Alit, photo digital art, ©2013 Michael Dickel
The series of flash experimental fiction, now named Chicken and Egg, has come to its end. At least, it has for now. It seems that when the woman with the beard thinks about buying chicken, everything clicked for the moment. So, I decided to try a different experiment. It also has a relationship to surrealism, automatism, Robert Bly‘s leaping poetry, and chaos theory. If you want it to. I posted a request on my timeline in Facebook for ” five random words” that “escape from your sub-conscious just now.” I may have fallen off the cliff face, I may be suspended, leaping in the air just about to land or crash land.
I’ve listed the names of my ten contributors, whose 51 words float below with about 150 more of my own. If you want to see the list of words, or most of them, follow the link above to the request and read the comments. If you want to participate in the next experiment, check out my Timeline for the next post. Oh, and try hovering your mouse cursor above the links. Really.
Please leave your response before you go. I very much want to learn how people who read these respond—from a word or three to an analytical critique, all comment welcome. Thank you.
Butterfly Effect: Chaos on a shoe string
Surrealism: Below the Snow, digital photo / art montage ©2013 Michael Dickel
Butterfly on a shoe—a constant bliss, elated and surreal, some automatic writing made from fresh warm milk—dreams of rain. The desert sunset signifies peace to the gopher writing its manifesto far from the Saskatchewan railroad’s violence. A nasty sherbet left a taste of forgotten hypocrisy like a flashbulb memory in his mouth, burnt like boiled-over soup on the stove top. The moon mirrors his face, its shadow-craters another dimension.
Greed spills blood through the nun’s hands, nuclear waste pouring out her fingers. What bread will she eat, this stench of death in her nose? Lady Macbeth knew blood and hands and death. The ocean breeze ruffles her hair like forest leaves, while the sea’s salt walks the dog like sweet coffee travels through the night, Mercury retrograde, with nomadic drivers hustling the highway for spare change at the pool table.
The tulip knows cold winds, playing Scrabble®, drinking mint tea under the snow, waiting for the cardinal’s lonely, red, winter vigil to leap up into spring. The spirit needs rest. Karma suffers bouts of cold and sweat; hot, dull space drips its indigo cello-blue into Luce Iragary’s recursive folding of flesh away from the center, touching and brushing together moments of possibility.
The cat in the sky sits on the green roof, thinks, “time to go.”
The following FaceBook (and real) friends contributed five words (or, in one case, six words) to this experimental writing
- MaryLee Bragg
- Jeffrey M. Green
- Zena Hagerty
- Donna Kuhn
- Aviva Luria
- Mamta Madhavan
- Donna Pryor-Foote
- Steve Silberman
- Eileen Walsh
- Aliona Zykova
Menu for the series
Experimental Chaos | Experiment two—The Other Day | Experiment three—The Toad’s Garden | Experiment four—Reflexive Properties | Experiment five—Word-Tossed Salad | Experiment six—Deciduous Mirror Reflecting
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You can read these stories
and other Flash Fiction by Michael Dickel
in The Palm Reading after the Toad’s Garden
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Categories: Digital Art, Experimental writing
Meta/ Phor(e) /Play 
My suggestion: a church window, a bottle, an expert and a green sweater.
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I suggest the words: polar night, almond flower, soft moonlight, stranded dresses, tumbler.
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This is the art of intellectual preoccupations and hermetic structure. It gives us a poetry with surreal combinations of words.
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I have asked folks on FaceBook to read this and add five words that escape their sub-conscious. These words will provide the bases of the next experiment(s). More info: http://www.facebook.com/michael.dekel/posts/10151585445634076
Please feel free to add your own free association, up to five words / (short) phrases. I will use most (reserve right to exclude hate speech, etc.) or all to continue this series of writing experiments.
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near never better yet
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resurrected on a credit card
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Nifty concept. I like the subtext added by all the links–you have to read the poem once for itself, and a second time for all the references. It’s like the beginning of the Poetry of Tomorrow (insert hokey 50s-style music here).
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Old and new. The aspect of (shared) automatic writing combines surrealistic school and Jung in some ways. Also, with the links, there are aspects of found art movement, found object, found poetry. I wrote, then searched terms / phrases, finding most of the links without having planned them. All of this relates to the ideas of surrealism but also of constructivism, montage. All of it highly playful.
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Thank you for being!
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Wow. TY for contributing and reading, Zena.
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Compelling, even if not conventionally comprehensible. The hyperlinks are an interesting touch. Poetry for the internet age.
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Hyperpoetrytext?
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