Mudlark Flash No. 38 (2006)

Jacques Debrot  |  Dialectical Poems


Dialectical Poem Five (Karl Marx vs. Lewis Carroll)
Dialectical Poem Nine (Andre Breton vs. Heraklitos)
Dialectical Poem Twelve (Young vs. Old Marcel Proust)


Jacques Debrot is the author of the poetry collection Confuzion Comics. His writing has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, The Washington Review, Rhizome, The Hat, and other literary journals. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and is chair of the English Department at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee.


Dialectical Poem Five (Karl Marx vs. Lewis Carroll)

Pretty girls at a tea party.
Fat arms, pale feet,

the electric click of tooth
against living spoon.

In the dream 
daguerreotype, the sky is brown,

halfway between pudding 
& cow.  Shadows lengthen 

their wires across the puzzle-wall. 
Like the state, 

the day withers away,
a baked plant

blackening in the heat
of summer heaven.

The problem is money: there’s never enough.
DRINK ME,

the sticky bottle says,
wasps pulsing on its shiny lip.

Now picture the room 
as it starts to shrink;

the head of a cat
floating from its smile. 


Dialectical Poem Nine (Andre Breton vs. Heraklitos)

Language is the place of the mind, 
as Space is the place of the body,

hair dripping, as it were, south, while the ice-blue 
neon of you hisses letters through the rain.

To speak is to desire.  So the gods judge.

The heart, an organ of fire and fat.
The soul, nail-bed and gift.


Dialectical Poem Twelve (Young vs. Old Marcel Proust)

Inside its diorama,
the Grand Hotel—

baroque elevators,
mental solarium,

doll-house roof x-rayed
in the moon’s trembling halo.

Language is the sixth sense,
says nothing.

In novels he skirts its absence, 
past and future intersecting like

the white shadows behind two people
in the negative of a photograph.

Vampire of himself.
Ghost.

The word love always
like a rip in silk. 


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