surreal sestina

the surrealists -- many of them, including the main man andré breton -- wanted to get rid of the notion of the "bourgeois" author, hence surrealist texts are full of seemingly unrelated strings of surprising images, incomprehensible to those "bourgeois" readers imprisoned by societal logic and constraints.  these texts, then, are the product of some more or less random process rather than the deliberate composition of some author.

i've become intrigued by many traditional poetic forms: haiku, sonnet, sestina, villanelle.
in my mind it would be just "too easy" to fill, say, a sestina, with random cutup lines and appropriate end words. if we're just doing random cutups, what does the traditional form add to the poem?

i think these traditional forms demand some intellectual effort on the part of the poet to fit the words and images into the formal regime, not necessarily of rhyme, but often the regulated repetition of end words, images and lines.

doesn't mean it has to make "sense" in some grand narrative arc,  but readers need to feel some
poetic urgency to the image sequences, end words, lines and stanzas.

here's a sestina i just put together:

you told me never


you told me never reveal our secret internet burrow
so the monsters won’t capture the composer
of our hearts stolen by the fairy
when i break her i fear
the winged thing mourning
for me and i’m scared it’s night and i don’t know where i wandered

fervent fucking O please take me in where i wandered
to meet these women in our hidden burrow
the little boy scared my mourning
your frequent laughing composer
so long ago eating on the sandy field where fear
asked if she's artificial like the fairy

see me kiss the women imagined by the fairy
who let you in the cockpit as you wandered
joking that you live in fear
in our glass burrow
never talk to my composer
who wanders in the days that hitler’s myth is mourning

the luger in his hand can’t be mourning
the barracks the bodies the impotent fairy
an asteroid denied there was ever a composer
so much smoke wandered
fearfully in our burrow
hack my optic nerve so you won’t fear

we worry hitler’s box is full of fear
it’s such a long drive to visit your mourning
you thought you hid it in our secret burrow
i’ll do anything to come to your house and talk with your fairy
mother called me to your room the night i wandered
from nowhere and came after your composer

other days i think my new women talk to your composer
but friday night i’m going somewhere else where they’re not dead yet and i don’t
                  understand what they fear
prepare to leap into empty space where you wandered
trying to fight off the mourning
without you i feel like such an empty fairy
always watching the film burrow

i fear i made the mannequin look into mourning
snow that wandered where your fairy
composer put it all in our internet burrow