Ordinary Person

1

The old descriptions are 

no longer with us  

with their odes to  

silver-brown cobbled paths  

like rows of distorted  

chiclets stained with nicotine.  

We’ve spoken of dusk so many times 

that the muses yawn  

when the crickets chirp 

as swatches of gossamer darkness 

shove the rosy blooms.  

2

In my longing to make it new, 

I read the Surevian troubadours:  

The bards who chanted  

while the drums beat unsteadily,  

I borrowed from the Dacunian  

alphabet which flows diagonally  

across the page, pictographs  

that are direct expressions of  

thought, a language that conveys  

emotion perfectly, unlike the  

ones we write in. I did courses  

on the mating of Platypi — 

The rhythms and motions,  

giving me ideas to curve my lines 

both literally and figuratively.  

I read the philosophy of Chon,  

a Nuruman prophet who  

wrote in neologisms, claiming 

the universe was chaotic and  

not ordered.  

3

Why must my lines have structure? 

I must re-shape and restructure  

4

After all everything is madness/ like a winged whale eating flies on a purple plain/ the aircraft with fifty thousand eyes and wheels, spinning like a carousel/ the Ferris wheel shaped like a square, swinging like a pendulum/ the weed that helps you time-travel and then become a potato/ the suppository that’s inhaled/  

5

But I’ve realised that even madness 

has structure, connecting tradition  

to the new. I want to leave it at that 

but other poets have already done that,  

bringing back stoic poetry while 

ridiculing romanticism,  

portraying the artist in confined  

spaces while alluding to order 

and sequences. 

6

These irregular structures don’t work 

they are only not so well-done pork… 

Post-madness-super-madness-supra-madness@mad.mad.madmadmad… aiee…aiyoo… the-that-(outside)aline#%p^jadgscjsegc.khe.lc/ 

7

Perhaps I should give up on words,  

purge the first person  

narrative because it’s too 

personal, get rid of the second 

person narrative because it sounds 

like an attack, erase the third person  

narrative because it’s mere storytelling, 

destroy the collective ‘we’ because  

it’s too inclusive, annihilate the ‘they’ 

because it’s exclusive. 

8

3+3=9 

There, I’ve made it new.  

Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash