Monday, April 06, 2020

On River Seine I Sat Down and Said

He is to me what a Paris is to an artist
Like a place to love and live, but never to die at
Melodiously vibrant, yet poignantly loud and sour
Making my heart run round the entire block in its restlessness,
Sweating through my nose
I wish to sit reciting Neruda's love poems along the banks of Seine
Until the break of dawn when the feeling of Paris perishes
And I reach atop the hill admiring the Himalayan stretches
And my snatching looking bae
In a wisp of a second turns into a digressed foggy space
Whispering the mild 'bing bang dung da' thundering of the cloud
Causing the tingling in my ears of despair
The empty vastness of the sky fills up with dense insanity
And the foggy being around me visibly takes the form of dark shadow—
Saying in baritone, "Hey tiks. You acting weird, huh?"
In sudden concussion I foresee myself turning into a maze.
In my dialectic infatuation of him
I decide it ain't no good, I must die now and here—
Mors mihi lucrum (death to me is reward)
And the sky gets filled with big-eyed snowflakes saying out, "Now's the time. Here it's come."
When with sudden repercussion I return to the bank of Seine, "I can't do it here, Paris is no place to die."

...

This poem above has got 20 little poetry projects which goes as follows—
Begin the poem with a metaphor.
Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
Use a piece of talk you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . .”
Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.”
Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
Use a phrase from a language other than English.
Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

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