The Tyranny of Intentions

This afternoon I wrote a poem; not a good poem, not a bad poem, but a mediocre expression of a certain lyric impulse. It runs as follows.

this is what the world needs: an abscess to lance
on a hobby-horse dragon, the puss of which will
ooze along the thigh-meat, past the scaly knee
of cedar-wood shingles, upon the shaving talons.

to slay the boil, they say, is to slay the dragon;
to see the white blood erupt, to calm its wooden
breath, forged of fantasies of fire and poison
as thick as puss oozing on down the thigh-meat.

It would be dishonest of me to say that I had no real design in mind as I was writing this. Granted, that design was, at best, vague and ill thought out, but a particular intention did compel me to say particular things in particular ways. I can't honestly say what prompted the faux 6 beat alliterative line (with caesurae), but it led to a certain mock heroic style that did not in any way displease me.

Upon finishing the above, I read through the poem from the top and realized it could be read in a way I hadn't intended at all. Normally, the corrective impulse would intervene, reword certain lines so as to obscure the incipient reading, and thereby erase all knowledge that such a reading had ever existed. Instead, I decided the alternative reading wasn't so bad, if a bit creepy, and appended the following title in order better to hint at it.

drag‘nslayher

As I was composing those two verses, I had no title in mind, which isn't to say I had no particular title but rather intended not to title them at all. After all, they were merely an exercise, an attempt to filter out of my noodle a set of loosely connected lines that had, as Ray Stantz would say, "just popped in there." Now, my moment of submission to fancy didn't mean the wholesale destruction of Manhattan at the behest of a giant marshmallow man, but it did imply something I am still not entirely comfortable with: that the poetic force of my minor poem had very little to do with myself and my intentions and that it had a great deal to do with chance.

And it occurred to me, as I sat feeling very smug and self-satisfied about how I had anticipated what other people might think, that, in reality, all my title had done was obscure my original intentions. Try as I might, I could not recall what it was that I had been thinking or why it was so important it needed to be written down. I wasn't vexed for long, though, as the timer dinged, and I got up to retrieve my shredded beef tamales from the microwave.