WHEN I AM WITH PEOPLE I AM BOTHERED BY HEARING VERY QUEER THINGS

I went to the pillar-box
I never saw a worse-looking house
in town or in hunting zones

“welcome to girly hell”
turn her out because her necklace has been stolen
explain it by some kind of hypnotism

they fancied those constellations were
able to handle large fires
with the elaborate finish of jewellery

wherever we find pleasure, there we are attached
because of certain “spiritual rappings” or “knockings”
lucky for us that we so rarely knock up against them!

we shall agree at the outset that
The Teacher was just going to
be all things to all men,
to burst in upon them with such excitement
Dwarves started arriving, yes, Dwarves!

Even usually rational people are starting to suspectPI-2.
the lining of your stomach
his eyes and their fluttering lids

he didn’t ride the roan mare he’d been riding
he does not think it will ever be required

please under no circumstances speak of this
smoke your luncheon instead

the lady seems decidedly eccentric
Uncle Roy’s Queer Girls
embodied this principle
on screen, in a lesbian way,

A strange creature,
Let us lead him to the elders.

The title of this poem—and all of the other titles in Katie Degentesh’s 2006 book The Anger Scale—are taken from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a standardized personality test used by psychologists to diagnose mental illness. Originally developed in the 1930’s, an updated version from 1989 is used today.

I began to…write the poems themselves by feeding phrases from the statements into internet search engines and piecing the poems together from the results pages. This process was a little different for each poem. For instance, for “I LOVED MY FATHER” some results might come from a search for “LOVED MY FATHER” +turtleneck, some from “HATED MY FATHER,” some from “HATED MY FATHER” +pussy; etc. I might also then replace words or phrases in the results.

In some cases (mainly in the poems that make use of more archaic language) I followed a link from the search engine page to gather material from an actual web page, but for most poems I did not feel the need to stray from the search results themselves.

Here are some of the other titles:

I DO NOT TIRE QUICKLY

NO ONE CARES MUCH WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU

I SOMETIMES TEASE ANIMALS

AT TIMES I HAVE FITS OF LAUGHING AND CRYING THAT I CANNOT CONTROL

I SEE THINGS OR ANIMALS OR PEOPLE AROUND ME THAT OTHERS DO NOT SEE

I HAVE HAD VERY PECULIAR AND STRANGE EXPERIENCES

I BELIEVE I AM NO MORE NERVOUS THAN MOST OTHERS

I AM NOT AFRAID TO HANDLE MONEY

I LOVED MY FATHER

I LOVED MY MOTHER

SOMETIMES I AM STRONGLY ATTRACTED BY THE PERSONAL ARTICLES OF OTHERS SUCH AS SHOES, GLOVES, ETC. SO THAT I WANT TO HANDLE OR STEAL THEM THOUGH I HAVE NO USE FOR THEM

MY SLEEP IS FITFUL AND DISTURBED

Image:
An early draft of Card III of the Rorschach test