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Surreal Poetics

(1+1)+(1+1)=22
A Collaborative Poem
​

Issue 02, Part II - Language & Image


NOTE: This poem should be viewed on a computer screen or in landscape view on a tablet to maintain its formatting. It may appear distorted on a mobile device.


I’m never going to author words that sound like music in a bag                                          “Poet’s Oath”
or grammar stones wrapped in newsletters.
I’ll cover me in paper leaves, lull me gently, ink my wires
and either I’ll become a microcosm of re-imagined senses
or, I swear, I’ll turn into a perfectly tuned clock.
                                                                           clocks beat                                                    “Perpetual Time”
                                                                           the metronomes

                                                                           hands smack
                                                                           the twelfth hour

                                                                           chimes ring
                                                                           profanities

                                                                           perpetual time
                                                                           waits for no one

                                                                           anticipation
                                                                           tightens the noose
               There are no autumn leaves here                                                          “LES FEUILLES MORTES”
               where green fronds fall to death
               every day from every tree and vine
               on this tropical line set to zero,
               and so Mercer’s metaphor
               of periodic loss
               wreaks the way you sing it since
               all our verses, all our stanzas,
               all our falling, all our missing
               most of all, my darling, has
               no one
               season.
               Nothing but green and brown grass                                                                          “Impressions”
               long grass tall grass long tall grass

               grows growing—I step out am stepping--
               we all step smash trod on the fallen tree

               infant human birth
               I give birth
               to the green grass
               but some
               some of the grass brown

               a giant leaf leaves footprints
               in the grass
               a snake maybe a snake

               impression
               your impression

               circles swirling folding
               blowing in the wind

               if you blow your candles out
               you can see more clearly
               in the dark.
                                  My face became a giant question mark                                 “Ativan Poem #6: Pond”
                                  and a thousand birds flew out of my mouth
                                  and over the pond in a great murmuration.
                                  I had no answers; I had no turtle comfort.
arms woven around                                                                                                                                  “dwell”
my torso, twiggy, leafy, waiting for
bits of down, gum wrappers, odd seed pods
leaving softness and character.
i am handmade.
sometimes when it hurts
i ooze, shapeless,
a snail into the smooth inside
of my skull, iridescent
patterns in stripes like
the beach, smooth, after the
waves have ebbed with
the sun going down
that i will never see.
maybe you can look inside
after i am gone, leave
me hollow up
let the crows pick it clean
a nest cup left for a song bird
in which its children might sing.
                                                 Last night’s bird orchestra                                                                 “4:30AM”
                                                 is tuning up for a second show.
                                                 The tiny lights click on over the branches
                                                 where the chickadees and titmice
                                                 practice trills and runs
                                                 by some little known
                                                 German composer.
      Good and bad are twins brothers                                                                                 “Evil and Good, 1”
      lost & found on a see-saw.
      A crossroad with no signs.
      The abandoned barn
      where you spend the night.

      Candle is unlit on the table.
      A full basket of eggs
      some light pink some blue.
      Bed is made with white sheets
      and dark blankets.

      In the distance
      a bell strikes the hour.
      You hear
      but you cannot count.
 
Your mouth moves fast as an eye tracking rain                                          “Attention Dislocation Order”
or the rapid writing of a word thief                                                                    for Rebecca Mae Holder
in a library corner. I wonder,
“How many blinks are in your sentence-thoughts?”
When I write, it’s to moments by the window.
It’s slow as circumscribing the world
island by undiscovered island,
sometimes the wind blows and hurries me along.
In other words, no matter how far I seem,
I return to read your eyes between the blinks.
                                               This vessel of breaking                                                       “Level with a Body”
                                               down vesicle vehicle vessel
                                               of breaking down the moors the cape
                                               blue the vase valise vessel of
                                               breaking down wonderful vassal
                                               and night tonight I can write the vessel
                                               of breaking down rights itself or
                                               blue or vacillation between well and
                                               not between sense and non between
                                               empty and full the vesselofbreakingdown
or
                                               moon and then there’s neither full
                                               nor empty but gone no vessel then no
                                               breaking breakers the sea loosed lost and
                                               no way of ever knowing it again
           Imagine the prairie upside down—                                                    “II.  Martini, Bitters, Cocktail”
           grasses feeding roots
           rather than the other way round--

           no head-high flames to sweep unchecked
           across bluestem, dropseed, or stiff goldenrod 

