Thread: Eyes Like Cutaneous Membranes of Sharks (Surrealist Valentines)

Hello all,

First time poster, but I'd appreciate constructive feedback on my surrealist valentines, which essentially amount to prose poems. I've been trying to bend my own genre lately, so they've been getting increasingly long, but the basic idea is to use surrealist metaphors, tangents, and meta-commentary to sing the sweet praises of love.

Yes, I have actually written these down and decorated them and handed them to attractive folks. No, I haven't gotten laid yet as a result.

My blog of these can be found here:
Eyes like Cutaneous Membranes of Sharks

But I will just post two (of the shorter ones) below:

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DINOSAUR CHEEKS

The eggs of yesteryears stare back at me like an ice cream rainbow when I stare into your dinosaur cheeks, which enclose miniature universes where prisms of the sun reflect their torrential love onto cosmetological fantasies: hair twisted into the cover artwork of Playstation games, mobile like the invisible agitators for antisocial reform, who lobby for the end of all existing social relationships. O! but you make me think that an agreeably temporal relationship between two as-yet not-rotting pieces of flesh is possible, and so now I abandon my years spent in solitude writing Surrealist valentines--as high-concentrated dishwashing liquid might a piece of cooked animal carcass--to celebrate my prose with you. Yes: teach me the ways of the world, such as how the black widow makes the tiger invalid, despite his tender fierceness. Or how the artist makes a living without ever drawing a table or a dollar sign in Microsoft Excel (what shame!). Teach me why the sun does cartwheels on Wednesdays, or why in the very least it should. Life is brief, like an alien abduction... or the dream sequence at the beginning of The Elephant Man, so never let them cheat you out of anything, especially your most unique, terrifying, and ingenious pleasures.

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MEET ACROSS A MEMBRANE

Ferocious beast, thy pentacular eyes spark only images of the gnarled fingers of young girls burned at the stake for witchcraft. I feel my nose melt into porridge as I stare at your fiery locks, which communicate unseen messages referencing the untimely death of usurious Italian Republicans, who care for nothing but spaghetti and slashing the welfare system. And your cysts, oh dearest, inside them I imagine colonies of bees tending to sporadically (re)generating bits of sponge, clinging to the coast of Trotskyist empires, decked in the blood of sweaty sailors charming rag-tag bands of vermin like-children who prey upon the consecrations of Capital and spite their hard-working parents, who lie forever ossified in middle class realities and see nothing in the works of the Marquis de Sade, and who stare blankly into wretched clocks, unable to move due to the gravitational pressures, which also crush my rather weak spine. As I feel the skeletal structure of my body melt into sheer facade, I picture myself an amoeba and muse that we might meet across a membrane, watching a spectacular series of fireworks from the depths of our mutually protozoan existence.

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Thank you for your time. I encourage you to check out some of the longer ones on my blog if you enjoyed these. In the latest one I posted (1000+ words), I attempted to bend the (self-created) genre a bit.

Hmm. I see that you attempted to bend the genre, but I'm not sure it works. The fact that there are no stanzas gives these pieces energy - I read them very fast. But if they were broken into stanzas, I would probably slow down and think about them a little more. The writing itself paints a lovely, though chaotic, picture.

I think Damien is correct and stanzas would help the reader to absorb what you're saying here. This definitely speaks to a very special kind of valentine and would probably go over well in those circles.