This is your brain on literary crack.

[icepixie]

This is why you do not read three separate pieces of Joycian goodness ("The Dead" from Dubliners, the first chapter of Portrait of the Artist, and six hours of Ulysses) in one weekend and then try to write a poem. Your brain turns into modernist mush and produces things like the following:


Echo (Not Quite Modernism)

It's midnight and foggy by the church
where bells chime every quarter hour
and start anew with a bang--
Westminster pattern and then as many
deep F-bell bongs as it takes.

Each chime fades into the next--
a continuous bong-bong-bong
like waves that never stop,
like a nervous schoolgirl
reading a poem reallyfastlikethis,
like cursive handwriting no one can read--

particles of cloud make miniature bridges
between metal and those little bones in the ears
(sound requires matter to travel)
bong
bong
bong
bong
bong
bong
bong
bong
bong
bong
bong

BONG

all sum together at this
final call carried on the clouds
wavering like a sylph when it reaches the ears,
fading away to become one with the crickets
and the whispering trees;
brief echoes come to us on the mist,
twisted and fading still more,

like our genes echo our parents',
like Joyce echoes Homer,
like this fades away into pale repetition
of echo, echo, echo...


I hope the spacing came out for everyone. If not, just know that there's stuff all over the page in the middle.

*

I will finish my little android death vignette thingy for the fiction workshop application today. I will post it by tomorrow afternoon at the latest and beg for comments. If I don't do this, please beat me over the head with a trout or something, will you?