one of the things you know
is wrong
guess which one
laughing unmediated through
pages of old newspapers
pregnant with an ancient spirit guide
who does nothing but sit around
and smoke cigarettes
while your dread grows younger
& the man of your dreams
counts off the days on stubby fingers
(you don't know where the count
begins - or ends
the thing that is for sure
is that nothing is for sure
dancing like a prophet
singing like that last thought
that leaves your head
a dollar or two buys consolation
but your wallet is empty
and the sky closes around you
like a mistake
4 comments:
this seems unlike you. it is kind of facile and a bit cruel, though the last two lines make for a nice image.
facile in the same sense that a lot of surrealism is facile, I suppose, since this is sort of an experiment along those lines.
may not be final version - i'll have to live with it first.
oh, wow! i didn't get a surrealist taste from this. i guess i can see where you're coming from now, but that is definitely not the way it struck me at first. it's a little more like analysis and less like the dream.
Another way to break an image. I'm going after a looser feel here, not as focused or measured or "treated" (edited) as I usually do. It doesn't totally take off like what we usually associate with Surrealism (which, actually, is more like the subset where Surrealism and Dada intersect), but it does shoot for an incongruity that functions the same way, if less "in your face", so to speak. It is in this incongruity that there is a lot of interesting space. I am, for instance, totally into Andre Breton lately, but I'm finding myself attracted more to the stuff that is less over the top. I think we are inured to jarring images like Dali's melty clocks, and when we are faced with that, we can file them away under this tag "Surrealism" that terratorializes them much more easily than images which float under the radar and are, as a consequence, actually harder to nail down (explain, terratorialize, etc.).
And also, I was pushing myself to do an automatic writing exercise, to get something down whilst engaging my conscious/rational side as little as possible. I also wanted to post it *before* I made a single edit, though I waited a while before actually posting.
By the way, none of this is meant as a defense of the poem, just an explanation as to where it came from. And I think you're right, it does sound unlike me . . . though I may never bring it too far back in, even if (when? I am still the obsessive editor) I end up re-doing it.
And it is a bit cruel.
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