"A Song at Dawn" (The Follies of Nine)

FROM MY JOURNAL OF 'UNCONSCIOUS POETRY'
A POEM CALLED "A SONG AT DAWN"
(Better known, for some reason, as "The Follies of Nine")

This is a little poem I wrote a few years back when I had first discovered (and fallen madly in love with) Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. It's hardly the genius of 'peeled pencil choke, rub her coke' or 'a carafe is a blind glass' or 'a no sense a no sense a no sense when sense a no sense when sense a no sense" but I loved to say these words out loud as I wrote them. I wrote this really fast, in under five minutes, and I wrote it without thinking about what I was writing and without attempting to assign these words any meaning. They were just the muse-born sounds and concoctions that I came up with on the fly, and strangely as a result this poem always seems to have some deep, obvious meaning to those who read it, and they speak very passionately about it, explaining to me all the clear and evident sub-textual messages I subconsciously encoded therein, but honestly it's the one time I wasn't contriving and crafting and planning my poems. This one is heart-sloughed and, though it's rough (it's photo copied from my notebook, where I originally wrote it) it's still one I find myself feeling strangely proud of.

xoxo