The cornerstones of Talgam’s many schools
all claimed to be worked by Amalgam’s tools,
and yet we have no masons in our town
so all of Talgam’s schools were beaten down.
_
I wrote the Amalgam poems in the mid-1990s while nearly napping under a tree. They were seemingly nonsensical stanzas about a fictional town named Amalgam, its residents, and its larger world. I collected them one-by-one in a word processing file, which I printed and stashed away in a notebook.
In November 2009, I had a dream in which a hit man chased me and a group of “dream acquaintances” deep into the sub-cellar of an abandoned military building. In a room at the base of a rubble-filled shaft, he warned me to “dig up the Amalgam poems and post them.”
This constitutes my compliance with that instruction. I will post one each Thursday until they are exhausted.
Obsidian Eagle
April 29, 2010 at 1:33 am
Nothing quite so fascinating as poetry or fiction directly channeled from one’s unconscious (which if Jung was correct taps into the collective). I wrote a whole book once inspired by a strange and powerful dream. The story only marginally resembles what I dreamt but it would never have been committed to paper had there not been that nagging impetus planted during sleep.
I have since heard that the aborigines of Australia say that the great stories in life are out there hunting for the people best suited to tell them.
In any case, its also interesting how you were coerced by an assassin within a military building. In Aztec lore, the war god paradoxically doubles as a patron of the arts.
Will return for further analysis when time allows – dream on!
slpmartin
April 29, 2010 at 9:30 am
Very interested in reading your work and love your introduction to the poems….many thanks.