Poem 193

This is the last poem I’ll draw from my Original Composition end of year portfolio from 1984 …

… now looking back through and reassessing the poems I had to hand at that point, I would make different choices about what I included – pulling about thirteen things and replacing them with poems I didn’t value enough at that time – I can see clearly now how I could have made it all killer no filler …

… most of what would come out is a bunch of intense and obtuse prose poems (influenced by Les Illuminations by Rimbaud) where I was really pushing out into something modernist and experimental … to my credit I was never happy to play safe, I wanted to show the full range of what I was doing whether that compromised how the portfolio was received/graded or not … now those experiments look like just that – experiments – good to flex my muscles in that direction but not leaving anything lasting …

… this poem is in the mode of those other pieces but is the most accessible (believe it or not) and even if I was reselecting the portfolio I would still include it … Rimbaud is here but as much or more it’s Patti Smith’s interpretation of Rimbaud in her poetry that’s influencing me, her voice, format, use of image …

… I really like this poem, its ‘altered state’ hallucinogenic nature, its arc and images … to me it’s intensely visual and filmic – I ‘see’ all this …

… it’s about someone having an out of body experience, believing they are sealed in a sterile phone booth watching as outside in the middle of an asian market a boy has an epileptic seizure … the intense sensual earthiness of the market, heat smell sounds touch and taste, is juxtaposed with and cut off by the plastic cell of the booth where the watcher struggles to communicate with the outside world and (as becomes apparent) his body … he finally recognises that what he is watching is himself as the duality resolves and he re-enters his corporeality …

… obviously the phone booth is illusory (hovering seems to indicate it’s in mid-air) but bear in mind that the spice market might be too, this could all in reality be happening somewhere quite different …

… I don’t have epilepsy but I have seen people have seizures and was always struck by the overwhelming sense of isolation alienation and otherness, the sudden going-out of themselves … I think I’ve successfully captured the dialectic of simultaneous dirty sensual bodily event and the entrapped distanced mental one …

( wild boy comes from William Burroughs via Duran Duran, the telephone directory with unfocused print is similar to what astronaut Dave Bowman finds in the hotel room at the end of the universe in 2001: A Space Odyssey … and healing is a nod to the NZ bicycle manufacturer … )

Strain

glass/ the phone/ the street
shrieking wild boy in convulsions
giving the thumbs up to heaven
oxen-traffic
the white hoof knocking his knees
I am in the booth
trying numbers
any combination/ any connection
the plastic stem and head-rest
the book of unfocused print
outside the bicycles
long spurts of blue healing flame
ridden/ riven
through impossible splits in the crowd
they are watching him
worshipping an island of light
keeping one eye on the sky
a thin scum on his lips
the eyes turn in
lord of all he surveys
the phone booth is hermetic
glass and hovering
cool circulation
linking to international exchange
picking up unconsidered transmissions
through the steel nose ring
of the ox
the bruised blood comb
of the caged bantam
all on certain frequencies
jammed in the wide blind beam
of revelation
wild boy's tongue dirty for god
no answer/ numbers indistinct
held in the street
under the sheet of his thrashing religion
diverted/ absorbed
within grey lead pigeons
stationed on roofs
spaced along tiled guttering
he gapes
trying to bring up speech
signals sizzling in the mouthpiece
lost/ refracted
at once everywhere in the spice
market/ high shimmery tuning
of fish and sharp citric fruit
unfelt/ unsmelt
in the booth
the fluttering tinfoil taste
of reconditioned air
the rust of blood
on unravelled lips
the pressured membranes
at the back of the nose
he has spit me out
juggling with the connections
now he fades
the radio cover frees/ fades
draws me back
I feel stones underneath my shoulders
I have a headache
I am very tired