Jacques Debrot  | Dialectical Poems
Dialectical Poem Five (Karl Marx vs. Lewis Carroll) Jacques Debrot is the author of the poetry collection Confuzion Comics. His writing has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, The Washington Review, Rhizome, The Hat, and other literary journals. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and is chair of the English Department at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee. Dialectical Poem Five (Karl Marx vs. Lewis Carroll) Pretty girls at a tea party. Fat arms, pale feet, the electric click of tooth against living spoon. In the dream daguerreotype, the sky is brown, halfway between pudding & cow. Shadows lengthen their wires across the puzzle-wall. Like the state, the day withers away, a baked plant blackening in the heat of summer heaven. The problem is money: theres never enough. DRINK ME, the sticky bottle says, wasps pulsing on its shiny lip. Now picture the room as it starts to shrink; the head of a cat floating from its smile. Dialectical Poem Nine (Andre Breton vs. Heraklitos) Language is the place of the mind, as Space is the place of the body, hair dripping, as it were, south, while the ice-blue neon of you hisses letters through the rain. To speak is to desire. So the gods judge. The heart, an organ of fire and fat. The soul, nail-bed and gift. Dialectical Poem Twelve (Young vs. Old Marcel Proust) Inside its diorama, the Grand Hotel baroque elevators, mental solarium, doll-house roof x-rayed in the moons trembling halo. Language is the sixth sense, says nothing. In novels he skirts its absence, past and future intersecting like the white shadows behind two people in the negative of a photograph. Vampire of himself. Ghost. The word love always like a rip in silk.
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