Monday, May 4, 2020

Unconsidered Chaos


                                                                                                      

       

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Unconsidered Chaos
.
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for John-Frederick Williams
.
Unconsidered chaos likes to make a bliss
of mess, exposing all its unsuspected charm.
Although it’s true in my first take on this,
the claim repelled, a cause more for alarm
.
than praise, a trope equivalently visual for fart –
squalid and contemptuous – bad Dada.
At first I labored to elaborate against its “art” –
until a fire rose in me, an uprising, an intifada
.
countering the truer source of my disgust,
the festering idea that polished surfaces,
eradications of the very thought of dust,
amount to shoring up the stifling  purposes
.
against which my most precious vision warred;
the seeming random ease of Sargent’s paint
had led me long past it to know what I adored:
outlying provinces of funk and sweat that taint
.
the soul to give it interest. But what a bore
when I implore my kitchen to appeal esthetically.
I need to throw the trash out, sweep the floor.
Then I can lavishly hold forth I live heretically.
.
One fights to keep an iridescent vision of oneself
that will entice, sequestered safe in Shadowland,
retrievable on cue, to make believable the fiction
that the shelf one lives upon is paradise.
.
.
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1 comment:

Bernard Hamel said...

Wonderfully angled at substance under chaos coloring the various hues to assure the vibrancy of our shelf life never expires. I'm reminded of Bob Dylan's line, "I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me." Another appropriate one is, "He not busy being born is busy dying." - it's that stimulus that lifts us to be ordained to minister life as spirits who have been sequestered by the explicitly written orders of confinement announced by the no-sayers, fear being their only defense, but an offense to all creative weaponry - so that "polished surfaces" are ripped floorboards and "dust" the shedding of stars are "outlying provinces of funk and sweat that taint the soul to give it interest." - sheer absorbance exquisitely swabbed, Guy.

Chefs and carpenters can only work in cluttered kitchens using all materials and ingredients at their disposal to inspire their designs - in other words: something is finally happening! Paradise lost in the land of shadows (...blowin' in the wind).