Method & Madness E-Book

E. Martin Pedersen

• Herausgeber: Odyssey Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 44

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Method & Madness takes its title from Hamlet, its inspiration from Dr. Freud, and its material from the intersection of the two impulses: production and destruction. If one is too mad, the poetry will never get written or will be gibberish; if one is too sane, there will be no crazy play of words and ideas, no transcendence, no subversion. I walk the fine line. These poems go everywhere: exaltation, depression, expatriation, frustration, expiration.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

EGO

Etiolate Blues

Coming Out of the Coma

Avoiding Mirrors

Punctuation

Jumping In and Out of the Mirror

Seated After Lunch

Am I Breathing Gas?

Watching Through a Hole in the Fence

White Lightning

Waiting for What in the Bank

ID

Going to the Edge of the Land

One Sweltering Day on the Caronte

La Soluzione del Fiammifero [The Match Solution]

Palmyra Remembered

Bumming a Third-Class Train

King Hussein and the Blind Man

Moving Still

Miss America

SUPEREGO

Remission of Cancer

I Kissed You

Charlene’s Golf Ball Story

A Century of Accumulation

Me and the Beast

Our War is Over

Colonoscopy

In Court

Being Chased

I am the Urge to Sign my Name

MELANCHOLIA

Good Friend on a Beach

Death of a Sentient Being

Asbestos Factory

Heirlooms

I Was Dead

We Will All Become Vegetarians

Call For Prayer

I Repeat Repeat

On Review

PHANTASY

The Koi Are Not Indifferent

Waiting for the Bus

Look the Other Way

Do Food

Driving My Way

Weakness

The Gospel According to Bob

The Sun Knows I’m a Fool

Photos of Food

The Persuaders

The Name of God

Back to Earth

Seven Days a Week

Maze of Thorns

The House of Experimentation

Credits

About the Author

Landmarks

Cover

Copyright © Martin Pedersen

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Published by Ensorcellia,

an imprint of Odyssey Books, in 2024

www.odysseybooks.com.au

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

from the National Library of Australia

ISBN: 978-1922311580 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1922311597 (ebook)

Cover image: Soul Nebula, NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.

— attributed to Sigmund Freud

EGO

Etiolate Blues

That man sitting in my chair near the window

Reading the same page of Naked Lunch over and over

Wondering, if anything, how much longer his socks will last

How many more pairs of socks he will need

Turns to look out at nothing, although the sky is right there

What is he doing sitting in my chair? Spying?

On a brilliant Sunday morning at 11 am

After making tea and drinking it, which he can’t remember

Social Learning theorists say that self-pity is a common method for gaining attention

So that must be the African violet’s game

That feeble houseplant his mother gave him

That never got enough light, never got enough

It won’t thrive, neither will it die in San Francisco

Living alone is no surprise but a point of shy pride

Last April they gave a pride parade and everyone showed

Except the sitter and the window cat who jumps into his lap

Not for love, just the warmth of a human body

And what little light streams in on them from above.

Coming Out of the Coma

It’s a week or ten or a month or ten years

My God. Come quick! It’s a miracle, he returns.

Hi everybody, what time is it? Take me home. Drive.

New decade, new pres, let’s see, Rowan and Martin still on?

The viva la raza mural on the side of the movie theater’s still there

though flaking badly.

Sno-White Drive-In became a Chicken Shack.

The Mall, still its little planet — Starship Enterprise — looks smaller now, seedy

With the Forgiveness Church across the street — they never move churches

big old trees in front gone.

University still houses the library

Ruben’s librarian with the braid still at the front desk?

Man, I’d like to check her out,

like I checked out this book on parallel universes.

Have you seen my parents lately?

Is my brother still mad at me

over that silly misunderstanding with his wife?

That retarded guy in middle school who knew everything about Italian racing bikes.

I bet my erector-set nephew’s not a kid anymore,

baseball player maybe.

Is my dog, Lucy, okay?

I don’t see anyone I know here.

Am I slipping, slipping back in?

Another ticket to ride, back

Back to the other side of the worm hole,

In and out of the coma with a passport and

Luggage coming out

In, out.

Avoiding Mirrors

My daydreams and nightmares have the same plot

with different protagonists or the same

people from my past life passed over on the other shore

people (see above for their real names) showing up on my doorstep

now that I finally have a doorstep

the horror and the joyous pathos

Wither they show up or not they do

in the playhouse up here

torment me as a hint

as to after many, many years