After performing a recent Brechtian mind-experiment at Poetry Live, Daniel Larsen’s sanity was under question. Luckily he has responded with a flurry of new text and submissions to poetry zines such as De-formed and Side Stream, so now there is no doubt his mind is way out in the water. See, I’m swimming! To top this off, he released his Potato Poems in a limited edition of 40 some time around the height of the silly season, his first attempt at home publishing.
SIGMUND ON THE BEACH
Analysis of the unanalysable slippage of tongues—interminable, this unlimited interpretation drags its feet. Physicality howls out loud in laughter at dreams. Now sexuality is garbed flamboyantly, what remains secret? “Displacement here means circuitous path.” My dream elements, ever absent, give rise to Olympic rings. Overdetermined to succeed, I stretched language and interpretation to all that is the case-study. I subjectively formed my power to speak, but still had no power over language. The symbolic made me distinguished, but I could not separate my own symbol from it. How should I address the heroic without becoming a supplementary antihero? What can I see that does not come to be out of some hero’s work?
This work was published in the author’s limited-edition Potato series
DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS
Nameless, faceless unnumbered we fit in /
to clockwork in blockwork towering /
over ways that may even flow forever /
towards every end and to none /
like it or leave it, still it turns /
still only ever for a moment /
disappearing into the thinnest of air.
This poem has appeared in multiple settings as part of the video art of Cellulite Rose.
RedAcidTreeSt1d
Let in a rip. Then... If you have no obvious physical trauma, picture this, if you will—a path of mystical stepping stones before a creaky stairway to the heavens. Now that the celltowers have risen above the steeples—and the skyscrapers above them—at the top, on the horizon, a crystal rainbow island and the inability to breathe. But I remembered what Lechte said, and I scaled the panopticon, flinging faeces at each crack where the darkness seeped through. The chosen one threw down buckets of hot pitch and boulders, so I taught myself how to build a wall. And behind the masonry, in a box, I kept my heroicism a secret, obscured. But in this confusing fusion black and white could not be separated. I was opened with a speculum, but had bad night vision, and could not see. Order me to decide on which side to be. In between my dreams I smoked, I wrote, then I lived.
