Write a surrealist prose poem by first blowing the fucking thing to smithereens. Depress the plunger. Fill the well with a mixture of dry cleaning fluid, elemental potassium, Evian, and celery, and connect the fuse. Then take up a collection door-to-door for the most inflammatory opinions, rudely oversized vegetables, recyclables with no intention of being recycled, and little known Rick and Morty quotes. (You've placed them in the explosive, of course). Pick up someone else's dry cleaning by accident. You forgot you needed to go to the dry cleaner! Take off the child-size goat Halloween mask, pick yourself up, and fall backwards up the stairs. Slowly, you reach the conclusion you'll have to go downstairs to find a pen. Get out of bed a good 30 minutes after you promised yourself you would. Finally, articulate your 1st grade teacher's reason for being.
I'm really behind on these lessons, but better late than never, I suppose!
First, take the rusted shovel in your hand that your narrow, farmer-tanned dad’s arms used to break barren ground – you know the place, it fell below the poverty line sometime in 1929. Second, now that you have your tool, take it for a twirl around the moonlit floor your ancestors built inside the middle of your skull – it always sticks a little, all the way down to your breasts, when your friends stop by for a midnight ride and no more sound will come from your chest. Next, wrap your hand around your throat, finger tip by finger tip, making sure every tendril twists along one line of your freshly wrinkled flesh (remember how they all told you, by now, you might as well be dead?), and then, pull until you break open that erotic portal that was forged by George Washington (at some sort of time before 1989). Finally, we’re going to excavate that sticky feeling you get when every man you meet smells vaguely of your mother’s feet (some hard-nosed sociopath from the past has a very rational explanation for that). Mix it all together in a large bowel and slowly stir in the flour, add 1 cup of sugar, and a dash of those childhood memories that make you fall to your knees, in service, at His feet (or sometimes when you’re just trying to wash your hair and start staring into the plastic bathroom from beyond a thick glare). P.S. DON’T forget to add a pinch of sea salt at the end that tastes just like every rough hand who fondled you like you were a jellyfish in heat (and, also, the prickly sideburn stuck to that one guy who called you a stupid slut before he even cut his teeth). I promise it will really add to the mouthfeel of how you exist as a dish!
Just getting to these lessons. I have mixed feelings about (perhaps owing to my cursory knowledge of?) surrealism. I think of Dali’s clock which, while odd, is entirely made up of know image “units.” With a poem, aren’t we using “real” semantic elements? Anyway, here’s my first cut at this:
How to Write A Surreal Prose Poem
Start with an ekphrastic, a box on a page, a crate of stones and on each is inscribed the entire bible of a religion practice by ocean waves. There is a god in there no one has has faith in. It is the one true deity—for who could believe in a poem that is just rocks worn down by ground-up time, eaten at by crushed rhymes mixed with caustic bits of empty space. And isn’t that were stars go to die and are born again, like a man who dreamed of becoming dust so he, too, could burst into existence?
Let fall the dogs of too many TV shows that dog your days. Dream of ditches filled with cash. Build papier-mache rockets and let fly dying moguls. Blow logic and reason into space on the wings of doves. Twist straight edged edges into spiral cut razors of vanilla ventricles. Read Freud then denounce him. F*!!#~ Dali, then kiss him on the lips and set him aside. Steal his sofa. Find yourself a star on which to perch. View the world as it passes by in vivid colour. Watch the clocks reassert themselves to now.
Bring your baby to the Dali exhibit at the Art Institute and look for Dementors in each frame. Walk past each panting painting and do not bother sitting on the low wooden benches. They are not for you. Don't touch, do you mind? Seriously. Examine each guard as they stare you staring at them staring at your baby, now kid. We used to own this place, no changing tables at the Art Institute-go on and just roll out the gauze and change. Change you, change me, change this diaper. We are in a moment. Dear Kid Baby, your grandmother, she's from the old country, wanted to wash your face with a diaper for good luck. I told her no, that's not good luck here. We don't need luck here. We just need a changing table.
The first step is to experience a traumatic event early in your life for example by having an elder sibling who never existed but almost did who was there in the queue ahead of you in the astral plane hey buddy hey buddy looking forward to being born aye pal I’m looking forward to being born you’ll reply and then he’ll slip ahead of you out into the world and when it's your turn to come through everything will be haunted by sadness and no one will ever tell you why and you will, of course, have totally forgotten all encounters on the astral plane not believing in such new-age age of aquarius bullshit being fully grounded in reality your parents having raised you as devout atheists after the bathtub filled slowly with blood in the home of a friend a very wealthy friend in the highlands nothing felt real like I was fully detached from reality that is a normal reaction to shock your parents therapist will say I hope to god they’re not freudian I’ll say we don’t believe in god in this house will be our father’s reply who aren’t in heaven.
Baby poet here! With raging adhd, so I’m late to every party. Posting to keep myself accountable, if anyone happens to read it, I would love any feedback! 😙
A surreal roast
You can’t choose your words from a sticky laminated menu, you’ll get lost in the hole in the wall. They need to find you, the words. The bad ones can smell your fear as they hunt you down – the cliches like wolves under a full moon. You can’t eat your words, bellies never full, starving artists must stay that way. You can only have a taste. Yes, chef. Some pluck wilted basil as a garnish, definitely needs more salt. What happens when you watch a pot? The smell of your nana’s cabbage soup wafting, sour and pungent, you sip and sip but still it lingers. Now you can pluck the words from the air. Hands, I need hands! Don’t use the same verb or adjective twice, too many spices spoil the word salad.
Hey there, I'm a baby poet with adhd who is always late too! Just wanted to say hi, and I love your poem! I love how so many of our poems ended up with similar themes or shared ideas and words.
Don't. Do anything else. Try sitting on the stone slab beneath the window on the back of your notebook, or, if you're more practical, crawl under the esc button on your keyboard. Run outside of ink. Pour coke onto the motherboard (cans and cans of it) (for years and years) until it swells up and gives birth to a committee of edits. Watch them waddle off and fall flat onto the earth, little bulbs for butts, unprepared to be a forest.
take your skin. Peel it open. Like an orange. Throw the scraps in the ground. Maybe the insects will feed on it tonight. You'll find the thing that you've already lost. Pour it in a cup. Feed it to the rich white man. Take the slimy intestines and wear them around your neck like a noose, like a garland of hope. Wait, don't strangle yourself yet. Get to the bone. Break it. Make crumbs. Stuff them in the pit of your teeth. Eat the world. With regret, with pride, with pain. Don't swallow it. Spit it out, and look at it with a noose around your neck.
it is august in arizona, a month of record-breaking dry spells with heat that make your breasts smell like poor taxidermy. go topless but beware of the one-eyed mailman. he is a spy. leave your old dog in the ac and do synchronize belly flops into the kiddie pool: alone. pretend the yellow spaghetti noodles is your first college roommate; the one you made out with on Halloween dressed as a scarecrow. Write the first erotic though into your drowned cell phone. surrealism is the lifeguard that saves it from wrinkled skin and liver spots.
Begin by becoming very small. Not subatomic, but tiny like a seed. Like the soft wisp of a single cypress needle. See if you can float on a moonbeam, without wondering where you'll land by dawn. Are there birds nearby calling? Sing their songs back to them if so, and maybe they'll carry you off to some I-have-no-idea-where. This is where you want to be: lost, and thoroughly, seemingly slipped loose from time, and the important thing is not to mind. See, you want the words to find you before the thought does, I think. I try so hard not to think, but here I am. Here too are you, and we are hoping, which is a mistake. Bobby used to hope, and now he prays, which is worse. He never learned to be seed-like, never let a beak crack and scatter the soft stuff inside of him so it gets rained on, which is important to poets. You must be rained on often, and sometimes be small. The rest happens by moonlight and lost time.
Firstly, don't listen to Jon with his bald head floating like the moon on the night black sea. It is thyme or rosemary but never both, the stew can be too fragrant, you know. Sixteen candles in an airplane bathroom when the flames caught root and shattered Jon's reasoning to infinitesimal clangs of the broken wind pipe. It is a good thing to exist for the falling of dust; to remain open to it's collecting on white plastic and sometimes, not always, wipe it free. Dried eucalyptus turns verdant and purple and we ignite on the landing. Jon said don't fly but that is all you must do.
