I’ve been wanting to write a stream of consciousness for a long ass time and I think this kind of writing is super important. Trying to construct our thoughts into the structure and format that we want sometimes edits out the most dangerous, the most raw, the most true aspects of my writing and I suspect of other’s writing as well. Here goes:
The door was splintering as they were smashing it crashing it with a broken mirror and a tin can. I didn’t know things that were that fragile could carry the power of a battering ram or could crack the face of porcelain man while he’s curled up crying like a crippled lion and dying in the light of the wildfire that’s climbing the ladder to his tree house where he camps out sinking his teeth into the leather binding of the kill. His fangs puncturing the pages that plead patience but that’s the way that ink teeth fall on the page. the fire is making its way to the lions den because it can smell the gasoline drip drip dripping from the lion’s leaking maw cause lead that has burrowed its way from muzzle to muzzle has left the massive muscles shorn from their anchors. Little lion men, make that dying men, always burning walking spirits of flame that think they can tame the mane that they think they can cut from the nape of the main man in the plain that they infiltrated because they take what they can from the land that they lay claim to like they were natives like their names are inscribed on the mountains and boulders and lions like they could write their name on the sun net it up and swallow it up. Thank god the sun can burn them away because they’re patiently waiting till they can reach it and stab it with the sharp end of a flag and take a flying leap for (white) mankind. How dare you mistake a man for the sun. believe me i can burn you blind if you try to take the hydrogen violently exploding in me dont try to corrode my fire. You cant bottle lightning so fight me look me in the fucking eye as you try to break my eye contact, step back because you lack the power to make me bow and your just a flashbang waiting to be swallowed and spit up into the light of the sun. You can’t blind me with your artificial light, I’ve got sight and you might think that you could break me and win but im a sun lion and a stallion you’ll need a battalion of broke nose, rotten teeth sin grin, men that been licking the dirt that stick to the boots of their God, to bear down on me like a garbage masher. Too bad the trash that you mean to compact can compact back and slap the newtons out of the metal walls that make to break. Next time you line up in formation like the british at lexington, think about it before you start a war and before you try to snap the back of a spine that breaks back.
Well. that happened. I ended up sitting in a kind of rap rhythm. I’ve never written with that kind of rhythm. Honestly I’ve never written anything that was stream of consciousness. Hope you liked it! I feel like Diego will especially appreciate this.
David,
This was really cool to read. I love how rhythmic your stream of consciousness seems to be, and I agree that it is super important and very relevant to our understanding of the self and the mind.
When writing a stream of consciousness poem (which was my introductory poem this semester, yikes) I realized that I’m kind of creepy, excessively observant and possibly judgmental when I let my thought reel go uncensored. This was actually very beneficial to understanding how I think, and writing a poem that was completely unedited (and 3 pages) was also kind of a fun adventure.
I really applaud your efforts to go uncensored; I feel like that’s something we should do more often, though I do love finding that PERFECT word.
Hi Grace and David!
As you may know, consciousness is both a source for my poems, but also what my poems try to uncover and understand. It’s an interesting dynamic. That being said, I LIVE for stream-of-consciousness poems!
Grace–I, too, have sat down to write freestyle stream-like and I am always disturbed at where my mind runs off too. Not exactly in a depressing way, just moreso in the fact that it is all over the place, and I get astounded and pretty horrified by how many emotions I can trail off too in so little of a page space. Where do all those thoughts fit???
David–I love the idea of exploring consciousness through a specific mental disorder/impairment. That’s mainly because I’m obsessed with the connections between mental illness and creative arts, and namely what we can uncover through writing uncensored. This writing exercise is pretty cool, and I love what you’re thinking in terms of figuring out ADHD/understanding it more through the page space. It feels very overwhelming and is very cool.
Thank you both for sharing your thoughts on this. I’d love to talk more with both of you about your processes with stream-of-consciousness, and what you feel its merits are. It’s definitely very overbearing, very out of control, but very fun to dissect. And you learn a lot about your own mind.
-Juliet