Fred
I'm catching up on things, as apart from the holiday hiatus I've all
sorts of computer problems (again) but I very much like the the first
and last lines of the Obscure Line. They have a real flavour: the
violence of line one, and the comedic psychology of the last. Like the
exposition in between too, been there!
Best
Dave
2009/1/3 Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>:
> Obscure Line
>
>
>
>
>
> When sleeping pills fail, I suck my brain.
>
> Endorphins, serotonin
>
> will eventually run out;
>
> and then I'll have to read till dawn
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> the usual bad poem and worse critique,
>
> but for now the technique works. With a new soundtrack,
>
> private despair becomes triumphant, heroic, public,
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> solitude a crowd
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> hanging upon my every mumbled word.
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> They have no other entertainment,
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> for media once switched off are dead
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> and what crosses the eyelid screen is immediate me.
>
> Late-middle-aged women return to high-breasted youth
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> at the cost of being probingly
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> interviewed forever about our month
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> or few seconds together, so that
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> their every guarded sentence starts with "He."
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> One channel up are war crimes trials
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> I'm no longer even interested in
>
> but have been playing so long in my mind
>
> I won't know what to program when they end.
>
> Meanwhile, the cultural station is showing
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> how all parents, grandparents, etc.
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> abused or elegized in current verse
>
> are the same two people, all dogs one dog,
>
> all landscapes kudzu. Which is boring too,
>
> except for the part where they all vanish.
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> (I turn, and my fetal position
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> becomes a commanding though seated pose
>
> in another dimension ... ) What's on
>
> the nature channel is more interesting.
>
> A ship drops anchor in a shallow sea
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> that seems both Freudian and Jungian.
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> Its anchor scrapes along the bottom
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> until it snags on the idea
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> that the seabed is the surface of Europa,
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> the sea beneath, and warm.
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> A tantalizing form
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> both radiant and dark is there
>
> like Schelling's self-divided God,
>
> a teddybear clutching a teddybear …
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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