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The Breakfast Light (after the female characters in David Lynch's films)

Blink, Alice Wakefield, Blink

It's time for you to wake up.

These guns and LSA bullets
your coffin a limbic coma
in this dying star's belly.
Your vegetable heads growing in Panasonic fields,
the planispheres and queasy footlights.
These meadows and dead star jumpropes.
I'll fingerfeed you morphine dough,
The hydrotherapy ministries will marry us
and carnival ministers will stare
in the bulb's kissy, broken rouge
exposee

Renee. Turn Away, Renee
The casting call is on hold.
The doe eyed strings in XXX minor moist almond
a symphony, a blue nail file,
stopwatch yellow eyes.
Click over
"We've built your cement brassiere."

Wake up, Diane.
It's time to wake up, Diane
or others others in the room
will decide. Your orphaned sunshine bees
have run and stung in the Los Angeles
night, purple gloved paranoiacs, cloud swabbed flowers interred

under soft black stars

and Jitterbug Selwyn's heroin teeth for cheap bullets.
Sandy:
Mystery restores innocence.
The robin's blue light,
the midnight chapels of blue noir.

Wear your first dress forever with nighttime musk,

and the knocks at your toy village door
you will still us with your notice,
Midnight's dormant room key.
It sticks

Review Request (Intensity): 
I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing stage: 

Comments

This is a poem based on the work of David Lynch and the female names are based off his female characters.

JTA

author comment

I do not understand about David Lynch much but I enjoyed the quick and short poem

I read this poem 3 x The third was a charm You know that I'm extremely fond of your linguistic agility Having said that an immunity to it has set in from the abstruse worked over disjuncture of your product I get symbolism and metaphor I get surreal but after serious consideration of your influence over me as a writer and what ideas influence you it emerged that treading the rash in the name of surrealism as license to abstract maybe in the final analysis unsound

I've been a yogi for 50 yrs familiar with the body electric, altered stats, occult ritual work that shakes the very foundational baseline of human existence ,so maybe I know something about anti matter reality more than most, but I also live in this concrete jungle of stress, mortality and relationships etc
To me while you are capable of so much I feel like you only write for the right side of the brain In other words you leave half of yourself out and subsequently half of the reader creating a hindrance

Through my own struggle to write it is not lost on me that the concrete elements in the Images of a disambiguous narrative demands strategic grounded language; perhaps too prosaic for your taste.
Conversely while surrealism permits a creative elasticity yielding unexpected striking imagery, as your poem does so beautifully, for me your write has a perplexity though, an excessive weight to the eye and ear. While ample in painterly charm its like deciphering an arcane hieroglyphic and even amplified in this case by the surreal obscurity and meta babble of Twin Peaks and or Blue Velvet of which I myself was a fan
I appreciate that we both respectively occupy at least mentally various cultural margins and I am not unsympathetic to your cause If you write exclusively for yourself my comments may remain irrelevant to you but if you write to connect with even a few others beyond cacophonies of image and disjunctured asymmetrical narratives it is my opinion that your work needs to add a kind of greater grounding in the viscera of the human heart ie literal emotional content produced through the linear and then you will have killed both birds successfully; and both sides of the brain will be conquered:
Best Z

"Surreal obscurity" and "meta babble" I have never seen in Lynch. He's a painter who sees things uncomfortably well. I think similarly with generational differences. Don't think he's God.

European poets and writers have been writing this way forever, and American ones too.

Thank you for reading.

JTA

author comment

Understood: In my view the majority of writers deal with the narrative head-on The mystification of reality is what makes surrealism in the broad sense obscure because it speaks to the surrealist methodology—the use of techniques, such as automatic writing, self-induced hallucinations, and word games like the exquisite corpse to make manifest repressed mental activities. What's not obscure about that in the context of most literature?..... which is in the main is constructed linear plot and character oriented.

You're talking about orthodox by the rote stuff--still great, but we have new forms which can use the marvelous as the centerpiece and explore other mediums which intensifies it. Surrealism and "the weird" can depart at any moment from characters and plots and often do.

Roussel, Carrington, Gracq, Lautreamont.....

Plus, you're talking about movies interacting with poetry. That's a whole different deal.

JTA

author comment

Yes I feed off those hybrids myself and hopefully in my own way participate through my own writing
Its a matter of what works ie what is the link between what is thought of as coherent and identifiable and what is stream of consciousness, chaos, symbol or a kind of meta speak that drives language into obscurity I cant totally write only for others I have been accused of being unintelligible and may even delight in it for ursonations sake or some idiosyncrasy But in the end I want to reach out and touch others and cant let the politics of aesthetic identity, dogmas, literary tribalism typical of some schools of thought own me There may be no easy answer as all of art history will attest There's plenty thats great and good about what you do without my 2 cents thrown in On the other hand I was sincere in my initial response to this poem

I always feel if a review of work doesnt touch the nerve or I don't respect the source; its irrelevant.
My initial review of your poem was as far as I can tell intellectually honest f it helps you I'm glad if not so be it

Best Z

this rolls right off the tongue and excites my sometimes surrealist brain. I haven't watched a lot of David Lynch, so a lot is lost on me. but I enjoyed the marriage of psychedelia with somewhat religious imagery.

comment no thanks for comments in general I and thank you greg. Love using religious material in my poetry.

JTA

author comment
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