Hypergraphia Poem by Desmond Kon

1. an ethnographer can’t help but objectify
2. the watchdogging what’s eclipsing / defecting
3. he paints the solarium / the cheeks / no, the eyebrow
4. brown boy in the blue frock / its chiffon
5. a cerulean styron sting / prayer can be a poison ring, a finger
6. a call from a lighthouse, pillars / william down jacob’s ladder
7. cranial, vertex / quick-speed lover, snarling body
8. leaping-lizard women / clothed men you notice
9. you notice / you transcribe the garish / the trying bad news
10. because there’s the bother / there, the white paint public
11. morals, nail polish; her big toes twiddling / door knobs
12. I don’t have luxuries, of such walking / open legs
13. scary scary snowstorm / snowed-in man, cold-blood return
14. everyone’s double take caught / under shades, lucky lucky
15. he smiles / and he smiles back, peranakan captivity
16. in a wince; so he knows he has feelings peeling
17. ductile water moving its waves in the cold
18. the paparazzi have got it right / ….
19. the paparazzi have got it right, headlong profiles
20. love in a fix / knowing little of what can be said these days
21. …. no / no / no ….
22. I like the serendipitous / no, the sexy surreptitious
23. the unlevelled / the treble roofs rocking off more tiles
24. off the problem with the not-so-great disabled poem
25. off the patrician problem of the slowing down / word-by-word
26. the trek between 87 degrees / the right angle beneath
27. there’s always the unpractised truth / of thinning particular
28. …. no / toothpick-precision / ….
29. the random assemblage / ikebana tallness
30. a shattered peace / these things I don’t want to see wane
31. don’t want anymore / don’t want any / anymore waning
32. but of course / sadness is a slow burn, waxed peruvian wings
33. ostrich wings piñata-heavy / sitting in banged-up heat
34. wetness, the messy / wildness quaffing, always quaffing
35. back the klang river / torrents but no sound, no rainy sound
36. back the picnic sundays / her picture, perfect sermon
37. I don’t have the sleepwalk peace you have
38. I envy you / but I don’t either
39. I don’t envy you either / lily-livered yellow
40. the wall a mellow clock / many hands and gnarled hours




Author’s Note:

An earlier version of this poem appeared in Faultline, a literary journal published by the University of California, Irvine. The diagnostic prose that follows, 'homeostasis, then hypergraphia', was later picked up by Versal, the only English-language literary print journal in the Netherlands.

In Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press,1997) , Bloom’s concept of the “anxiety of influence” refers to the Oedipal relation of poets to their literary precursors, who may fulfil the function of the Freudian father. The poet thus develops artistically through progressing from admiration of poetic forerunners to finally culminate in a crucial misprison, or misreading; at this point, the new poet has managed to create something quite new. Examples of such poets include Wordsworth against Milton and then Shelley against Wordsworth.