Joy Garrison Programs: Command Highlight

     A. Joy

I was born Joy, to enjoy
in a state of overjoyment,
an adventurous joyrider.

I play with a joystick
always joyfully, giving others
much enjoyment.

In this game,
my obstructors
are killjoys.

      B. Garrison

Ghosts defend me
through time, as I design
the ultimate garrison.

Understandably, my actions
lie on the periphery
of the fourth dimension.

I build protective barriers
so you can hold flowers
so you can smile.

     C. Command

The laws of life
move me along.

If I don’t see it,
I make it.

I theorize.
I change the facts.

As I change,
I command the world.

     D. Highlight

Watch me move the pieces:
A Queens Gambit
A fancy castling.
I always defend.
I always protect.
Do not seek my highlights.
I have not peaked:
too much to achieve.

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Posted on:

Open Link Monday

The artwork is by Bonnie. Her blog is http://originalartstudio.blogspot.com/

This piece is a response to onestop poetry challenge:

 http://onestoppoetry.com/2011/07/friday-poetically-with-brian-miller-21.html

I’m not sure what this work will mean to you, but I will assume no one will guess how/why I wrote this. After I explain it, it may make even less sense. 😉

Some time before seven this morning, I HAD to get on my computer to do some preliminary work on my screenplay. I booted up, and instead of NOT turning on my browser, I brought up Google Chrome, clicked on the one stop poetry page, and saw the challenge.  I decided that in order not to waste my time of not writing my screenplay, the only solution was to write the poem about my main character.

I had no idea what to write about. I read the first poem posted, by Esther Douek. This can be found on

http://www.estherdouek.com/?p=381

Her poem is titled: “A Salesman with X-ray Vision | The Eyes of Poetry” . Her concept of X-Ray made me think of Four Dimensional art, as in Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)  Salvador Dalí. (1954).   Which you can see on  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dali_Crucifixion_hypercube.jpg

My protagonist’s name is Bashira Garrison. Bashira is a popular Muslim Girl name. It’s Urdu and Arabic for “Joyful.”   The main theme in my screenplay is “Protecting the Protector.” This is why her last name is Garrison. I called the character in my poem “Joy” instead of “Bashira” because I could play with the word “joy.” Poetry is all about playing and painting with words. So at least that part should make sense.

The image, above is saved as file name “ghist.jpg” . I thought it could be a mispelling or perhaps a variant of “ghost”, because it’s a ghostly image. I looked it up, and it’s a computer command: command highlight. The picture is one big highlight.

Bashira is an engineer who is developing a small unmanned aerial vehicle (SUAV). She often must re-programm the control system, so I thought that naming  this poem about Bashira (Joy) after a computer command would be apt.

Yesterday, someone asked me if my poetry was inspired by some sort of ” gift from a higher power.” It’s not.

This is how my poetry is contrived: I have one thing in my head, in this case doing some analysis on my screenplay. Then I encounter something I have to write a poem about, in this case a onestop poetry challenge. I take the two concepts and blend them into an abstraction. I look up words and phrases. I use them in my poem. In this case, I looked up variants of words with Joy in them. I looked up famous quotes for the words “change” and “highlight.”  That’s pretty much it.