Poems: I Didn'T Say Poem
Poems
( i didn’t say ‘poem’)
… are as many as galactic swirling gnats multiplied by equal number
though not as many in shape and size and weight
as tough as feather-and-fly to middle-and-heavy in gait
but never as punchdrunk as a Dylan Thomas dervish quake
some like this tell you what to think
and make a show of the tinker rather than the tank
so take a cue and read no further than this
unless you want to know what a poem is
Poems are bundles
which tie themselves up
by just letting the words come together
in the order in which unless you take it/them back and let them/it out according to whim
not like presents with name and age and knot on the top
all wrapped with care
kowtow after sai kere feet to kiss
serf to his Lord of the Manor
with utmost respect and honour
all for a piddling favour
bundles then of meaningless signs in strings of letters
synaesthetic strings of tactile gustatory olfactory auditive images
held together by syntactic gum
each bundle and there may be as many as you may want to or can see separately tied
mixture of more or less of each synaesthetic string in a form on page (unless you give voice to them which is still a voicepage distinguishable by modulations of voice in the head)
the evident content pushing the words in or out of line (you’ll note you can’t push it off the page like this unless you reduce the size of the teeth of words till they cannot be read...)
bundles then within bundles
Russian peasant wooden dolls within dolls
magic Chinese surprise boxes
a bundle by any other name is still a bungle without a bunghole
unless you tie their toes up
only the sinusal knot which instructs its time its beat and rhythm is not so easy to find where there are no rhymes and steady fixed wellworn structures unless the poems come wrapped in multi-coloured papers with do-it-yourself kits who-dunnit maps teach-yourself diagrams
they may be that is their insides on the outside as you’re quite right in thinking
or simply somewhere in one place in the inside where you can’t get your hands in/onto it even with an angiopathic catheter as easily as a Cronenberg character digging his hand into his belly and drawing a pistolhand
so appropriate it’s like Lynch saying where do you put the eye of the duck not on the bill ‘If it was sitting on the middle of the body, it will get lost...It has to be placed in the head, it’s the most detailed.’
yes that’s where you’ll find it but remember you can’t untie it yourself
it’ll untie itself when you still your senses your thoughts your feelings and your sense of importance of your self
that is when you want to know what you do not know ‘There’s nothing more exciting than something you don’t know about.’ [Eric Mottram a poet délaissé by the mighty who make and break poets but can they break a poem like him]
so depending on how you go about it some bundles may open others not yet others may stay open and you may not know how to profit from their guilelessness while your thoughts and sensations take flight in other directions thinking of yourself and how you might have done better the content of some bundles may mix with the opened overspill and you may not know which bundle came first to mean what
but the main thing is to let the bundle(s) open even all together at once
only then you may swing on the strings
only then you may see the trees from the underbrush jingly-jangly jungle noise of course not all poems are bundles of bundles
those that narrate an event a story a heroic tale of yore
those that through unwideopen mythic mouth speak of holy lore
those that paint a picture so lovely you’d forget you’re looking at a natural Matisse colour print
those that cry raucously for the assumption of some material power the castecraze of mythic mind-muddling mantras
those that confess some tale of personal tragedy and woeful dismay and
those in fact like this dictate define try to instruct make much of its dialectics
the rest are they the only poems
bundles of synaesthetic strings
bundles of flights of fancy and fantasy
not so magical realities
bundles blasting through meaningfully-sewed and bound spacetime curves
bursting in the silencing din of mental short breath
budding colours of unknowable scents
the touch of taste
the flavour of an emotion
so intense you’d want to die says the lady watching a tearjerker
choking from empathic self-immolation
or while riding in an open motortaxi
the swirling dustfumes’ apnées in a Chennai heure du point
sit suddenly back in unbelief
at the power of some black empty signs on clear woodmade ground
the heedless joyous cries of dustclad children shut in a pavement poem
From the privately pub. Coll. (revised) : longhand notes (a binding of poems), Paris :1999, 115p.
© T.Wignesan April 28, 1997 Paris
Copyright © T Wignesan | Year Posted 2016
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