NaPoWriMo 2021 Day 3: The Surrealist's Flipbook

Prompt: Today, I’d like to challenge you to make a “Personal Universal Deck,” and then to write a poem using it. The idea of the “Personal Universal Deck” originated with the poet and playwright Michael McClure, who gave the project of creating such decks to his students in a 1976 lecture at Naropa University. Basically, you will need 50 index cards or small pieces of paper, and on them, you will write 100 words (one on the front and one on the back of each card/paper) using the rules found here.

Once you have your deck put together, shuffle it a few times. Now select a card or two, and use them as the basis for a new poem.

Today being a full day of teaching, plus weather-induced migraine, plus last-minute unexpected editing work, my brain wasn't in a space to go full-list like the rules, so I did a very simplified version of the Poetic List, and picked words at random in the shower.

Words: Orchid, knives, pearls, bones. (I know. They read like a murderer's list.)

The results...are a bit bizarre, but I think that's about as best as I can manage on a day like today. It felt a bit like flipping through one of the flipbooks I used to have as a child to make the pictures move, so that's what it ended up getting titled as.

DAY 3: THE SURREALIST'S FLIPBOOK

Did you find me in the pages of the old account ledgers
In the corner, each entry listing a name. A part. A value.
Two myopic eyeballs, a pair of hands (short and stubby)
An assortment of innards, a brain of unknown composition
Sandwiched between a dried fern leaf and a recipe
For no-knead bread bookmarking Page 15.
 
No need for overly-complex analysis, dear Watson.
I am a map, a skin, a chameleon skin.
 
Lan Shijie, assassin-eyed wuxia Orchid Girl, serenaded
Not with flowers but a bouquet of knives
And a pure black orchid nestled within, its
Nymph-blush-speckled white centre housing
A protruding gold-black flecked coy tongue
Mouth opening to swallow me wholesale
Wholeskin
Down down
Down
 
The trap opens, a body drops
And I am the Hanged Man again
Mouth a cavernous fly-specked hunger
Protruding black-flecked tongue a jester’s joke
A last word, a by-word choked back into the throat
Down down
Down
 
Cut down
Into a box, a jack-in-the-box
Of skeletal words and skeleton bones
Dressed in Ophelia’s lace, lying low, low, below
Where jack-in-boxes-with-secrets go
Dropped into the deepdown
Down down
Down
 
Full fathom five where thy father lies
With fish-hooked mouth and hollow eyes
Or are they pearls. The pearls that were his eyes.
La la la la lies, all lies, the pretty words
Defleshed from promises decayed.
 
You hung a chimera around my neck
To guard me. Pearls, you said. A string of pearls.
In the night the dead men sussurate
In fractured letters, fragmented words:
We see you. We see all. Set us free from our prison
This necklace of pearls
This necklace of eyes.