Surreal-Absurd-Sampler Brian Clifton

“The poems are from a currently unpublished manuscript that looks at the intersections of capitalism, art, and gender/self performance--and all their relationships to death. With these poems specifically, I was interested in how seemingly mundane stuff (a cyclist, a radio, a cell phone, etc.) become increasingly weird the longer you look, the more you contemplate their various aspects and implications. 

There was a game I used to play as a child. My friends and I would turn off the lights of a room and stare at each other's faces. Because we could only see vague outlines, our imaginations would fill in the details, would distort the faces we knew until they were strange and stranger. I think these experiences are related to seeing the surreal blossom in the contemplated mundane. The more we think about seemingly categorical things as unique and individual, the more we are able to see their weird deviations. I hope these poems can serve as a model for this or at least show this type of thought on the screen's page.” - Brian Clifton

At Dinner 

I pull a hair from my mouth. It is my own hair. At night it leaves my head. It ties itself up: a knot for ankles, a knot for a waist, the head a knot. My hair sits on a chair. It reclines. It scurries into the dark to do what I cannot say but am tied to—a golden eagle with a snake in its beak. I find my hair in the corners of every room. I am sorry. This is not polite. I just like to imagine inside my body a braided muscle ready to unspool, a wing flicked out to slow the wind that is my body pressed around me like lips.

Metastatic

I walked on shadows. Shadows like any other: heartless spaces, invisible buttons, deadly traps. Inside I felt the shadow’s heart. In the shadow’s heart, a hank of hair, a sleeping spool. I grabbed the hair. It dangled from my fingers. The light licked the hair. The hair squirmed. I dropped it and ran. The hair coiled. It was mine, and I lost it. I rushed back. No hair. No trace. No irradiated blood to light my way. Hardly recognizable, the shadow stared up about to speak. 

Cyclist with a Parachute

Thighs and calves bulge under Lycra. The parachute: a nylon bag gorged on air. A thick strap attaches it to the cyclist, and pedal clips attach him to the bike. In silhouette, no difference between conduit and force. The man strains; the parachute expands. Does he move forward? Do the wheels turn? For a moment I do not think so. But they must to keep the cyclist upright. It is good to think he would stay upright—his pedaling, the wind—, to think balance a synonym for eternity. But the cyclist does not stay upright. He falls. His parachute deflates. I assumed in falling the bicycle, man, and parachute would stay attached as if made from one stiff piece of matter, that the cyclist with a parachute would rest on the ground a moment before rising all at once like metal figures in a shooting gallery—dead then alive, having never lived. The world is so far from what a mind devises. The cyclist twists out of the pedal clips. The parachute droops. The tail that steadied deflates. The man lies there, separated from his bicycle. Who is he now? More man, less chimera. What is he now? Stiff, rising. A pain shoots through his ankles and knees, which now hold bits of gravel. He hobbles. Under his quarter-zip, his chest heaves. His parachute drags.  

The Dark Radio

The radio devolved into static. I listened intently, my finger on the SCAN button I did not press. Soon, the static parted. The car radio like an unseen brain deep in the reeds. It let me in on a secret. It mimicked my voice. It said, the world is small and the people are grave. The imitation was not very good. It got my voice wrong. I listened intently. The radio devolved. Static in unseen circuitry. My finger on SCAN was the partition between my volition and my vehicle. The engine an organ, not a very good one. My brain devolved into static. I listened intently. The blips mimicked my voice. Was it so bad? It let me into the radio’s overgrown mess. It said, the world is small and grave. I processed. I devolved. The vehicle listened intently to its own churning. The blips came closer. The SCAN button’s jump-cuts. My brain processed the radio into its own channel and said, the world is a small grave for small people. My finger on SCAN, my brain a mess of reeds sprouting from an abandoned car’s soiled upholstery. The vehicle devolved. The car radio was getting better. I let it in on the secret to my voice. I gave it a channel in my brain. Static and my voice. I processed the jump-cuts. The radio listened. I said, the small grave, the world. My brain listened to static. I agreed. A secret pumped through the vehicle. SCAN beneath my finger asked, is the world the worldof a small grave? Is it the jump-cuts of an unseen question? I did not press it.

Tiny Tykes

I smoked drugs in the cemetery. That was the type of year I was having. When the flood rains started, the children tore across the fenced-in yard of the daycare next door, leaving their toys to drown. They pressed their ghost faces against the bay window, each head a mausoleum of itself. What about the dead? I asked my mom on the phone. Do they continue to grind their teeth? Yes, she responded, the dead grind their teeth. In bed, I replayed this conversation until its filmstrip melted into another paranoia. A painful chirp in the other room. In the crib, glowing and warm, my cell phone threw a small tantrum.

Brian Clifton is the author of the chapbooks MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). They have work in: Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Colorado Review, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. They are an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.