Posession
Ted J Mallory 1970 (Phoenix, AZ)
I promise that tomorrow I will rejoin society
tomorrow I will teach
and enter grades
and discuss pedagogy, lessons and curricula
I promise that tomorrow I will lecture about the judicial branch
give instructions about content theme and genre
tomorrow I will coach and advise
about code and syntax and hypertext markup language
But today I am a painter
today I am a poet
today I am a theologian
a philosopher, a maladjusted malcontent
Today I am possessed by Jackson Pollack., Willem de Kooning, Claude Monet,
Arshile Gorky
and maybe Achille-Claude Debussy too.
No drugs,
no alcohol,
maybe too much coffee
maybe the holy spirit
or some spirit-animal
maybe just automatism
Or maybe, I’ve been possesed by the spirits of
Marcel Duchamp,
Wassily Kandinsky,
and Hugo Ball
all having a ball with my basal ganglia
What rhymes with ganglia?
Galling gangly genitalia?
Damn. That was a lot of alliteration without actual profane explication!
Perhaps I am ready to return to convention, conformity and community already.
But the smell of turpentine
and the layers of oil, acrylic and gouache
that I extricated today
from my palette
like a paleontologist with a trowel
are so intoxicating.
Perhaps a few more minutes
in this other world
the one where I enjoy some espresso
with Vincent and Theo
and Frida and Diego
I promise, I’ll be me again
tomorrow.
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Submitted by ted_m on April 14, 2021
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:07 min read
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Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABXC XCXX XDEX FAX XXADXX XXGXC C C EA XBFDXG XXHHG XH |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,303 |
Words | 225 |
Stanzas | 12 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 3, 6, 5, 1, 1, 2, 6, 5, 2 |
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"Posession" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 14 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/97666/posession>.
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