Saturday, September 15, 2012

Chivalry and Kitchen Appliances

This is my assignment for poetry class:  
Write a poem in the surrealist mode. Your poem should include genuinely strange, startling, vivid and specific language, images, details, and insights. Don't confuse surrealism with formula fantasy or sci fi; you want to draw on archetypal and unconscious (not conventional or cliche) associations as bizarre as anything you've dreamed. Be weird. Be unpredictable. Allow genuine randomness into your work
So here goes
____________
___________
Chivalry and kitchen appliances

She is a brown recluse spider
with a lidless blender

a very large blender
ominous in a vague
I'm-not-quite-sure-but-this-
crab-salad-might-have-fangs
way

she resides in a yellow house
in the middle of a maze

a very large maze
laced with auditory hallucinations and
fun-house mirrors

an enormous crowd of people mill about
clutching hedge clippers and
poorly crafted love potions 

they are all searching for the correct path
they are all trying to be the first
through her labyrinth,
past the flytrap garden she's cultivated,
to open the padlocked door

this latest is
traipsing along daintily
fancying himself a knight
though his armor is unmistakably cardboard,
glue dripping out from the
hasty assemblage

he's picked her flowers (daisies)
he's written her sonnets (cliche ones)
he's doused in Armani cologne (Devoted Infatuation No. Five)

the door swings open

our hero enters, offering his gifts up,
a blood sacrifice to Parvati

Into The Blender!
His carefully chosen words mangled up
and hurled back in a puppy-love stenched tornado of
floral sentence fragments

he stands bemused, awestruck,
covered in aftermath

an insect enamored by bright lights
he will stay
and she will weave her web,
she can't help it.

(she never can)

No comments:

Post a Comment