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Nine Attempts to Clone Jason Nelson: Attempts 4-9

© Lewis laCook

Attempt 4: Time on Venus Never Renders Well

When the wine finally gives out, our days curl like paper blackening in a bonfire. Poem 3 follows us as we shuffle listlessly through the lab, dissecting the poetic canon of the English language for more inspiration. The Gamelan orchestra, an apt and quite symmetrical response to Poem 7, pounds through the walls as I saw the wheels from William Carlos Williams' infamous wheelbarrow. "White chickens indeed!" I mutter, throwing Jason a half-crazed, exultant grin. His smile is weary. " Time is one of the wonderful and sadly disturbing aspects of hypermedia. My host server company has this webstats function where I can see who has visited and for how long. A creepy version of Caller ID for the tech world," sighs the hypermedia poet, tailed by a URL (http://www.heliozoa.com/ ). "It’s strange the way some look at ten to twelve different works in only a few minutes, while others linger for half an hour or more on one piece."

"Pansies!" I cry, eying Emily Dickinson's buzzing fly with an errant tongue punctuating my chapped lips. "Fools standing in the way of progress! If you can't stand the heat, get out of the pre-processor!"

"Creating these works is incredibly time consuming. I’ll start on something at nine and then quite suddenly I’ll find the flipping plastic letters of my alarm clock are turning to five and my bed is asking for a warm body to fill its depressions. And I’ve only begun to create." He stops, finally laying aside the Keats he'd been slitting in strange geometric patterns and sinking to a hlaf-lotus on the lab's dusty verb-slathered floor. "It reminds me of early animation artists that spent months creating new cartoons, frame by frame, that only lasted a few minutes. Something so all consuming as hypermedia, something requiring so many of the senses, the brain’s lobes, must surely overpower the subconscious desire to record time. I don’t intend to stop time. I merely want carry the reader through an experience. In the case of “clone” I intended to constantly change, from section to section, to continually mutate the reader’s relationship with the text and sound and movement. Maybe text poets are limiting themselves by only creating words and not expanding the full reach of their

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