Compleynt

What is it about outsider artists that they combine a complete indifference to coherence with the most elaborately rococo private references and mythologies? Consider this impossible poem, left at the unknown author's death, neither defensibly conservative nor avant garde, just a mess of unhinged obscurity:

"Gate of Hampton and Sequoia

We lust to lock others' doors of perception.
When people ask me to be open minded
I know I'm asked to believe as they believe.

Open and shut. Little gates, little fortress,
Little body turned into a circuit board
For all sorts of illogical programming.

Commuting until his sentence commuted,
The extremely incompetent beast who's known
To obligately social conspecifics

As that and/or, neither/nor switch, a teacher
Passes between an international chain
Of nonsense and a non-native invasive

Which is of course natural as anything.
Three mule deer does have died after being struck
By other commuters steering steel monsters

And been dragged to rot by the side of the road.
Ravens have ripped them down to their ribs. A dog,
A glossy Irish Setter rubs her muzzle

In a desperate, uncontrolled ecstasy
Across the rotten remains. A truck pulls up
With an open-minded man inside and time

Confuses the commuter by not keeping
Everything from happening all at once. Done
And undone, the mind, the door, the deer, the dog."