Lesle Lewis Surreal-Absurd Sampler
It doesn’t seem to me true to be one or the other. I think of it as a spectrum and not a binary division of real from surreal or sense from nonsense. I think of it as inclusive, the surreal being part of the real, the real as part of the surreal, the sensical in nonsense and the nonsense in sense, a new sense.
-Lesle Lewis
Tedium
Every morning — a different arrangement of pillows and books.
One face down over another.
The sky and ground and me, all white.
The deepest place is not all good.
The outer world, the same.
No comfort either.
So what time is your surgery?
Why not come home where you are loved to death?
You don’t answer or your font is microscopic.
How much sunshine do you have left?
How much money?
How much self?
The house is one-sided and you’re flat in it.
In the mouth of your pillows are teeth.
It looks like this.
That it does!
It is a pronoun!
We live with it and nothing else!
Bodies Do What They Do
The story we tell becomes the truer one over time.
The doors are open and the lights are on.
The shades are drawn.
We have blackish hearts.
We have fake rocks.
We have dread.
The sky weeps.
The children are amazed and say, “This is amazing.”
Their parents are amazed and say, “This is amazing.”
Her Boots
How is it that we are so insufficiently productive?
How many tiny flowers are in our flowerhead?
How many years before we’re dead?
Death approaches in her boots.
Her period at the end is the point.
Her hands wrapped around a joint.
Fire eats our house and the sun rises.
The mood changes sizes.
How is our despair?
“A bit better.”
Like a love letter.
Kisses wander in the woods and desires grow on the mountains.
The Sleepers Become the Hills
I used to want pills so I wouldn’t have to sleep, but now I want pills so I can.
I have the same questions as the other members of the insomniacs’ club about truth qualities and knowledge and power and so forth.
About intent.
About absence.
I go missing.
I dream that I am still myself.
Sometimes I dream that I am in a hotel.
Sometimes a cafeteria.
Sometimes riding a bike.
Sometimes with a dragon.
“Ohe! Ohe! Horrible the Dragon, O swallow me not!”
The Something that Might be Found in an Ultrasound
A policeman is killed by a rooster.
There are too many people in the trees and too many psychiatric hospitalizations.
It’s pre-mood, then mood, then post-mood like something you lost that wasn’t meant to be — lost that is.
You paint on both sides, so you must decide the side to show.
You have never believed that “life” has “meaning, “ but suddenly this is a problem, a very different problem with just a slight removal of context.
The explainers of the explainers babble on.
We go to the bird room in the museum and make a short video.
Someone knocks on our door and we are forced to think about Hobson’s choice, to take it or leave it,
We want everything — including the ability to live without it.
All the buried bodies revolve with the planet.
There’s no more ambiguity, no more falseness.
But what if truth does not want to be found?
The wrong word might be the right one.
I cut off my hair for you.
Then you put your toys on me.
Oh Mama, where are we?
On a summer night in a fast car.
Tenderness
What’s glad can make you sad.
It depends on where you put the horizon.
You have no governing philosophy or close friends.
And me?
There’s always something wrong with me.
I can’t tell if you are facing me.
It doesn’t matter if it’s you or me.
We will someday be happy and brave and strong.
But meanwhile —
“Seize the despoiler!
Rescue the gold!
Help us!
Woe!
Woe!”
The Horse Stands Watch in a Future City
You micro-dose.
You use the maybe pronoun.
You are charming and super-cool.
You pick up my prescriptions.
“What was that?” you ask and I tell you.
The planet rolls over in her sleep and dreams us.
Sky
I talk to you on a phone in real time.
How is this possible?
Time and space are one infinite thing, are they not?
Huge and vague.
Loneliness on the other side of loneliness.
In this composition, we rise above the depths of ocean to the strip of land we call the horizon.
This is the living self that will end.
This is a kink in the cortex.
This is unanswerable.
This is where one person hurts another person to relieve their own hurt.
On this strip of coastline stand and topple towers.
We land flat-faced.
We are the composers of the compositions.
We are the poets on the edges in light green houses in the cold.
We are the frost-bitten squirrels in polar vortexes.
We make little towns to live and play in.
We add some little people.
We are ready to rise.
We are packed and calm.
We take our pet rabbits.
We fly over the clouds.
Whatever logic we use suffers in the sunshine.
It’s an emergency up here.
Lesle Lewis has five published collections, Small Boat, Landscapes I & II, lie down too, A Boot's a Boot, and Rainy Days on the Farm. She has also published the chapbook, It's Rothko in Winter or Belgium and numerous journal publications. She lives in New Hampshire.
