Language Slips 1

Language Slips 1

10/19/2001

I will write for a period in abstraction. For I want to see how much I can say and make known without being overt. The bulk of these entries will be the poems I've written over the course of the last 5-6 months on my PDA.

PDA poetry is significant for me because
1. While I've written for many years, it's often not kept - ie I write on scraps and throw them away.
2. I often write poems in letters and notes to people without retaining a copy for myself.

With the PDA, I've managed to amass a body of work and continually go back to it. Don't ask why I never wrote in a notebook - too lazy or never thought highly enough of the quality of the thought to start a book.

Anyway ... This is a poem that cames from a section called "Language Slips"

keeper of lost obsessions

She dubbed me
"mr lim, the keeper of lost
obsessions"
not quite sure what she meant,
i asked,

"when someone lost something
they come and find you what ..." she said with a shrug

"lost possessions you mean"

but i liked the title
"keeper of lost obsessions" better.
So i squirrelled it away
in a poem
hoping it would lend some
dignity to my writing.

I try after all to chart the
psychic gaps of a society moving
too fast to know itself,
so entrenched
in what it owns
that dreams, fantasies,

obsessions are
merely material.

I try after all to poeticise the
energy and rush
the mundane speaks
(strictly to me )
of failed desire
of a material culture losing
it's SOUL ( capital
OH NO) without knowing it.

I try after all to store the
slips and traces
that you would rather forget
when your tongue races to
squeak of the latest
mobile model

obsessions are
merely material

"so mr lim it should be lost
posessions is it "

"perhaps ...."

The idea for this poem and really thus this whole section "language slips" came from a paper I marked for the Prelims. The phrase "lost obsessions" was a misapplication of "lost possessions" and the poem has fictionalised the rest - how the poet is termed the "keeper of lost obsessions" - a kind of priest-like existence like "the keeper of the keys". The poem however, moves to parody this role: poets take themselves too seriously sometimes. The poem really eats into itself - trying to poeticise the mundane language slip, yet realising that act is buying into a stance that removes poetry from being relevant. I'm still not exactly clear about the different parodies that take place ... it's a poem that keeps moving I guess.