Several years ago in a poetry class I took in college we were asked to attempt to write a postmodern poem. The idea with postmodern poetry is nothing should really have anything to do with anything else... it should be random, disjointed and dreamlike, sometimes disturbingly so. This applies not only to subject matter but to line length and sentence structure as well. The idea is to make a statement by not making a statement. That kind of thing.
This is what I came up with back then:
Twenty-hour Robotics
by Grace Dow
A cat crawls into the sewer. Poison ivy.
Skateboard to the edge of the globe.
Goldfish in a puddle, F-Critical,
is the distribution if you find
the z-score and the t-star.
Blood mint. Rejectful metronome.
Funny goes. Winks an angel to the tree.
Grave stones reeling to the underbelly. Pigeons.
Dream-jump over a brick wall onto needles or
speak Greek to the crazies. What the heck?
The blink's the root, but no white flashes
crease space with canonical care.
Serrated gun. And then another sings,
refusing antihistamines. Bug in the network server.
If you travel
by car or backwash you rework the phantom.
Greenly lives the octopus, preening,
but baby mobiles require optimistic, do-it-yourself.
So the plum said to the graying weasel,
Was one negative?
Autocorrelate the pattern. That cuticle reeks.
He would want to look. Heteroskedasticy.
Once the percent excluded the word.
There isn't a pattern.
Eat now. She's a decent girl. Thumb
the web between worms.
Recently I came across that poem again while moving some files between computers. Some of the images stuck in my mind, so much so that later that evening I wrote this, my Good Madness for Day 47:
It started that morning, with the cat crawling out of the sewer.
It was a drainage grate along the curb. I saw clumps of matted fur and flash of claws and teeth and crazy eyes. The thing wriggled and dragged itself up onto the street. It was caked in filth and what looked like blood and its tail seemed barely attached to its body. It trailed behind like a scrap of crimson-stained cloth held on by the thinnest of threads.
Twenty minutes later I was outside the bakery where I usually get my morning coffee on the way to class. I looked down at the sidewalk, in a low dip near the building where a puddle had formed. There was a goldfish in the puddle, swimming around as happily as could be, oblivious to the fact that it was a goldfish swimming in a freaking puddle which pretty much equals you are going to die very soon in the grand equation of things.
These were signs. Signs that something terrible was on its way. The apocalypse. The end of civilization as we know it. Or at the very least, the end of my life. But I didn’t notice, or I didn’t connect the dots, as many insanely weird dots as there were.
Like walking past the music studio where students come for lessons on how to play various musical instruments. There was a metronome clacking back and forth in the window as a girl played her flute along to the beat. But as I walked past, the clacking noise stopped. I looked up. The metronome was swinging, but only insomuch as it seemed to be trying to bowl itself over, to fly through the window at me. Jerking from its center in only the one direction, like it had a magnet in its tip.
Like the way the trees seemed to wait until I’d walked past them to rustle and whisper and shake in the breeze.
Paranoid, yes. But I’ve earned the right to be.
There was an angel in my dream last night, and it wasn’t the kind of angel with pretty feathered wings and a golden halo. No cupids, and no Christmas tree toppers either. It was human-like in general form, but it was alien and strange. It was a voice-of-God kind of angel, the scary kind, the kind you can’t really ever quite look at straight on. Except it looked. That was the dream. It was approaching, and I kept saying in my dream, “No, it isn’t right. I shouldn’t be seeing you like this,” and yet it kept coming anyway. And it floated right up to me (it had feet and yet it never walked) until its face was mere inches from my own and I looked up and it looked at me.
It looked at me.
THOSE. EYES.
I cannot impart to you the dread in those eyes. It knew where I was and it could kill me in an instant. It was not my friend, and I was not worthy, and yet I saw those eyes.
It was going to speak, and I prepared myself for the trumpet blast, but something tickled on the back of my neck, and that was enough to jerk me into wakefulness, and the angel, so vivid in my dream, was banished from the reality of my room in the darkness.
So just imagine my surprise… okay, don’t imagine. Laugh at me. Laugh at me for being surprised, when all manner of signs come before me: the cat clawing its way up from the sewer, the fish swimming in its tragic and temporary home, the metronome, that insistent, obsessive metronome.
When I reached the main outdoor plaza between the dining hall and the building where my first class met, I saw it. Looking out across the field of students playing ultimate Frisbee or lounging in the shade of trees and pretending to do homework, I saw a figure. Standing rigid, far too rigid to be a college student. Completely still, in fact. Unmoving.
I looked up and saw those eyes.
THOSE. EYES.
It was the angel from my dream, and yet terror that dark and blinding can’t be a thing of heaven.
It was yards away from me. I made a slight motion as if to turn around. No one from that distance should have been able to even see me move. Yet that nearly-human head slid from side to side in a warning.
And suddenly the metronome in my mind swung the other way, and it was as if it was pulling me closer.
We claw ourselves up, or we delude ourselves into thinking we have some kind of promise of forever, but our lives are already dictated for us. We may play freestyle, but it’s always to a beat.
My heart skipped a beat.
I should have known. I should have known.
And suddenly it’s there, inches away from me. And I raised my face and looked into those eyes.
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