The theme for this month's issue of Verse-Virtual, the online poetry journal, is dreams. For me, dreaming is an almost daily puzzle, sometimes with a power that wakes me up. I wake up feeling that something important, or meaningful, or at least real is being dramatized -- however absurdly -- in those nightly transmissions from my subconscious mind that pull at my conscious mind for the first few moments of wakefulness. Then they go up in smoke when I try to "recall" them in the language of the waking mind.
So, a fertile subject for poetry, that literary genre that feeds on emotion and imagination. Dreams and the subconscious mind. Dreams and absurdity. Dreams and the way real problems, anxieties, changes and challenges get encoded into the surreal images of our unconscious mind.
In a poem titled He Dreams He Burns His Book, the only clearly recollected image taken from a dream is the one that appears in the first line: a large (and naked) man exiting a toilet -- a picture that certainly resounds of the unconscious...
My conscious mind -- imagination, fears, self-dialogue -- must take responsibility for the thoughts, words and jumble of ideas that follow in this poem. These ideas and images come from my obsession with a society, or civilization, drifting toward disaster -- this is not a dream I would like to understand as a prophecy.
Here's the first stanza of that poem, one of three of mine that appear in the June issue.
He Dreams He Burns His Book
A very large man emerges from the toilet
It's not his fault, we say
We all must give something up.
Not my chocolate, I protest,
huddling in the corner, the blanket pulled over my head
Thus I appear to strangers as a slumped mountain
covered with coarse, brown grass, begging
for somebody to take me down
As for the others
They survive on ants and mud-covered
acorns, unearthed by leased squirrels
Times were hard too, when I was a child,
Gramps says
You think this is bad?
We ate the toes of plague victims
Our pens skipped
And we coated our fingers in icicles
to have something to drink
...
You can find the rest of this poem, my other two, and poems by 28 other poets in the June issue of Verse-Virtual.
Here's the link:
https://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2019-june.htmlA very large man emerges from the toilet
It's not his fault, we say
We all must give something up.
Not my chocolate, I protest,
huddling in the corner, the blanket pulled over my head
Thus I appear to strangers as a slumped mountain
covered with coarse, brown grass, begging
for somebody to take me down
As for the others
They survive on ants and mud-covered
acorns, unearthed by leased squirrels
Times were hard too, when I was a child,
Gramps says
You think this is bad?
We ate the toes of plague victims
Our pens skipped
And we coated our fingers in icicles
to have something to drink
...
You can find the rest of this poem, my other two, and poems by 28 other poets in the June issue of Verse-Virtual.
Here's the link:
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