Cut-and-Paste Found Poetry

Here is my cut-and-paste poem from found sources. Below the poem I provide a link to where I drew the material. I figured it would be more fun to read the poem first before discovering how I pieced it together. I rewrote this countless times over the week until I got it just the way I like it, so this is pretty close to how the final draft will look.

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The Triumph of Dream Shadows

Temptress Satan, my lady of whims,

keeper of the flame as the long

day closes: witness your black legion gambling

with souls. Invisible agents of destiny, they live by lessons

of darkness. Phantom fiends with no name,

wolf riders by gaslight, herdsmen

of the lonely dawn. Flesh and the devil

duel for inner sanctum.

Each sunset I die.

Tonight: behind locked doors, a savage

bridal procession. Fallen angels dance with burning

flowers, desperate sinners on a paradise path

of passion. Death smiles on the women

condemned--demons who fire-walk on a violent sea of grass

where serpents dream of winter light. Dangerous Juno--Killer

of Men! Royal Wife of the Goat! Sitting high and strange across

the distant valley of vengeance--who

leaves nothing sacred in this narrow

corridor of sleeping bondage. 

Chained raven of Hell strikes scarlet streets of panic. 

My marked woman of shadows

reborn in moonlight--assassin of youth in the persona

of a stolen face. Her heart of glass. Her naked

kiss a fog of evil. Lethal decoy, strange illusion,

discreet downfall of

Shame.

Saboteur of ecstasies on broken wings of hope.

The midnight bride came D.O.A.

Call it murder! Or the conquest of a lesser god.

For her, I wept a golden reservoir of tears.

Eternity remains a hollow triumph for

God's lonely man,

a sinner in the land of silence and darkness.

Glitterbug soul, rise from my wild eyes (Look:

A dragonfly in the stardust!).

Fly beyond the last door of the living flesh to

escape the Chariots of Death.

We are spellbound searchers for the moonstone of life....

 (*But sweet rhapsodies also die--the burden of dreams

at Bellevue.) 

Sunrise! 

And with it Death. 

I wake up screaming. Chimes of a sombre empire ring

bells from the deep. A scream of stone:

song of fear in the night like lightning over water. A trick of light

echoes in the tomb of the blind dead. The midnight

voyage vanishes. My fugitive soul encounters its body

in the final shock of day. 

I speak now my ballad of fire: a tribute to

the fata morgana of lost desire.

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My list of found items for this poem consisted of titles from my DVD collection, which can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-sanders/my-dvd-and-vhs-collection/10151104618662489 (I made this Facebook note public, so I think everyone should be able to see the list from this link). Every word in the poem comes from the list, and I didn't reuse words unless they appeared on the list multiple times. For example, I used the word "of" 23 times. It appears on the list far more than 23 times. (I stopped counting after 23 because I didn't use the word any more!) "Death" appears on the list seven times. I used it twice.  At one point I wanted to use the word "drink" or "eat," but I didn't have them, so I had to go in another direction. I also could only use "as" twice and "but" once. Thankfully, I had Woody Allen's Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask, or I would have been unable to use it at all! 

Notice that I also incorporated the asterisk in the title before the word "But," as in Allen's title. All punctuation marks that appear in the poem--periods, commas, dashes, exclamation points, and parentheses--also appear on the list, and I didn't use any more than are on the list. Thankfully, I had many titles with "Mr." and "Dr." or abbreviations like "C.O.D." or "D.O.A.," which I mined for periods in my poem. I also had Lindsay Anderson's IF...., from which I drew the ellipsis after "moonstone of life...." 

Since I’m a fan of old B-movies from the 30s, film noir, and German cinema, the tone of the poem is fairly dark! I think the best lines in the poem come from the German film titles.