Today, I've got another exclusive for my fellow Hive creators. As a participant in Adimverse, I've been playing around in a room called Generations. The leader of the room shared a prompt by Vera Molnàr titled De l’imprimante au Pinceau.

The prompt was real simple. In 15 minutes, we were to write something inspired by the image. There were additional techniques Colette Estelle asked us to incorporate, but I won't go into those. Instead, I'll just share the poem that I conjured as a response to this prompt, which Adimverse also published in their newsletter this morning.

Spectra

Red is lavish.
Like a spider web
Crossing the universe
And re-directing space-time
As if traversing the deep depths of mindless mind.

Blue is the ocean
Going far and wide,
Taking the universe in reverse direction,
Exploring the caves beneath its belly,
Reflecting deep space in a mirror of galaxies.

Together, red and blue are mosaic
As if music got up to dance
And tripped on its colors.

When blue dominates, she dominates politely
As a lover wanting something more
Than the beloved is able to give.

And red pants. Because red
Knows what blue can never know:
That hot is not what some star-crossed
Cosmic wannabe thinks about in the rain.
Hot is like negativity with a positive spin,
Like spaghetti masquerading as soup
In a bowl of green sauce
Lip syncing to some dance pop punk rock synth wave
In a bathtub full of gin
With the clowns in the background
Playing rummy on their smartphones.

A Note on Technique

This poem was written in a nearly stream of conscious manner. When I looked at the red lines, they reminded me of a spider web. That was the first visual image that crossed my mind. The vastness of the space around and between the lines reminded me of the universe. Of course, blue is more typically associated with the ocean than deep space, but both are immense. All of this just melded together in my mind. Hence, the first and second strophes.

Naturally, the depth of the oceans do not mirror deep space. But the juxtaposition of the two met in the conference room of my cerebral cortex. I allowed the image to take root and added two elements to heighten the sensation:

1. In the first case, I wanted to use the strongest words, the words that would make the biggest impact. From "lavish," which set the pace right off the bat, to "clowns on their smartphones", I made sure that every word in the poem conveyed some strong image.
2. Second, I infused the poem with unexpected internal rhymes throughout. It started with "re-directing" and "travering" with the nearby and complementary "space-time" and "mindless mind." Those two were followed by "universe in reverse". The next strophe played off the sounds of "mosaic" and "music". In the final movement (indeed, the final sentence), it takes the reader from "hot is not" to "negativity" and "spaghetti," then on to "dance pop punk rock". The images these phrases conjure explode on the page in rapid succession like firecrackers in the brain.

The poem explores a type of postmodern rhythm through colors, primarily red and blue but then green also makes an appearance near the end. But it isn't about the colors, per se. It's about contrasts. Red is hot and blue is blue. The ocean is deep, but space is deeper and in a different manner in which the ocean is deep. Music and pictures ("mosaic") are both art forms. Colors are sensual, like the touch of a lover.

In the final strophe, I wanted a mind-expanding climax. To achieve that, I went from short, imagistic sentences and clauses to one long thought. Even the lines are longer. And the images become more surreal (e.g. "spaghetti masquerading as soup in a bowl of green sauce"). On the surface, these images make no sense. They might appear as just a jumble of words thrown together. But when we consider what lip syncing is, and that the poet reports it is being done to various styles of music, including synthwave, which often doesn't have lyrics, the lines beg deeper exploration.

The mention of the styles of music themselves give a sense of moving through time, harkening back to the first strophe. They become their own spider web directing space-time. Dance pop, popular in the 1980s, morphs into punk rock, another popular music genre of the past, and that morphs into synthwave, fast forwarding the reader into the 2000s with a retro feel, and the fact that "synth wave" is divided into two words rather than the typical combination word alludes to the possibility that we're not really talking about music after all.

Of course, spaghetti can't masquerade as soup nor can it lip sync, but if it did, would we find it in a bathtub full of gin? What a strange image!

The poem crescendos on this note, with spaghetti doing all sorts of things spaghetti can't do, remember those lines in the image?, but it's the "clowns in the background playing rummy on their smartphones" that gets the final beat. These images flowed from my mind just like ... spaghetti into a soup bowl, filled with green sauce, lip syncing to various styles of music in a bathtub full of gin. And gin made me think of gin rummy, the card game. And that made me think of games we often play on our phones.

I don't know anyone who plays gin rummy on their smartphone, do you? And I have no idea who the clowns are, but Spectra is a poem that flowed from my unconscious mind like red lines on a blue background serving no purpose other than than to pay tribute to themselves for being what they are.

Isn't that the nature of art? Unwittingly, "Spectra" is a retro imagistic ars poetica, a poem about the process of writing a poem. It's an illustration of itself. A mirror.

Music. A collage of images. A journey through time. A spider web crossing the universe. The poem is all of those, and more. But most of all, it's a medley of thoughts that paraded through my mind in rapid succession until it made sense to blow the whistle and make the traffic stop.

Allen Taylor is a poet, an author, a journalist, a man. Learn more about me at my website.