The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

On the other hand if we activate the link ‘poems’, we obtain a poem about
the relationship between time and space, the verbal and the non-verbal:

Spawning offshoreon far-off stars

caught between nets at the bottom of creeks

unborn at the rim of the earth

the day spears the night till it dies reveals

a spacewhere new sounds explode as time

she strikes words on the sky in looping flames

the untouched paths of the untold

In this new text, the link ‘offshore’ leads to the following urban but surreal
narrative:

Someone you intensely dislike predicts the dayon which you will die.

You know that he cannot really know.You do not know whether he

is serious or joking or both. But you approach the day with a certain

fatalistic dread. Beforehand you say good-bye to everyone, friend or

acquaintance, just in case. On the day itself you are careful when you

cross roads. In the evening you return home, on an effortless high,

believing you may survive, ready to pour yourself a drink, and find

that your neighbour has committed suicide.

However, activating the link ‘space’ in the poem takes us to a satirical
advertisement for city and body ‘parts’:

WANTED

a bodywithout organs

the page numbers for the encyclopedic city

a body that makes music

one second-hand reproductivesystem

a mind without thought

a story linethat doesn’t go anywhere

a mapwithout a mirror

Here there are again multiple choices, but the link ‘reproductive’ produces
a reminder of historical taboos about the body, at the same time mimick-
ing the form of a medieval public notice:

New media travels 241