Poem of the Month
To Call The Fair People To Your Aid And Succor

By Peter Dubé

Published on December 3, 2013

Change your name. Change your clothing. Change your habits and your commonplace routines. Change the routes you use to move across the city’s warp and weft and change the many tools with which you lay your hands on such conclusions as you may. Cut your hair, short so as to throw your features into sharp relief, or leave it grow into an unobstructed fall across the eyes, the brow. Change your face – an unshaved beard or artful application of cosmetics, if you will. Alter your posture, and your eagerness. Amend your voice, your faith, your goals and sympathies, and change as well your rhetoric and favoured meals. Undo familiar rituals and sow unease across your days by changing every argument, the political positions on which you speechify, or raise your voice. Breakdown the comfortable framework of your life, be it appearance, stature, job or ideology, your thoughts and all the patterns in them; make yourself anew and grant this newness an open place in which to rise. For they, the little seen and subtle, the deft and mighty all at once, love nothing more than novelty and joy, and nothing less than trepidation. Then let this new, this unanticipated self take space and reach towards its foreign ends: a self that startles you and all a world around. The world that now must change, as you have, shift. The buildings will be quick to take on sharpened lineaments and irregular perspectives; the elevators that ascend therein feel clamorous and odd. In your new skull, a transformed imagination watches, seeking after this: the outlines of your memories made watery, their hues transformed, the lines of their narrations quiver, queer. When you have taken on and grown accustomed to your uncoupled name, a father made of silence and of will will take on ghostly consistency and – specter – move through the prison of the nerves trailing nude revelations in his wake. A friend from early childhood dissolves in rain and swirls in the gutters of your teeth. Laugh to see a livid other self. And classmates careen into a flight of winged things; the breeze that lifts them higher, floral, fine, and with a shudder of the scaled in its uncanny grip. The parks and alleys of an adolescence burn with fire as the empire of djinns erect their monasteries. Laugh. Deep in the throat and moving towards light. Story undoes itself and all the windows in the nervous city clatter. Laugh again. A noise like gamelans and drilling stations on a distant moon conspires with that pack of wild dogs as you display your twice-created face, defined or insurrectionary in the framework of their forms. Laugh. Sweet-talking entropy and reinvention wave to the unfamiliar and watch as in the sudden space now opened by transformation the great invisibles arise from long languishing and draw near. Attracted by the shattered regularity; a cracked delight in their long motionless expanse. Bloated with dizziness they come, assemble round the one to vanquish boredom; give him strength, resources still unknown and knowledge. Now laugh again.

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