Excerpted from I'M DEAD—Osiris
Scott Michael Potter 1966 (Grand Rapids, MI)
The cadaver horizon is a mountainscape
that spreads from my eyebrows across the world
spanning outward evermore,
for death is everpresent within everpresent life,
and so it is not purely chaotic
to see in my death the death of all
and within that all
a nothingness some would call a void,
but which upon closer inspection reveals but another me dreaming it,
the dream and me…
life within the cadaver is the promise blossom
awaiting blown seedlings to scuttle across the desert
of a once rain forest
under the glacial ice’s memory of millennia,
is a world tree,
a stately scented sycamore…
If plants waited to expand because another glacier were coming,
then all would be desert or ice.
Nonetheless, we are all a carnival dressed for funerals
and upon our pyres we dance
the macabre cadaver dance
regardless of peregrination
chosen as a soul before entrance to the dance,
despite our willingness to unwillingness
to comprehend the choices now,
we yet journey.
Dying each day,
stinking and rotting,
and living each day,
fragrantly renewing,
leaving stenches intermixed with aromas of beauteous sorts.
No poem is a poem as self identified,
or self unidentified,
for in its own recognition or dismissal
does it fail as such or its antithesis.
So, call this nothing, but read it deeply…
And, what of a life pretending to be dead then?
Does death pretend and feign so readily life?
Is a wound but death making light of life?
Wounds heal and reopen,
countless times in a moment,
scarring providing us skin
and tissue
memories to jolt physicality back into psychology,
as if we need to recall and cannot without their assistance.
A wound in unthought fields of chaos reels
over black flowers
dotting ever-steeper valleys and ever-lower hills,
bleeding black flowers with heady stenchy odors
wafting warily nearer and further
from until surrounding all Osiris
emerges
reborn from Isis’ chaotic womb…
the glacier but a memory
of her moonlight fading
in the unconsciousness
of Osiris’ dead memories.
The memory returns,
now a rememory:
Osiris is the sycamore,
is the plants reborn out of a desert or tundrascape,
is the sun born from the moon each day,
is the cadaver horizon,
is the life carnival,
is all of life and death
one arising out of the other…
--by Scott Michael Potter
About this poem
"I'M DEAD—Osiris" was a collaborative poem piece during which writing with the other collaborator I was faced with numerous challenges in attempting to make sense out of chaotic and nonsensical contributions and then to form a greater "enstorying" out of them through interknitting and interweaving various radical concepts and nonsensical phraseologies. In this collaborative piece, by excerpting only my words written, a truer sense of not only the topic being explored, that of Osiris and the Egyptian Underworld, but also the greater esotericism of my words in response to gibberish so that the gibberish could become what might seem like the words of a prophet when by themselves become nothing but unfathomable crazy gibberish, the words of a madman. Take the utterance of "My eyes...a cadaver horizon" left as a "nothing proclamation" like that in a comic book that the superhero might shout in response to being blinded by fire. It means what? Anything? Everything? Nothing at all? I then describe it a bit and wend in a reason for its existence, and tie it into Egyptian Mythology through the "specter" of the unknowable Osiris. Then take a non sequitur like "promise blossom" which is surely stated because of a number of ideas condensed into two words that poetically romanticize one another, and are pregnant poetic words as well. Yet, with nothing other than their utterance comes nothing further than speculation and nothing to tie the reader into the over arching ideas. Again, I reach back within and seek ways to tie these together, and on and on it went. Every collaboration was similar. So after the collaborator refused to endorse the book I assembled based on collaborative works and imagery of artistic works by both, I pulled/excerpted all of my words from every collaborative piece and since they all make sense by themselves and were un-reliant upon the collaborator's words, I put together my own book of powerful imagery and words. more »
Written on February 18, 2022
Submitted by ScottMPotter on April 11, 2022
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:06 min read
- 2 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | AXBCXDDXXEXXXFEBGHXIIFIJXEKGKGXLLMXEXCCNXXXEXXOXOPHXXEGJXXBBAKNMXP P |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 2,286 |
Words | 422 |
Stanzas | 2 |
Stanza Lengths | 66, 1 |
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