Poem: Schrodinger’s Alarm Clock
Imagine such provoked desire
For infinite consciousness
That waking and sleeping
Elapsed in to one,
Dual faced like far-seeing Janus,
Eye sight crashing upon the future and the past.
Dream within a dream, completely absent,
Both dissolved and completely whole,
A raging lion roused indefinitely,
Eternally poised in waking sleep,
The fiery sun both coagulated and devoured.
The ending is the beginning.
Awake.
On January first, I rediscovered this short poem I recently wrote that features Janus, god of doorways, transitions, endings, and beginnings. Even though the occasion fit, it was placed with some mild trepidation since the last word of the poem “Awake” should be viewed with an “A” much larger and more ornate than the “A” I can supply upon this page. I suppose that is exactly the type of issues poets have, especially if they find themselves in some type of perplexing scenario where they are writers yet have not known themselves to be so, due to the stirring anxiety their own words arouse within, all while providing poems in a technologically advanced medium. It is my aspiration that such strangeness can move the reader or perhaps entertain since I know of no other purpose that such a state can serve.
In an ideal world, “Shrodinger’s Alarm Clock” would be the first page of a book of poems. The gaze of the reader upon the page would end the world that came before the experience of the poem and begin the world of both gaze and poem together as one. The poem, specifically within an imagined book, would be a poem that exists and does not exist at the same time. As the first poem, it would inhabit a heralding function and thus would not be the same as the other poems in the work since it would stand as a semiotic doorway into the larger poetic vision.
I am currently working on a series of poems, some old and some new. As can be imagined by my commentary above, it’s proving to be an interesting process. I can only relate it to what Ann Rice, in a long lost interview, described as her writing process, except not as bad. Ann Rice related tears, shrieks, frustrated appetite, and extreme insomnia as her companions while writing her vampire series. I am not crying nor shrieking. I am eating well and, for the most part, going to bed relatively early but displaying my work….Well, it’s an effort of faith — faith that the Muse who touches my mind and my heart indeed wishes for me to speak. It is some what uncomfortable for now partly because I have this notion that my poetry make other people uncomfortable.
Whatever, poetry isn’t supposed to be safe.
What to make of this? Who knows.