Draw a line. Be confused. Be interrupted by the demon trapped in your understairs cupboard as it screeches its way into the light to ask about its résumé. It wants to work in a cafe, so you hang bone china cups from its ears and feed it with feathers. Plant a forest and watch the sun glow in the trees, staring back at you, looking meaningfully at your keyboard, one eyebrow raised, twirling its moustache like a pantomime villain. Write. Write well, write savagely. Turn your typos into gourd. Shove the guardian cat off your phone and see you have six minutes left. A lifetime, a moment, a celebration, a bereavement. Don’t edit. Not yet. There are not enough fortuitous errors for you to nurture on your page, the sun glowering over them. Give the page more. Let the sun scald your fingers. Then, slow and click, slow and click. Make the page less red. Less squiggled. Let the forest grow and the sun set and spell the words correctly.
This is my favorite part: " It wants to work in a cafe, so you hang bone china cups from its ears and feed it with feathers. Plant a forest and watch the sun glow in the trees, staring back at you, looking meaningfully at your keyboard, one eyebrow raised, twirling its moustache like a pantomime villain. Write. Write well, write savagely. Turn your typos into gourd."
Forget everything you know and write only the spaces between words. Pink petals fall to your hands and reach out to them, your fingers tethered to the strings between things. Pull down and tie a bow. Untie the strings between things and sting them with petals. Spaces in the damp dark where musty things grow. Marionettes of prose monkeys dance dreams from the deep. I am not your teacher only words can do things. Only things can do things. Only dreams can do things. Dance in the light of the deep dark dawn and drive down to where the wild flowers grow.
Write a surrealist prose poem by first blowing the fucking thing to smithereens. Depress the plunger. Fill the well with a mixture of dry cleaning fluid, elemental potassium, Evian, and celery, and connect the fuse. Then take up a collection door-to-door for the most inflammatory opinions, rudely oversized vegetables, recyclables with no intention of being recycled, and little known Rick and Morty quotes. (You've placed them in the explosive, of course). Pick up someone else's dry cleaning by accident. You forgot you needed to go to the dry cleaner! Take off the child-size goat Halloween mask, pick yourself up, and fall backwards up the stairs. Slowly, you reach the conclusion you'll have to go downstairs to find a pen. Get out of bed a good 30 minutes after you promised yourself you would. Finally, articulate your 1st grade teacher's reason for being.
I'm really behind on these lessons, but better late than never, I suppose!
First, take the rusted shovel in your hand that your narrow, farmer-tanned dad’s arms used to break barren ground – you know the place, it fell below the poverty line sometime in 1929. Second, now that you have your tool, take it for a twirl around the moonlit floor your ancestors built inside the middle of your skull – it always sticks a little, all the way down to your breasts, when your friends stop by for a midnight ride and no more sound will come from your chest. Next, wrap your hand around your throat, finger tip by finger tip, making sure every tendril twists along one line of your freshly wrinkled flesh (remember how they all told you, by now, you might as well be dead?), and then, pull until you break open that erotic portal that was forged by George Washington (at some sort of time before 1989). Finally, we’re going to excavate that sticky feeling you get when every man you meet smells vaguely of your mother’s feet (some hard-nosed sociopath from the past has a very rational explanation for that). Mix it all together in a large bowel and slowly stir in the flour, add 1 cup of sugar, and a dash of those childhood memories that make you fall to your knees, in service, at His feet (or sometimes when you’re just trying to wash your hair and start staring into the plastic bathroom from beyond a thick glare). P.S. DON’T forget to add a pinch of sea salt at the end that tastes just like every rough hand who fondled you like you were a jellyfish in heat (and, also, the prickly sideburn stuck to that one guy who called you a stupid slut before he even cut his teeth). I promise it will really add to the mouthfeel of how you exist as a dish!
Just getting to these lessons. I have mixed feelings about (perhaps owing to my cursory knowledge of?) surrealism. I think of Dali’s clock which, while odd, is entirely made up of know image “units.” With a poem, aren’t we using “real” semantic elements? Anyway, here’s my first cut at this:
How to Write A Surreal Prose Poem
Start with an ekphrastic, a box on a page, a crate of stones and on each is inscribed the entire bible of a religion practice by ocean waves. There is a god in there no one has has faith in. It is the one true deity—for who could believe in a poem that is just rocks worn down by ground-up time, eaten at by crushed rhymes mixed with caustic bits of empty space. And isn’t that were stars go to die and are born again, like a man who dreamed of becoming dust so he, too, could burst into existence?
