Was I more psycho- than sociopath?
\nHard to say. The twain do almost meet.
\nCautiously, I trod the strait path
\nbetween, kept my missteps discreet.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
Don’t ask me how I came up with first line of this epitaph, a genre which deserves more practice and of which this is first in a forthcoming series.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n If you did ask me, I’d probably take the Fifth Amendment, but just for the principle of the thing, P<\/em>oetry is essentially word play, a tail trying to wag the dog of reality, \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Let me cast my secondary argument of defense against any spurious charge of psychosis into the jargon of contemporary literary theory. The above ditty<\/em>\u00a0is a <\/em>Sprachspiel, an exercise manipulating dichotomies based on a disciplinary distinction that no one believes anymore, but which can still work rhetorically\u00a0(psycho vs socio). Upon that semiotic field is laid a sequence of metaphors turning around liminality, twains meeting, strait path, missteps — inadvertent traipses across borders which cannot, by the rules of binary logic, be transgressed.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Either that or it was just fun to write.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Was I more psycho- than sociopath? Hard to say. The twain do almost meet. Cautiously, I trod the strait path between, kept my missteps discreet. * Don’t ask me how I came up with first line of this epitaph, a genre which deserves more practice and of which this is first in a forthcoming series.\u00a0 … <\/p>\n