dogofdiogenes wrote:This is rough and written as i cannot settle my mind. Night, night all.
In chapel
should my feet remove themselves
into another room; I'll win.
I loved the boy with the thick
thick cock
his life a gun trained on his mind
who dared to like a world which
only billed him for his violence.
Bramber 3, a death cell green, the
home to random acts of acquiesence,
absent paranoia.
(trees with paper tears grate themselves
over the grass. Asylum Street is empty
as the linoleum smiles. There is nothing
else which it can do, stroked into state with
polish by attendants who are busy attending).
He also smoothed the corridor but shook
as if it spoke. Until
the mortuary was real, he thought
the clock was telling jokes. Now he names
a snooker cup. And me.
His feet will not remove themselves
again. I win, but not for him.
dog who cannot doze
This poem is wonderfully intriguing, because of the structure and
language you used, the arrangements of words you created.
But it is like 'modern art' in that if sense is to be made of it, it
must be made by the observer and not supplied by the
artist. To be blunt, I cannot tell if the speaker is suffering from
something like bipolar disorder, probably slipping between a manic
phase and a depressive phase, or perhaps is a paranoid schizophrenic,
in the throes of a not quite deep enough to be real bout of
logorrhea; or if it is an observer of the patient, speaking for his
as well as about him.
Or her.
I tried googgling asylum street, and found two in Britain and one
in Hartford Connecticut, and Bramber, and found Rape of Bramber,
which is not a crime but rather a location in Britain, but nothing
that matched it all.
I failed utterly to make any real sense of this, except that someone
was in dire straights mentally, had loose associations, and in a
delusional way, hoped for release through going to a different room,
perhaps death.
The violence was certainly a clue that the institution is for the
criminally insane. The wandering associations, the fairly constant
mixing up of factors of reality; the paper leaves, (oh, on reading
it as I'm typing this, I see "absent paranoia" so I'm now guessing
bi-polar), linoleum that can smile -- have a personality, have
a mouth of sorts, have expression, be alive, be stroked into
calmness by the attendants (it's really the subject who is being
stroked, I'm guessing, but he's projecting), who smooths the
corridor as though it were malleable or even alive, and who shakes
as if it spoke (because to him, it did speak, or projected its
thoughts or mood or both, into his mind).
Until the mortuary would become real, time was tricking him,
his own mind was tricking him. Apparently he did not improve
with drugs; the only way out, now going from mania to depression,
was death.
Since the poem starts in the past tense, and then moves to
present, it is a doctor or attendant, maybe even a relative, who
is the author of the piece. But again, I'm guessing.
It shifts in to present narrative, showing the ongoing course of the
disease and its effects, and we also get at the end a complete
reversal, if I'm guessing aright, of perspective.
That is, we go from an unattributed statement that if should
my feet remove themselves
into another room; I'll win,
to:
His feet will not remove themselves
again. I win, but not for him.
This is interesting because it shows that the speaker is and isn't
someone who works around the patient or visits the patient,
but is a highly personal third party voice, who has a stake in the
outcome, but can read minds. He reads the patient's mind in this
poem, yet he appears to be something like an attendant.
This is intriguing also, but I suspect that you may have lost the thread
between the start and the end, or you just plain weren't intending
for the poem to be understandable to anyone but you.
One has a fundamental choice when writing something.
One either has an intended audience of one, the author, or one
intends to entertain and/or inform a larger audience.
In the first case, associations which are unique to the author and not
to anyone else are justified, but perhaps publication isn't.
In the second case, the author must be sure not only to locate the place
and time, but also to provide detail about actual events, written as
images that are as universal as possible, in order to give the reader
a fair chance at digging out what the author intends to be dug up.
This one is beautiful in it's sound and flow, but I think may be so
intensely personal to what you know and we don't, that we cannot
benefit from anything but the beauty of the arrangement, while
you can benefit from your own, what? Perhaps resolution of a tragedy,
(this person seems bent on killing himself if he can organize it up),
a closure.
Now I'll go read the other critiques and find out that I'm a fool who
missed clues that were entirely obvious!
