here is a poem

Sep 24, 2008 19:22

I've recently become aware of this website, which delivers one-line excerpts of poetry reviews as they are published. I decided a week or two ago to subscribe to this site's feed and, when the inclination struck, to use the excerpted lines as fodder for prose poetry. Today is the first time that has happened. Hopefully there will be more of these, but, you know, the muse is pretty fickle.

--

The voice is perhaps the most lasting incarnation of any existence. The body sings, not the mind or “heart;” the voice scrapes up from the lungs and carries throat-shape out into the air. The body is robbed by metaphor, bereft of substance whenever somebody “loses her head” or “breaks her heart” or “finds her feet.” Language needs more blood and gore; I demand that my transports of ecstasy end in grisly decapitation, that my breast be pierced by arrows when I grieve. My steadiness must always be the result of clumsy surgery, Frankenstein anklets attaching me to my sensible, incremental goals. As I plummet to my death I will sing at the resonant frequency of my internal organs, my pancreas and liver joining forces with my diaphragm and larynx to deliver a vibrating column of air that will reach your ears a few microseconds after all that contributed to its manufacture has scattered on the sidewalk. With any luck, there will be an echo.

poetry, my writing

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