My friend Stuart Fallon emailed me a list of 44 words to include in a piece of writing. I made a poem using all the words in order, inspired by my mum who had done a similar "Da Da Dream" poem using a list of crossword solutions. Anyway, this is my effort:
A pathos stalks my Dada dream
Its legacy a sorry scream
Chance as praxis, random routine
An interstice with stories to glean
Revenant cadaver, a hollow toy
A plaintive song for a long-dead boy
Whose delicate wraith haunts his room
Gossamer flowers in dismal bloom
Signifier of loss, fragile tears
Interpellate my thoughts and fears
My speech a semiotic mess
A simulacra, paper dress
Miscegenation of my thought
To fetishize what seemed so fraught
No treatments chemical or holistic
Could ravel twine for our dear mystic
Our foundling prophet, our lost savant
Paradigm of hope, desire détente
The autonomous king of funereal song
His morbid words strike deep and long
With arbitrary meter and clumsy rhyme
His quixotic journey in romantic time
Mutable meanings, all liquid senses
Appellative chaos, pure pretences
A nexus of low and hateful screech
Sanctimonious with hypocrite’s speech
A feral child to loftily preach
His maxim he’ll obdurately teach
Affinity to purity he feels
With pithy phrasing and splendid ideals
Utopia of abject shrines thus built
Transcendental filth in guilt
Dystopia mirroring his awkward phrasing
Stasis in his subject’s praising
Juxtapose a picture of our boy king
Phantasmagoria of shiny things
Dense child here pauses, so thick and obtuse
Pedagogy now sadly no use
His manners just gauche and ever so crude
Modus Operandi of coarsening mood
Coalesce our tale and lighten our tone
With a well chosen aphorism carved into stone
And end on a note of bathos
Or if not that, then back to pathos.
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