‘i remember this one time’ is a series of 40 or so vignettes from my life, told as truly as i could, in what i call ‘metric prose’ - free form prose poetry that invokes and applies poetic techniques - metre and rhythm - alliteration, occasional rhymes - to natural speech giving each piece authenticity along with a driving pace.
as vignettes - complete in themselves - they are non chronological - there's no real beginning nor a natural end - the pieces have no specific order. whenever i perform them, i reorder them depending upon the context or onus of the performance setting, the mood i am in, or the story i need to tell on that day, regardless of the order in which they were written and/or experienced.
on a meta level, this is a metaphor for the role of association in memory recall. we do not remember linearly - how our memories cascade from one to the next is very much dependent upon the context of their recall - who we are talking to, what we are talking about and what we are feeling all impact the associative paths our minds may wander in our recounting.
on another level, it is a metaphor for queer narrative - for my trans narrative. after coming out at 38, i had to recontextualise my memories and experiences, i had to reorder them, reunderstand them through the new linguistic lenses of dysphoria, euphoria, dysmorphia, socialisation, and assignation.
in early 2020, ‘i remember this one time’ became a book - a collection of unbound single poems per single pages - pages that can be ordered and reordered - collated and recollated - depending upon the associations that are relevant for the context of their recollection - held together between two covers and bound with a ribbon.
to view each poem, pause the video
