Confetti by Dada
By Felicity Plunkett
'a lie that I have FIXED like a butterfly on a hat’
(Tristan Tsara)
Prepare your confession.
Write it out.
Confiteor: I confess.
Now tear your words into flakes:
confetti. Lying
like any habit
takes thirty days’ abstinence
to break. Create new
neural connections.
When you feel embroidery
or forgery
rising on your tongue
knit, shell peas
smoke.
Truth-making as millinery:
pins, embroidery
confection. Give me
words close
to what I would choose myself
if I could afford it.
Not some fine bone ornament –
the coy-headed shepherdess
of conversation –
which is fragile, unnecessary
and which I shall have to dust.
Thoughts (venial)
words (bitten
back, or spat
like a nightmare’s teeth)
what I have done
and failed to do:
omission courts commission.
No new messages:
his silence
on any occasion involving
salt, water, prayer
cuts out my tongue.
Cut it out.
Open his love letters.
Take a pair of scissors.
Snip each word.
Place yourself gently
in a bag and shake:
your portrait emerges
rare, ordinary, interchangeable:
lips, adore, golden, dark, I.
(I still consider myself
very likeable.)
(After Tristan Tsara’s ‘dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love’)
'Confetti by Dada' was commissioned as part of a poetry workshop series led by poet Felicity Plunkett at St Georges Girls High School. With the students and teacher John Turner - and inspired by the Cabinet of Lost and Found learning resource - Felicity explored the concept of the glory box or hope chest. Together they reflected on the hopes and dreams of women in the past and on their own aspirations for the future. The project was completed with a hand-bound anthology of poems, written by the students in a variety of forms.