Poem: "Putting Everything in Its Place"
This is the linkback perk poem from the April 21, 2020 Poetry Fishbowl. It was originally hosted by DW user Dialecticdreamer. It came out of the January 7, 2020 Poetry Fishbowl, prompted by DW user Erulisse. It also fills the "Injury" square in my 1-1-20 card for the Less Usual Bingo Patterns fest. This poem belongs to the series Arts and Crafts America.
Putting Everything in Its Place
Collage is the fine art of
using pieces of paper for
putting everything in its place.
After the injury -- and it
doesn't matter whether you're
bleeding in body or soul --
you take it out on the page,
ripping pictures and words
out of the gutter into open air.
You push them around on
the table, trying to make sense
of something that doesn't,
of chaos, of entropy.
You move them until
they begin to show
relationships, parallels,
perhaps a sort of timeline.
It is better than nothing,
so you smear them with glue
and fasten them to the background.
It doesn't mean anything, and yet it does.
While your hands have been busy
with pieces of paper, your brain
has been sorting splinters of memory,
too sharp to touch directly, but
safer when wrapped in metaphor.
What was chaos becomes
comprehensible in images,
becomes a part of your past,
as your personal narrative
begins to heal from the injury.
You won't keep bleeding forever.
Putting Everything in Its Place
Collage is the fine art of
using pieces of paper for
putting everything in its place.
After the injury -- and it
doesn't matter whether you're
bleeding in body or soul --
you take it out on the page,
ripping pictures and words
out of the gutter into open air.
You push them around on
the table, trying to make sense
of something that doesn't,
of chaos, of entropy.
You move them until
they begin to show
relationships, parallels,
perhaps a sort of timeline.
It is better than nothing,
so you smear them with glue
and fasten them to the background.
It doesn't mean anything, and yet it does.
While your hands have been busy
with pieces of paper, your brain
has been sorting splinters of memory,
too sharp to touch directly, but
safer when wrapped in metaphor.
What was chaos becomes
comprehensible in images,
becomes a part of your past,
as your personal narrative
begins to heal from the injury.
You won't keep bleeding forever.