To avoid treading on a snake, I stepped on a land mine. Did this
really happen, in my dream? No. Is it a fiction, then? Yes and no.
The time I spend looking for socks is insignificant: lie, irony,
or philosophy? Wombats shit candy. Joke – hallucination? This is
in fact a truth claim. My poems: litanies of truth claims. Is that where
We’re huddling, in a poem? And if so, narrated – spoken – by whom?
The Witch of Hebron? Saint Commonwealth Bank? I just call her
Aunty. That’s my affectionate nature. To improve, substantially,
a patient must be well enough to realise that it is up to themselves.
That’s the candy in the bed: it’s the last of it. Candy – lollies, to you –
Must be reframed as making the bed. How sweet, you will say, as if
sucking on a sheet or one of my socks. Well, you never know how
queer a poem will go on you, like a virtual lover, or a cow dealing
with trauma. What a chatty tone, as if staying up all night in Rome,
with Jahan and Robberto, and finally letting my guard down. Or taking
Speed, and getting fleas as I come down. Ultra rare episodes in a life
of work. Cf (short for the Latin: confer/conferatur, both meaning
‘compare’) Roland Barthes, who trumps Oscar Wilde here. Barthes is
hardly chatty. For an exemplar on surviving work – life even – see
neither, but rather, Juan Ramón Jiménez. In his work on the poetics
Of work, he urges us to live one hour at a time. All of us, he argues,
can seize moment after moment, forgetting the day, and without ending
up on the couch like Wilde, even if with less to show for it.
My adolescent prose style was rather too replete with dashes, which
were circled in red by Miss Hunt, yet they survive in my PhD thesis,
As pointed out, in black, by Professor Gelder. I try to keep a rein
on rhetorical questions, too, like, or unlike, a horse colliding
with Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. That’s ekphrasis. There was a bad smell
in my flat yesterday, and eventually I realised I had some patriarchy
on my shoe. An ultimate lie, irony, metaphor, and / or punch line.
