Sometimes known as a house with a cycle of paintings
of the lower torso & legs of a headless woman
reading a scatological
nonsense verse about Elephants favoured by German boys

Sometimes known as a cycle of paintings
with fantastic figures, with Freudian associations
heightened by appearance of fish in the sky

Sometimes known as a large scale picture
interpreted in history by Freud

Sometimes known as the paintings of the cycle of a girl
being buried alive by the volcano

her mind is a beast testifying to reality  ~

like a dead bird in leafy columns, like air charged with erotic delirium

like elements exemplifying the succession of images

 

like knife splashes, like the scratches of magic nails

like a sky distinguished by the topographic design of  avant-garde responses to suicide

like periodical fashion, like experimental elements of genesis not yet conjured

like striking consciousness freely criticising genuine morals & attitude in dreams

like mental typo, like the uncertain scale & the vaguely strange terrain of desire

like photograph stages for public viewing

like trancelike states and emerging melancholic legacy in a    new system of dreams

like conservations of automatism  in Ingrid Schaffnes’s Portrait of an Art ( MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

like the elusive A Letter to Tsara

like verbal pyrotechnics guillotined by the death drive theory of sadomasochistic sexuality

like the  dislocated figuration of a boundary of  mind

like the head of a soldier searching endlessly in the phosphorus clouds for itself

like papilios (butterflies) scattered about by art rascals

like cynical hysteria

like the grotesque notions of the sightless vision & unconscious hallucinatory bliss experienced when reading the omnipotent dreams of a child

like the haunting mathematical photographs of empty streets created by black magic

like the lazy coils of a python of blindness

like the surrealist immanence of dusky hysteria of a breast laying inscrutably on a poet’s tongue

like unconscious translations of illumination & disorder in the contaminated language of European shell-shock, amnesia and war

like the hypnotic delusions in Essay on Abjection

like fear, like papilios (butterflies) scattered about by art rascals

like the abstracted surrealist response to the question   (is suicide the solution?)

like # ############################### raised to power 10

like the loss of startling original ambiguity in the translation of The Hundred Headless Woman

 

like the fish in the groin of the naked lady singing in a church

like stones full of air, like my irrational fascination with fluid connections between Trees & amoeba~like drawings associated with bodily forms in The Laws of Chance

like sleeping rhymes, like a drunken boat of metaphor staggering towards the undercurrent, subterranean, illogical caves of desire

 

like The Poet of Sand pulling out the angular dreamlike sounds from the book SURREALISM edited by MARY Ann Caws

like maps of desire drawn on the breast of  a curvy femme fatale  mistaken as the image of a mermaid in  Le Vertige d’Eros by Roberto MAITA

like the infinite terrains of the theatre of cruelty suspended between the regions of delirium & desire, like works of Chance &  Freedom exposed in the elusive sculpture of the poetics of vision

like the preface & the survey of appendices with acknowledgement  to the wheel garden of  the  aeroplane, in the forbidden treachery to the key of dream & fish drawn in the never seen certitude of the untitled central story of the headless woman

like Decalominia, like the Enigma of Oscar DOMINIGUES

 

like the acknowledgement in the index, in the bibliography  of elusive objects of Chance & Freedom with the original, hidden, oneiric, transmutation of the poetics of vision

Sometimes known as a house, with a cycle of paintings

like a blindness induced alternation of blank spaces & ba     ba     ba              ba                       ba            ba

like the illogical majesty of the PRICELESS  lady in red, opening a car made from the bones of whales & the congealed undiluted whisperings of love

like a large scale picture of a strange Elephant
the scene; dreamlike, its irrationality
heightened by appearance of fish in the sky

 

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About the Author: 

Umar Abubakar Sidi’s work has appeared in Transition, Jalada, Enkare Review, Brittle Paper and elsewhere. His chapbook The Poet of Sand was published by Saraba in 2014 and his full collection of poems The Poet of Dust is forthcoming with KonyaShamsRumi. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria.