Experimental

It doesn’t look like a finger it looks like a feather of broken glass

Ruts and rivets track oblivious abuse.

Like bitter scars of life on the face of a broken soul

Jagged murmurs tumult and soothe, confusing, yet communication some.thing

some.thing. some.one. some.time. some. so. me. me?

no.

I don’t understand, this is all so unexpected.

I’m left standing in concrete boots – metaphorically speaking –

but actually drowning as I sink to the bottom and become lodged in silt, muck and the discharges of a disposable society

nothing more. to do than dwell. the persistence, sweet tormenting persistence; shallowly-lived richly-evoked glimpses through closing windows onto memories

From the start I declared myself guilty

Wild storms and torrid winds drive the path of my declaration

and, and… all the while, the words echo in my mind, for each man kills the thing he loves,

and each love kills the man it spawns.

half-formed words drown in my saliva, and I don’t know what to say, and I stand here shaking

and all i need you to do is reach out, take my hand and hold me

and all i need you to do is reach out, take my hand and hold me – stalemate.

There is no winning, just resigned defeat; legality aside.

_____________________

And yet, my dejected soul may continue to function, regardless of your disingenuous injunction

that shouts and curses in typographic silence; interrupting any attempts to connect with humanity – if any remains, that is.

and who can know? Perhaps only the silence itself; enigmatic, hushed and concealed,

suspended like  s

t

a

l

a

c

t

i

t

e

s,

drip

ping whispers in cloak and dagger tongue

lashing and biting the prey like an unseen cancer turning on its own

What can I say? This is the fibre of our being.

This is the word.

Trudy Bell, Alison Gibbons, David Roots

About the Texts

“Chainpoems” were a popular literary form during the literary surrealist movement. It involved single lines being written by different people. This practice was often manifested through the folding of paper in order to conceal the existing text from view before it was passed to the next poet. Often associated with forms of automatic writing, the poetic glory of the ‘artistic’ individual was usurped by collective poetic invention. While the resulting poetic works were often banal, the process of writing chainpoems created tensions between poetic voices.

The present chainpoems were created through email correspondence, instilling them with a technologically mediated birth. Writers were given access to the line preceding the space of their own creativity. All other text was blacked out from view. The title of chainpoem 1 was inspired by a poem by Hugh Sykes Davies of the London Surrealist Group, while the second title emerged through the writing process. While the disparate content and style of each writer creates a polygamy of form and voice, of interest is the anticipated ‘search’ and ‘interpretation’ of an overarching meaning by the future reader.