Conclude the project by writing a poem that incorporates words and lines from all of your past 29 poems.
Sounds simple enough, till you try to distill 29 days of Oulipo into a single piece. Well, it’s a draft, as always, and rather fun to revisit the various ideas and images that inspired me or drove me crazy over the past month. I will miss the back-and-forth dialogue with fellow Ouliposters, but I received my Oulipo Compendium yesterday in the mail, all the way from Gloucester in the UK, so I’m looking forward to more of this, without the newspaper constraint. Hope you’ve enjoyed the poems. For more patchworks, please visit the Oulipost blog here: http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/oulipost-30-patchwork-quilt/
IN A VACANT LOUNGE IN CANADA, I TOO SAT DOWSE AND WEPT
Winter, mid snowman. City parks bare, a soundscape of static and feedback.
This boggy tip of Newfoundland’s northern landscape, sullen winds hang low,
a cloud of irritation and icy Arctic sky send shivers through indigenous
eyes-locked people. Diamonds locked earth deep beneath limestone fissures,
ET dumped in a hole in Alamagordo. Hogs Back Falls aren’t behavioural.
Hog’s Back Falls (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Cheesemakers experimenting.Latest gastronomical experiment: crickets.
A bad-police-car idea to the letter. Check germ level. Net expert levels set.
The diaper had a lot to say, the little packet of cheese too. Saint’s jawbone,
several teeth, the finest strained carrots the size of garbage can lids—
the martyr’s blood liquifies. All assemble into a gelatinous creature,
a Frankenstein’s monster that never comes to life.
All puffball poke written in weird.
Everyone is guilty of something.
Lest we forget, it’s all about the tulips.
Tall chaw-down mothers run up, up, up, up, Stones-style, bruises,
bumps and beers, along the northern peak outside Belfast,
in shades of moral greys and déjà vu, cinctured with peanut.
Armies win wars, women, and even ice cream in various versions.
Good food and dog excrement blended up together.
Buy pigeons, sell carnivores. They’re going to give us ponchos.
We are on the cusp of the gaffe sizzle of Ottawa, mope-up laws of
fissure-written autobiography, further perfection of extreme evil
in 35 cries and as one dance.
Cigarette lighters mask the toothbrush lumber. Backyards have gone barren.
Inuit seals hunt zombie MPs. Most hunt members of the rodent species,
spring-loaded impalas, barcode wobbly-legged zebras.
Chickens search for grubs through cow pats. Aimless now; it was aimless then.
Savannah scrubland trees never bend to hear a river, ancient wisdom
taught them music in the soil. Dust of a life cannot kill the crocus.
We cannot remain the seed. If an ash tree falls in your forest, it falls on you.
The conflicted emotions, the shell-shock job of simply loving someone who dies.
To die, the agonizing job of suicides. Death isn’t inside-out water sieves or
sand dunes, the subsurface shock factor, depressed friend gone to
the dark side: a long suicide attempt involving pills and knives and bleach.
All puny sorrows nuanced; the subsequent overshadowed, insignificant.
Puppet dinosaurs, tiny sweating puppet people and sprawl of drunken louts
know when to take this step. All the heavy stuff happens in music.
It is all the breath that knows practising three hours a day at too steep
an angle to learn more about swooping can rob you of your remnants.
The clinical madness of the occult debris affects 80% of beachcombers,
silliness from trying to make the status quo look rational.
I tried to come in with a few more lingos. I tried to come in with a smile.
CAS, April 30, 2014
Portrait of Buffalo Bob Smith and Howdy Doody: Fort Lauderdale, Florida (Photo credit: State Library and Archives of Florida)
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