(read these lines before the midlife of the night)
I shouldn’t have had that third glass of Armagnac
In my profession we don’t
Get much to celebrate
I was drunk sitting
On the steps talking
To the kids
Perhaps he’d never left
Or he’d made it home before
Me, locked out
Next thing I knew we were back
By the water, the bay and Bayshore Drive
The writer arguing with the scientist
That worked-out comment
These on-air reinforcements
Those hidden objectives in Russia
Then him alone outside
Retelling the story
Repeating the first line
(an echo)
A third glass of Armagnac?
Not after all this wine
A scientist
A leader blunted
A maybe-no
Roommates with no personal
Pronouns breaking into an apartment
He followed her inside
They were arguing
That’s all they did now
But theirs was a good argument
Whose fetus was more beautiful?
Hers was perfect
A whale and an octopus
Her makeup had that glamorous
Cried-on-ness
She’d grown that extra tube
Then she let slip
She’d had an
Affair
I was glad I didn’t live
Here anymore but
I kind of missed it
© 2023 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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I’ve mentioned before that I keep a lighted notepad beneath my bedside nightstand. These lines were near verbatim notes from a dream, date unknown. For whatever reason, I got up in the middle of the night to transcribe them in the office. When I reread them in the morning, they captured a dreamlike quality. The only addition was the first parenthetical line which came in another half-dream fugue state sometime later but seemed to fit.
From there, I rearranged the lines into something that more resembled a narrative. Then I had to find the right line breaks to add some positional surprises as it’s read. Next, I removed (almost) all the punctuation, which seemed to lend a different quality to the text. Most of the punctuation is now implied by either line or stanza breaks. Read aloud, it would sound different than it looks.
In the end, I was just trying to capture something that resists being caged. The dream itself doesn’t matter. All dreams are personal, and nonsensical to anyone except to the dreamer. But there is very little evidence to prove we are not all butterflies merely dreaming we are men (“Are we not men?”). By which I mean human.
Picture notes:
ReplyDeleteLike dreams, there is some “unreality” in this image. Full disclosure, that’s not a bottle Armagnac. It’s cognac pretending to be Armagnac. And that’s not cognac in the glass either. It’s filled with white grape juice (we had it, it was open) with a drop of cranberry juice to darken it a little. The glass is one of two blown glass shot glasses we bought for our anniversary years ago.
Once I had the image, I created an Armagnac label for the bottle. I searched online for a brand that had a similar bottle and used that as a guide for content, then had to “wrap” the label around the bottle in the picture to hide the original label, including getting the shadows and highlights to look convincing. I used the shape of the original label as a guide for the shape, positioning, and highlights of the digital label, including getting the words to look right. That was a bit tricky. Part one, done.
Part two involved creating something that looked dream like, and maybe a bit tipsy (A third glass of Armagnac?) There are three overlapping images of the label and glass. There was a lot of masking, shifting and tweaking of both shadows and images to get everything to fit. Only the center of the image is really in focus. It was a fun combination of image and graphics.