Hack Writer on the Intersection of Internet and Reality

(Status update: Although I still owe you readers a few more free posts, I've collected no more income since Friday, and my property taxes are higher than they've been. If your income for the year 2016 was US$12,000 or higher, you're making substantially more money than I am, and you need to support this web site--which you can do best, not with a "donation," but by actually contributing your opinions and perspectives and the felt needs of your business, at your choice of the following:

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One of the more unusual writing contests publicized at winningwriters.com was for poems that just casually mentioned Singapore, written by people who were not in, of, or from Singapore. As a hack writer, I just happened to have written something like that one day, so I sent it to the contest. It didn't win. So, as usual with things other people haven't bought or published, it's going live here just to assert my moral right to it. (To see the poems that won, click here:

https://singaporeunbound.org/blog/2017/7/5/3rd-singapore-poetry-contest-results )

Here's what I wrote, back in 2015. Details have been blurred; I'm 5'4", not 5'6", an so on.

I’ve published something almost every day

I’ve gone online: most not in my own name,

and that’s by choice, most of the research being

entirely on the Internet, from web sites

suggested by the clients, thus one-sided.

The fun is logging on to writing sites

to see what people want. You learn a lot

of stuff to use in your own writing life

from writing about other people’s jobs:

Where people over six foot five buy clothes.

(You’re five foot six.) Male strippers’ thoughts on stripping

for men, by camera phone. (You never visit

that kind of sites: you can’t afford a virus.)

A high-rise mall-with-posh-apartments tower

in Calgary. (Toronto’s “west” to you.)

How mass mailings are targeted in London:

“by neighbourhoods.” (So that’s who lives in Barking.)

The season’s fashion looks in Singapore,

policy changes in the banks in Davao,

and prices for extended travel tickets

(even on Greyhound you get no vacation).

“Bright-colored doors are ‘in’,” a decorator

suggests you write. You write the piece while muttering

that no one you’d know would paint their door red.

Your jogging buddy recommends a route

down a nice residential street. “What color

d’you call that door?” Yes—a dark shade, but red.

“Headboards are back,” says the same decorator.

Headboards and footboards used to come in sets

to tell the world no one over five foot ten

would ever sleep at your house. You admit, though,

your bookshelf might be counted as a headboard.

Run word-count. Run spell-checker. Read the whole thing

through, one more time. Hit “send.” Collect ten dollars.

Then go and do a Real Job in the Real World

before you start to look like Pac-Man’s ghosts...

The first job I was paid to do, the winter

after Ms. Trendy ran the headboard story,

was helping an old man install a headboard.

Amazon link? Why not...more about the organizer of this poem contest?