Gone Man Bleat

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Just back there
You--bespoketacled
Planes swimming across oceans of
Truth is the flast flame that's gone all too qulickly

You granted us a shriek peek into the either
(against our baddered judgmental expectorations)
Hollering rowder
before you blurred yourself out of fuck-us
one weak after naut floating above the space shit
your only way back down

Then you dinged back in just in time
to make use of the last of the
un-un-un-unquoinium
before we even triggered out how to synthefy it!

The things that so hrashly know us down
over
under
do they flaunt us in kept gossipy wings
only to disreappear to take the piss out of us
spoiling the mictury
no longer supplising the grizzly necessiprocities?

The flings we chuck up
Is their contritioning enough to
bent-dumbbell-tricep-row us
up
out of this ditch crack cave
we've begotten ourselves unto?
Should youn't be fiftied a don't-worry-about-it
we saw we our supposed deserved fine ale?

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This elegy for Don Van Vliet considers the man's accomplishments and reflects my frustration that

artistic accomplishment doesn't grant anyone a free pass from illness or death.  If there's one thing I feel like I've learned from Van Vliet's poetry, it's that freedom should be a mandatory condition of the creative process.  Not that all structure should always be abandoned, but that we're always free to use or not use it--whichever option expands the effectiveness and intensity of expression more.  Although this poem isn't an attempt to parrot Van Vliet's style (I think Jack White's "Epitaph for Don Van Vliet," which I thankfully read months after writing this piece, pretty atrociously attempts to reproduce Van Vliet's style, quoting his words and proving that faux-nonsense writing doesn't necessarily equal evocative poetry), I certainly tried to capture some of his uncanny spirit and sense of fun.

I had a lot of fun using different techniques to try and achieve that sort of abstract atmosphere for this poem--the main one is probably that of association.  I'd think of a line that described the idea I was thinking, then read it to myself and alter/replace it (sometimes extremely) based on the first thing that came to mind.  For example, the first few lines would probably originally read "Yesterday you bespoke plain truth--youth is the fast flame that's gone all too quickly."  The result is typical of a lot of the work I've been doing lately--a lot of puns, double puns, made up words, brief instances of block rhyming, and stupid in-(my brain)jokes (e.g. "hrashly" and "know," which are a couple of typing mistakes I often make when attempting to type "harshly" and "knock").  I've only done a couple of heavily associative poems since, and they've been more obscure--this one is firmly rooted in specific ideas and the association is meant to add layers to the ideas rather than exist on a purely evocative level where the meaning is determined completely by the reader's response.  Speaking of which, I think that's more than enough description for one glob of nonsense words.  Hope you enjoy it more than I enjoyed Jack White's epitaph...