Disappearing Acts

FROM THE BOOK: "Day After Tomorrow" The police artist is drawing my face In charcoal, line by line, in grim brimstone For a stranger, one who attended the ill- Attended impromptu poetry reading Under a chilly streetlight flickering Where we used the forbidden words With facile ease as in the old days: She is as in a field a silken tent. Genders, pronouns, she, he and all that. The stranger hadn't seen much,...
More Description

FROM THE BOOK:

"Day After Tomorrow"

The police artist is drawing my face
In charcoal, line by line, in grim brimstone
For a stranger, one who attended the ill-
Attended impromptu poetry reading
Under a chilly streetlight flickering
Where we used the forbidden words
With facile ease as in the old days:
She is as in a field a silken tent.
Genders, pronouns, she, he and all that.
The stranger hadn't seen much, though,
Just a zee zaying zomething, a blur
Like a face wearing a beard or sprouting one,
Two feet, or maybe one was fake, the stranger
Hesitated to say: other-abled, some color
Or other. Yes, yes, I think zee was a shade.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION:

Dark Poet, your pen scratches at the heart of life.~~Antonin Artaud

Nonsense is often the most sensible kind of sense. [...]Nonsense reveals all of us-our self, our situation-in a single pop of recognition as we are trampolined from our usual assurances and then forced to regain our footing, to regain our meaning, on the fly. Like an old-fashioned photographer's flash powder, we are exposed to an extreme of light, with no visible space left for secrets or lies. This is part of the odd exhilaration of nonsense. And, don't get me wrong, nonsense isn't some sly encyclopedia where all hidden truths are stored and we must simply discover the index-oh, no. Rather, the puzzles that nonsense reveal are genuinely unsolvable. Gregor Samsa will never come back from being a cockroach; his transformation in the story "Metamorphosis" has simply revealed the pickle he was already in, but didn't know that he was in.

What nonsense reveals, at its best, are genuine mysteries.