*

I who find my verbs in the smoldering-over, who lose them in the midst of.

Unlock our tongue. Beat together two unsuspecting words, otherwise thumbcuffed by a poem.

*

“Caliban is hospitable to any writing which, when chewed, makes him hear music in the air.”

*

Music in the air. “As a beginning, Breton proposes that, instead of accepting the idea of the necessary separation of man’s [sic] inner and external reality, desires and the world, or dreams and hard facts, we consider the possibility of effecting a unity. One of the key definitions of Surrealism in the Manifesto revolves around this: ‘I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, into a kind of absolute reality, a Surreality, if one may so speak.' . . . It is the aim of the Surrealist esthetic to cultivate a technique for locating and situating this ‘point of mind,’ and to place it in an active relationship with an otherwise psychically destructive reality” (Michael Benedict, The Poetry of Surrealism).

*

Music in the air: Desnos:

I’m calling loves and lovers
I’m calling the living and the dead
I’m calling the gravediggers I’m calling the murderers
I’m calling the executioners I’m calling the pilots the masons the architects
the murderers
I’m calling the flesh
I’m calling the one I love
I’m calling the one I love
I’m calling the one I love

*

Let us not mince words. Masticate each word. Love it, hard in the mouth.




Note: The foregoing originally appeared in the "Contributors' Advice, or Free Speech Corner" of the first issue of the resuscitated Surrealist magazine Caliban, now Calibanonline.