unexpected passengers..
The driver's names, first AND last, are synonymous with hero,
And he fashions himself to be one, of a sort.
He determines to LOOSE this leech.
Glancing back into his blind spot the Deliverator spots the interloper;
Decked out in the flashy colors and modern body armor of a courier,
They are "skiing" off the back of his ride, dangling from the end of the suckered on harpoon.

Okay, damn... I'm gonna end that there.. I started this "poem" as an attempt to pay tribute to one of my favorite books by writing a poem BASED on it, about the main character. Any of my readers who have read Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" will have immediately (I hope) recognized Hiro Protagonist in his role as The Deliverator from the beginning of that great, fun, science fiction novel.  I feel like my attempt at an homage was just turning into a sort of butchered reinterpretation of events that Mr. Stephenson himself described far better in his OWN words, in the book.  So rather than sound like I may be ripping him off, or worse, doing a disservice to the tale told in Snow Crash by painting it less than it is, I'll abandon this exercise.  I was inspired to try such a thing by some of my favorite music artists who write songs about great novels that they love and manage to do so poetically and without infringing on the writings of those to whom they are paying tribute.  I will likely try this again, either with the same, or a different subject at a later time.  Perhaps I am being too hard on myself, and this poem was NOT going THAT badly... but for me it stopped even feeling like a poem and felt more like I was trying to tell the story and doing so badly :P  heheh :-D

I will end this post with a quote, directly from the book, a writing style that I can only HOPE to aspire to one day:
Image Copyright of lhn6856

"A row of orange lights burbles and churns across the front, where the grille would be if this were an air-breathing car. The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It comes in through people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconscious, and unearths terrible fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire." - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

2 comments:

  1. Your poem could have been a passage in the book -- easily. Remember those attack rat robot things...what were they called? They ought to have a poem at some point.

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  2. Hiro and Stephenson just referred to them as the "rat things." :)

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