Tag: postcards
Pataphor – blazing sun
Scholar history: he (re)members – we, with the scattered shadows at their feet, more than usual, touched moonlight messages they sent to those sunbeams & marigolds, that clung to the walls and broken crockery.
She smiled. Her smile was a blazing sun – it walked into the room on spiked heels, punctuated with a refrain of oooos and aaaahhs, an exclamation point that stopped at the centre of the room. In the far corner, a frain of sooo and shhaaaa sulked up gin and tonics, like there was no tomorrow. The Apocalypse was Nigh midnight.
The party-goers bathed in the glow. Sweating superlatives, their skin baked and blistered, like euphoric eggs on the sweltering city sidewalk. The smoke filled their charred nostrils – their eyes teared up as pulsing blood boiled in solar exultations.
The fire department arrived with Shock and Awe – the band played on and on.
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The pataphor , is a term coined by writer and musician Pablo Lopez, for an unusually extended metaphor based on Alfred Jarry‘s “science” of ‘pataphysics‘.
As Jarry claimed that ‘pataphysics existed “as far from metaphysics as metaphysics extends from regular reality”, a pataphor attempts to create a figure of speech that exists as far from metaphor as metaphor exists from non-figurative language. Whereas a metaphor compares a real object or event to a seemingly unrelated subject to emphasize their similarities, the pataphor uses the newly created metaphorical similarity as a reality on which to base itself. In going beyond mere ornamentation of the original idea, the pataphor seeks to describe a new and separate world, in which an idea or aspect has taken on a life of its own.
Like ‘pataphysics itself, pataphors essentially describe two degrees of separation from reality (rather than merely one degree of separation, which is the world of metaphors and metaphysics). The pataphor may also be said to function as a critical tool, describing the world of “assumptions based on assumptions”—such as belief systems or rhetoric run amok.
sleeping in a dictionary
In insomnia’s night, the dark tosses and turns over wide-eyed sheets – the bedside light is turning over the big dictionary –
the unabridged bulk is clutching antonyms of sleep, flipping through pages of undefined dreams, encountering retinas of meaning staring at the back of the skull –
brain-sparks skitter across the pathways, jumping crickets with accented syllables seek the entomology of rapid-eye-movement –
the marching metaphor bands loudly cross the dense lexicon of lucid somnambulists, echoing in the book’s binding, the patter of dead parrots, clinging to the holes in a starless sky, –
a retinue of offered broken rhyme looks for reason in a landscape of fragmenting ellipsis-
punctuated particlized phonemes impede meandering morphemes seeking symbolization in a cacophony of parable, the allegory flickering in the upper corners of the room is stuck in cobwebs of air and eyelids-
turn the page.
Collage prose poem derived from:
Implied Spaces 