9 out of 10 surrealist muses say
Let fall the dogs of too many TV shows that dog your days. Dream of ditches filled with cash. Build papier-mache rockets and let fly dying moguls. Blow logic and reason into space on the wings of doves. Twist straight edged edges into spiral cut razors of vanilla ventricles. Read Freud then denounce him. F*!!#~ Dali, then kiss him on the lips and set him aside. Steal his sofa. Find yourself a star on which to perch. View the world as it passes by in vivid colour. Watch the clocks reassert themselves to now.
Dali is for Babies-
Bring your baby to the Dali exhibit at the Art Institute and look for Dementors in each frame. Walk past each panting painting and do not bother sitting on the low wooden benches. They are not for you. Don't touch, do you mind? Seriously. Examine each guard as they stare you staring at them staring at your baby, now kid. We used to own this place, no changing tables at the Art Institute-go on and just roll out the gauze and change. Change you, change me, change this diaper. We are in a moment. Dear Kid Baby, your grandmother, she's from the old country, wanted to wash your face with a diaper for good luck. I told her no, that's not good luck here. We don't need luck here. We just need a changing table.
The first step is to experience a traumatic event early in your life for example by having an elder sibling who never existed but almost did who was there in the queue ahead of you in the astral plane hey buddy hey buddy looking forward to being born aye pal I’m looking forward to being born you’ll reply and then he’ll slip ahead of you out into the world and when it's your turn to come through everything will be haunted by sadness and no one will ever tell you why and you will, of course, have totally forgotten all encounters on the astral plane not believing in such new-age age of aquarius bullshit being fully grounded in reality your parents having raised you as devout atheists after the bathtub filled slowly with blood in the home of a friend a very wealthy friend in the highlands nothing felt real like I was fully detached from reality that is a normal reaction to shock your parents therapist will say I hope to god they’re not freudian I’ll say we don’t believe in god in this house will be our father’s reply who aren’t in heaven.
let us be the immensity of who we're meant to be
Watching synapses fly. I see them all lined up at cliff’s edge. They jump.
Luck has it, the gravitational gear box stuttered at lift off, faltered and stuttered again.
The world righted itself.
Some were back to front, others hovered, were shy to land.
They watched the end of time swirling around the mouth of a black hold. Teetering of course.
The whole shebang, at once flying and grinding to a halt. The beginning was approaching.
I stuck my head up my ass as pieces of shit flew past.
“About turn, now forward.”
It was muffled but I heard it just the same.
Baby poet here! With raging adhd, so I’m late to every party. Posting to keep myself accountable, if anyone happens to read it, I would love any feedback! 😙
A surreal roast
You can’t choose your words from a sticky laminated menu, you’ll get lost in the hole in the wall. They need to find you, the words. The bad ones can smell your fear as they hunt you down – the cliches like wolves under a full moon. You can’t eat your words, bellies never full, starving artists must stay that way. You can only have a taste. Yes, chef. Some pluck wilted basil as a garnish, definitely needs more salt. What happens when you watch a pot? The smell of your nana’s cabbage soup wafting, sour and pungent, you sip and sip but still it lingers. Now you can pluck the words from the air. Hands, I need hands! Don’t use the same verb or adjective twice, too many spices spoil the word salad.
Hey there, I'm a baby poet with adhd who is always late too! Just wanted to say hi, and I love your poem! I love how so many of our poems ended up with similar themes or shared ideas and words.
Hi! Thank you for taking the time to read and comment! Happy to connect with you here 🤍
Agreed re: Dali!
