Alice . part 1
Alice was poorly-bathed impenetrable in centimeters kicking the petrified glove slowly across the microphone hoping to conceal her mnemonic edge, secretly wishing for uncomfortable love.
Displayed with great angst matador armies now caught in a telephone cord, happening as they said it would, in candlelight so shaggy it just got in everyone’s way.
She made her bed with terrible theater; polypropylene eyes wrecking even the most extraordinary of men framed herself inside nitroglyc windows wearing a scarecrow nightgown.
All that stands between her and procreation, a deflowered perversion that kills with clockwork sureness, as she tolerates, violates and re-discovers herself in the young strawberry hours.
Stuffed with elephant grass, train song hammers the seaside fort. Trolley cables screwing down toward the docks across galloping razorfish, its white blintz camouflaged in tyrants filled with unnoticed resolve.
The blown compressor chewing up a swathe of robins. August arriving along with the water stars, burned dingys bobbing out with the tide and other things that amputate, dolls wrapped in lairweed walked all over starved of intercourse of any sort.
Doubled-over in tightrope concentration you pick apart like roses tiny gurneys soaked in horse milk. Alice reaches for the banister, leans forward and hallucinates a time and place for fear, reaching for the monster within.
This poem's foundation is arrived at through the Cut-Up Method (picking words & phrases out of a hat)
By it's very nature, it creates non-linear and illogical passages. I have done plenty of my own re-working from the raw copy. I have been fooling around with this style for years, seeing what happens when you keep lack of narrative tamped down or try to pull some shavings of narrative out of it. Here I am trying to do the latter. But, one can only go so far. The Dadaists used this method to create colorful nonsense and many of this same group when metamorphosing into Surrealists carried this over and used it in their attempts to mimic they way dreams flow, to describe it in the most general of terms.
I like that form of foundational material for creating a poem or even short story. Sometimes I'll just pick a word or phrase that jumps out at me and start building from antonyms and synonyms and grafting various other words and phrases in. Makes for a curiously intriguing, obtuse read with a subtle thread of continuity. Much enjoyed!
Great piece of work, Yarbrough...The surreal, that Dadist glow, that Dali touch - that Yarbrough quality - is there throughout....I look forward to Part 2