Autobiography.
in the shell of an exploded human head
scenes from my life are taking place
peacefully. I'm barely involved.
from now on it's going to take
something downright extreme
to make me smile. Sunflowers filled with teeth
instead of seeds, though I wouldn't
want to eat them, might do the trick,
or a girl with three backs.
I won't be putting any of these things
on my Antichristmas list
but I have advertised my preferences
I have made my desires known to America
and if you look through my bedroom window
to see my bed floating in water
surrounded by penis-shaped electric eels
and freshwater seals carrying
little mountains of crayon in their teeth
don't you fucking dare interrupt
my 41st century
1 comment:
Hi Betti.
I appreciate your candor. Yes, sometimes my absurdities are a bit tiresome. I write poems like "Autobiography" when I have writer's block and feel disgusted with poetry in general. There's no message intended--I'm just having fun in a sort of frustrated, perverse way, sometimes TRYING to write a terrible poem to see if something brilliant shoots out by accident. I'm glad you can see that poems like these are not my best work.
I don't mind displaying some of them publicly, because they're part of an ongoing struggle that I believe will be worthwhile in its entirety. I've even thought of self-publishing a whole book of my most embarassingly bad poems just to see if anything can be salvaged from their wreckage, but I should probably wait until I've actually accomplished something.
If nothing else, poems like these demolish any illusion that I might be "respectable", and that can be useful if one desires one's audience to have greater clarity in imagining the person behind the art, which I think is a good idea, though I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.
Peace & wonder. My face is the seat of your throne.
LB
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