Paging Through Jung's Red Book

(reposted from Tuesday, December 27, 2011)

She was young, of course. . . .
          - Siri Hustvedt

You've misplaced your archetype and now
your unconscious is collecting itself and leaving.
You thought you had it all worked out
but every minute brings a change.
Restate your case.
You bought into the line breaks and realized too late
that the enjambments were a joke.
Your trust has made you untrustworthy.
I've heard it from you before:
I had to protect myself.
OK, are you now free to be the self you see
or are you clubbing onlookers
with that old - and very tired - I'm confused.
You're lucky you have time.
Those you've blindsided refuse to pick up.
I can't blame them.
Jung broke with his pal Freud over scrambled eggs
built a scale model of his childhood village
then with gaslamp proceeded to search for his self
carve it out so to speak
renew membership in the Square One Club.
You too can be an event horizon.
You too can block hostile takeovers by those
laying claim to your inner beauty.
It's all here in the pages of Jung's Red Book.

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You decide for sanity's sake to climb

into a different dream

your costume feathered

to ensure a lyric feast of words

spinning the mind beyond language . . .

You have come to enjoy

the catapults of edits

lobbed by holdovers

along the borders of the  margin . . .

The seduction of the blank page pins you . . .

The unrecognizable new awes you

the misconnection of dots

miscalling the nothing-really-here . . .

Paolo Roversi

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But it wasn't everything always

the lines more different than alike

appropriated from Greek tragedies

by skeletons awaiting the call . . .

There are others in the wings . . .

There will always be others in the wings

finessing their choreography

with alphabetical certitude . . .

Outswimming your self

with devil-may-care strokes

you push identity-theft

to boggle the minds

of scaredy cats and leaf-rustlers

with grayed-out options . . .

Everything . . . and more . . .

within reach . . . in theory . . .

The slapdown bulks-up beyond the mirror-image . . .

You think it odd? . . .

Life out of balance . . .

The moment to moment is not the same . . .

The words . . . not the same . . .

Antonio Palmerini

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You hold the magic to an alternate reality

engaging passersby

with the opening lines to The Odyssey:

Tell me about a complicated man . . .

how he wandered and was lost . . .

And so the drama:

the camera, hand-held, tightens the frame

the fuzziness dissolves

at the edge of a beach softened by watercolor

soundtracked with trance . . .

Do you mean, nothing with nothing? . . .

No, surreptitiously . . . re-entering silence

as an arm enters a sleeve . . . 

Insisting on . . . what? . . . endless endings? . . .

The mute mouth to the deaf ear . . .

the camera panning the crowd . . .

Mayhaps in time

you will chance the lives you've imagined

trying on a different metaphor

to become who you are by not knowing . . .

Antonio Palmerini