           no cycle of loss and renewal
           rebirthing flowers, bitter weeds,
           mega-fauna or the ubiquitous lead-plant shrubs,
           but if Aristotle believed the heart was the organ of thought & sensation,
           didn’t he predict Duchamp’s urinal?       Can art be the object itself?
           No?    Where do you draw the line? —at Warhol?   Yes?    Because
           his Brillo Box was a made thing?—an artwork identical to the object
           which is different?
           In the light that ages                                                                                                                     “Nord”
           within the eyes’ incense
           the brushland of the area
           of the Northern gaze
           on the moment of spasms
           is flaming
           with the smell of burned hair
           Shocks in my nervous                                                                                                                   “Pulse”
           system
           a syringe breaches
           my open wound.

           Whenever I think
           it’s healed
           I’m wrong.

           Shards of shrapnel
           detected by
           airport security.

           A bomb exploding
           in my arteries. 
       It is a sullen world that drapes                                                                                           “Bitter’s Ratio”
       the heart with ash, portends
       the loss of sunlight, tastes bitter
       on the tongue—words turned
       by severed hands, burn the eye.

       Burn the eye, severed hands
       turn words on the tongue,
       taste bitter. Sunlight’s loss
       portends the ashen heart,
       drapes a sullen world.
       A big screen TV                                                                                “Magenta, Black, Green on Orange”
       behind a green mat

       bathtub full of
               squid ink
       lined with towel

       or:
               My kid
       could draw that.
               People weep before these?

       Too many antidepressants
               cancel out:
       razored arm on kitchen floor
               buried disinterred
                       reburied with wife

       a metaphor for
               what the Chinese call
                       the dirt grave of
               love.
In arid elsewhere,                                                                                                                   “OTHERWHERE”
musical bones leak
               melodies, released

by nuclear wind.
Gray leaves sprout, confuse
               corrosive heat

for spring.
The horizon slices 
               Otherwhere.

Acidic as an aquatint,
sun etches
                inhabitants

who delight
in hearing
                wounds’ laughter.
The absurdity of the world                                                                                                             “Symbiosis”
is in me is in it
I live
earthquake dreams
cru m ble  c rum ble
I dream through reality
dream walker
I breathe its pollution                                             
carcinogenic effluence
cough up
spurious assurances
phlegmulous lies
cohabiting lies
inside me nurture me
their origin unknown
from somebody
and nobody
they were always in me
symbiotes
I am
because
they appeared unto me
and announced my
Phlegmaculate Conception
Something musty:  shoulders    head    thoughts.                                      “Into Glowing (The Brooding)”
Boots span love
sagging god    skulking horizon.
The past is repast for worms: 
hair    eyes    fingertips
eternity late thrown
shimmering bone    weak ocean
god rhythm    something dripping.

Bats in air impress ages    pierce horned moon
break edges of gold shadows
shake late afternoons
surface to feed    usher darkness.

White moon always stretches
between stale shadows and sun
on ground like fire waves
overtaking concrete     smashing it
into glowing shards. 
Psychedelic dust                                                                                                       “Dust on a vision of hell”
spiking starfish eyes

Liquid claws rasping (like windows)
on the cusp of absence

The cacophony of bones
dissolving into technicolor bells 
 
The dissolution of dust, in technicolor absence:
liquid bones, cacophonous claws, stars fishing for bells on window’s psychedelic cusp
 
woke nearly every                                                                                             “I went roaming in my mind.”
hour summers
into snow cold and
darknesses

        quiet
        rains
        difficult space

        a form
        in flight from
        itself

one admits light as
one (other) (self) entrances
oxygen nitrogen into tremble shiver

        the hello
        of living

lights upon creatures
which is not the light of the sky
on the one moon
that runs us

                     The light gradually eats away at my face.                                              “We Never Really Die”
                     (Images steal the curvature.)
                     Eye for an “I” until it is eaten?
                                                            (Forgetfulness
                     is indistinct and uncertain.)
                     Mark this page, I ask him.
                                   “Light is a question in one millimeter answers.”
                     I do and I
                               relinquish the space.
                     it’s happening again                                                                                       “Dandelion Whizz”

                     the high lonesome feeling
                     I get when she pees

                     a blue streak
                     to the moon

                     floating on wind
                     like dandelion fluff
                     in May.
 
The word probably                                                                                                                    “In Conclusion”
defines the image
an eagle watching
a setting sun
the season winter
so all the reds
overtake white
mist rising.
 
                  

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