This month I was kinda hard up for ideas around publishing time, and it took me several days to come up with a feasible theme.
Music lyrics, much like bubble gum, are hard to remove from your head once they get stuck there. In the case of bubble gum, you're supposed to put either peanut butter or ice on the gum until it's hard or soft enough to get out of the hair. From what I understand, it doesn't work too well, and the best way to get rid of it is to cut off the offending chunk of gum and hair. This happened to my little sister at a water park once; she ripped out several strands of her bangs and went on the water slide instead of giving up her place in line to take care of it properly (but really, what sane person has scissors at a water park).
Maybe I lost where I was going with this. Are you that surprised?
Song lyrics are great ways to display phrases a songwriter has devised. A bad example is the Semi Sonic song, "Closing Time"; the song was obviously crafted around the lyrics: "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." Yuck! Nasty buildup. If the words had come at the beginning of the song or had had a better set of leading-in lyrics, it would have been technically a better piece of writing. However, as someone once said, "Those things not worth writing down are instead sung."
I'm taking some lyrics from the relatively underanalyzed (except by Spin columnists) trove of mainstream music [make that semi-mainstream] and seeing what spontaneous poetry a single interesting line can yield. I sat up one night by candlelight and penned four of these within an hour; it's a highly entertaining exercise, as well as a time-killer when you can't sleep.
If anyone would like to try this and send along the results, I'd be happy to publish your stuff in a future issue and give you credit (see Damia's story from last month).