Ealain Ar Son Ealaine (anachronistic credos to reconstruct the creative "now")

(For a variety of confusing, conflicted, and convoluted reasons that I'll spare you from here, several of my recent research endeavors have been bringing this poem that I wrote a couple of years ago to my mind a lot lately. I thought that I had posted it somewhere shortly after it was written, but a cursory search of google says that I'm mistaken. This piece was one of a pair (drastically different from each other) that I wrote for anonymous submission to an academic poetry journal that I was working for at the time. In keeping with my initial guess, this one was rejected in favor of the other, which was said to be more realistic, grounded, and relatable... which provided further proof of the point that I was trying to make with this one in an appropriately ironic way... which I was obviously greatly amused by.)


The breeze blows in
The experimental surreal
The swirl of my pipe-smoke
The mingling, crumbling,
Crushing of crumpled, living
Leaves, to sway and swing in
Non-notes, artificial harmonics,
To add texture to the silence.

None of this is more real or
Pertinent than the
Dream that I had last
Night... something about
Espionage, switched ID's
In the restaurant where I
Work, in big-backed
Red-vinyl booths with
Pernod bottles on the
Shelves, "Anisette," a smaller,
Softer version, a more
"Truthful" femininity,
Something far more "real,"
If "reality" and "truth"
Could be given more
False "faith." But from that
Draught they've drank enough.

When your footing fails,
And your senses are seen to be
No more than merely what
You sense, "Construction" and
"Conceptualism" render
"Content" entirely inconsequent.

Activity falls to the
Dagger of intellect;
All disciplines would quake and
Cower if they realized that
The ones that prove their
Umbrella could make their
"Important" findings obsolete.

Empirical studies suggest,
Based on what we understand,
The best of the research-
Methods that I have no
More than anyone else,
Or less, the plinking,
Plopping, fizzing, bubbling,
Test-tubes of all the
Chemical concoctions we can
Understand (which are none),
Besides what happens in
Our own heads, concludes,
That this is all that matters.

A false construction
In a dead language,
Of a nineteenth-century
Slogan, fitted around a
"Real life" growling version
Of a giant plaster lion
At the front of an emerald
Building in a city
Built for the construction
Of fabricated grime
Demonstrates this well.

When the activist "realities"
That Gautier and Poe spoke
Out against are demonstrated
By our daily lives to
Not exist, their credos adopt
More fervent strength and meaning.

Anachronistically, of course.
I am well aware of my
Ironies and contradictions,
And these themselves will prove my point.