surreal poetry
Surrealist poetry embodies the essence of poetry itself, drawing upon shocking imagery and lyrical incongruities to comment on the inner-workings of the mind.
Purgatory
Wandering through the deserts of purgatory collecting bottles as the sun burns through my shoulders, brittling my bones. Squinting at the horizon line, there is nothing here but endless dunes of burnt ochre sands and half buried glass. Metallic salts shimmering in the sunlight. I inspect each jagged shard carefully in my palms, displaying them as if they were a prize from some turn of the century fairground. Bristol blue bits of old dinnerware from my grandmother’s kitchen. Bottles with half torn off labels; Boodles, Basil Hayden’s. Robbing the graves of bourbons and gins, filling my pockets with their empty bodies. Mirrored glass reflecting off the sun in all directions, it’s amazing I can see anything at all. The silence has become a tidal wave of static ringing in my ears. The sun tears at my lips, turning strands of hair to straws of hay and there isn’t a breeze, just textured layers of blinding light and radiating heat. I am not entirely sure if I am breathing at all, lingering here for what feels like decades. By now, the agony of life has turned to a dull ache in my chest. Frothy tides reach out and scratch at my legs, the salt stinging my sunburnt shins. Seaweed and clamshells drifting toward me in the waves. Inhaling the sudden ocean in front of me, the color of the Aegean sea but heavy with the brine of the Atlantic. When I exhale, layers of flesh strip away as easily as pages of a book with a broken spine, my ribs spread apart and I start to untie like a pair of shoelaces. Collapsing into the sand, metal plates and screws protrude out from the dying skin and talus bone of my right ankle. I watch my blood twist and turn away from me, staining the water red. I thought I might be alive, only for a second, but it occurs to me that I can’t feel any of this. All of my bottles and bits of broken carnival glass, they bury themselves in the undertow, and I watch myself disintegrate into the sea. Decomposing femurs and tibias, knees knocking in the water, repetition in the current. The knocking gets louder. The riptide, the great grim reaper of this place, moving with ease somewhere around five miles an hour pulling me further from the shoreline, the knocking gets louder and louder still.
By Erica Liane8 years ago in Poets
Just Dreaming
They came from the sky as in my bed I lay awaken by lights and sounds. My eyes quick to open but what I see I'm uncertain. Strange creatures all around me. They not man or beast, either way I demanded to be released. When I spoke fear grew upon their face as in a phase of stroke. I was at that time provoked because the situation was unclear. Have I now been abducted? Why is everything so candid? A female creature says to me soon you'll be free. As the lights grew brighter I could no longer see my abductor. Then a loud sound broke over it all as from the sky I began to fall. Once again I awaken slightly shaken and confused. But to my amuse the alarm clock was ringing and all this time I was just dreaming.
By ElRey Niffen8 years ago in Poets