Don't. Do anything else. Try sitting on the stone slab beneath the window on the back of your notebook, or, if you're more practical, crawl under the esc button on your keyboard. Run outside of ink. Pour coke onto the motherboard (cans and cans of it) (for years and years) until it swells up and gives birth to a committee of edits. Watch them waddle off and fall flat onto the earth, little bulbs for butts, unprepared to be a forest.
take your skin. Peel it open. Like an orange. Throw the scraps in the ground. Maybe the insects will feed on it tonight. You'll find the thing that you've already lost. Pour it in a cup. Feed it to the rich white man. Take the slimy intestines and wear them around your neck like a noose, like a garland of hope. Wait, don't strangle yourself yet. Get to the bone. Break it. Make crumbs. Stuff them in the pit of your teeth. Eat the world. With regret, with pride, with pain. Don't swallow it. Spit it out, and look at it with a noose around your neck.
it is august in arizona, a month of record-breaking dry spells with heat that make your breasts smell like poor taxidermy. go topless but beware of the one-eyed mailman. he is a spy. leave your old dog in the ac and do synchronize belly flops into the kiddie pool: alone. pretend the yellow spaghetti noodles is your first college roommate; the one you made out with on Halloween dressed as a scarecrow. Write the first erotic though into your drowned cell phone. surrealism is the lifeguard that saves it from wrinkled skin and liver spots.
Begin by becoming very small. Not subatomic, but tiny like a seed. Like the soft wisp of a single cypress needle. See if you can float on a moonbeam, without wondering where you'll land by dawn. Are there birds nearby calling? Sing their songs back to them if so, and maybe they'll carry you off to some I-have-no-idea-where. This is where you want to be: lost, and thoroughly, seemingly slipped loose from time, and the important thing is not to mind. See, you want the words to find you before the thought does, I think. I try so hard not to think, but here I am. Here too are you, and we are hoping, which is a mistake. Bobby used to hope, and now he prays, which is worse. He never learned to be seed-like, never let a beak crack and scatter the soft stuff inside of him so it gets rained on, which is important to poets. You must be rained on often, and sometimes be small. The rest happens by moonlight and lost time.
You had me at 'the soft wisp of a single cypress needle.'
'by moonlight and lost time'. Yes!
Firstly, don't listen to Jon with his bald head floating like the moon on the night black sea. It is thyme or rosemary but never both, the stew can be too fragrant, you know. Sixteen candles in an airplane bathroom when the flames caught root and shattered Jon's reasoning to infinitesimal clangs of the broken wind pipe. It is a good thing to exist for the falling of dust; to remain open to it's collecting on white plastic and sometimes, not always, wipe it free. Dried eucalyptus turns verdant and purple and we ignite on the landing. Jon said don't fly but that is all you must do.
I read this so many times. I love that the images are crisp and feel specific, but still dreamlike.
thank you so much! That's so kind
Draw a line. Be confused. Be interrupted by the demon trapped in your understairs cupboard as it screeches its way into the light to ask about its résumé. It wants to work in a cafe, so you hang bone china cups from its ears and feed it with feathers. Plant a forest and watch the sun glow in the trees, staring back at you, looking meaningfully at your keyboard, one eyebrow raised, twirling its moustache like a pantomime villain. Write. Write well, write savagely. Turn your typos into gourd. Shove the guardian cat off your phone and see you have six minutes left. A lifetime, a moment, a celebration, a bereavement. Don’t edit. Not yet. There are not enough fortuitous errors for you to nurture on your page, the sun glowering over them. Give the page more. Let the sun scald your fingers. Then, slow and click, slow and click. Make the page less red. Less squiggled. Let the forest grow and the sun set and spell the words correctly.
This is my favorite part: " It wants to work in a cafe, so you hang bone china cups from its ears and feed it with feathers. Plant a forest and watch the sun glow in the trees, staring back at you, looking meaningfully at your keyboard, one eyebrow raised, twirling its moustache like a pantomime villain. Write. Write well, write savagely. Turn your typos into gourd."
Forget everything you know and write only the spaces between words. Pink petals fall to your hands and reach out to them, your fingers tethered to the strings between things. Pull down and tie a bow. Untie the strings between things and sting them with petals. Spaces in the damp dark where musty things grow. Marionettes of prose monkeys dance dreams from the deep. I am not your teacher only words can do things. Only things can do things. Only dreams can do things. Dance in the light of the deep dark dawn and drive down to where the wild flowers grow.
'your fingers tethered to the strings between things' is a great line.
Thank you!