Robitussin Judgment questions answer my knife flowers dance merrily over my eyes they weep for me it drips empty closet fills with song sobbing tears of blood and koolaid they taste of grape it drips rabid eyebrows bite my face ouch i don’t like that leave me alone it drips don’t label me you Labelled a line of coughs my throat hurts it drips i cant dress myself we could ask Camus he knows you dont it drips

This poem explores the conceptions of judgment and the penalty society inflicts upon those who dare to unbind themselves from traditional moral constraints and the western philosophical thought system.  This judgment is represented by a bottle of Robitussin - at once a product of healing and death through the unspoken threat of suicidal usage.  The inherent paradox embodied by the Robitussin is further played out in the speaker's continuing demands for solitude and individuality at the same time when he cannot function alone or without the guidance of societal constructions.  "I cant dress myself” is not so much a simple statement of physical dysfunction as much as an exposure of the individual's difficulties in contradicting the complex societal web of constructed meanings and prescriptive norms.       Indeed, the immediacy of the speaker’s declarations, "my throat hurts;"  "ouch, I don't like that" impart a sense of urgency and desperation.  The speaker is sick with frustration and choking on the unpalatable expectations his surroundings force upon him; the “Labelled” threatens to label him as well.  The immediacy of his demands further contrasts with the dream-like, drug-induced quality of the poem, representing the inefficiency and incapability of his thoughts to be organized in a manner that expresses his non-conformist idealogy: in short, he is living in fog.    The late appeal to existentialism further solidifies the author's inability to escape the stifling conventions of western philosophical value system, drawing inspiration from the depths of the very wells from which he is trying to reform. In conjuction, the final “it drips” is hardly final in the sense of closure or end; rather, it suggests the continuing cycle of judgment, penalty, and struggle.

Tylenol Dreams is rich with sexual imagery, but it is the way in which these sexual image-themes are juxtaposed that creates the tension, struggle, and eventual resolution of the conflict proposed in the opening line.   “My horses are out” suggests a speaker struggling with traditional concepts of gender and sexuality.  Horses are a traditionally heterosexual masculine representation, but being “out” obscures this meaning through its connotations of homosexual recognition.  Throughout the poem, expressionistic exclamations of angst are interspersed with more practical suggestions for sexual experience.  For example, the window panes, proposed late in the poem, represent the collective subconscious fear on part of men of female sexuality, and consequently the speaker is drowned by the very air he breathes.         This piece is an outcry  -- a desire to be freed from the constrictions of traditional gender roles.  The proposal early in the poem – mixing butter (phallic symbol), eggs (feminine symbol), and flour (clever wordplay and abstract representation of Nature through the ‘flower’) – to adhere to a natural sexuality, is discarded later as simple construction (“cantilevered suffering”), announcing the author’s agonized realization that even concepts taken for biological fact are indeed only products of a protracted value system reinforced by both institutional and popular promulgation; along with this realization, the speaker’s recognition that society not only looks but simultaneously judges is indicated by the exclamation mark added to the final “stop looking at me.”  However, this may be read as a defiant rejection of society’s piercing gaze, for the speaker has not only discarded the original proposal, but also found a new form with which to fill the void.  The speaker's continuing fascination with both death and sexuality leads to the rolling bottle: suicide, the ultimate autoerotic trip.  By extricating him or herself from the need of external sexual contact through a partner, the speaker is able to create new erotic worlds; no longing drowning in the oppressive atmosphere of conventional sexuality.

Tylenol Dreams my horses are out stop looking at me mixing butter eggs flour stop looking at me dogs and spiders on my tongue stop looking at me cantilevered suffering, speak stop looking at me galloping madly through window panes stop looking at  me the air drowns me with its erotic gaze stop looking at me yes i can taste the empty bottle rolling stop looking at me!

The contradictions abound in this piece--the dichotomies of being/non-being, peace/war, and space/time, but most importantly the central theme of hot/cold: in other words, life/death.  While the author(s) clearly admire the style of ee cummings, they twist it about itself in almost a parody of the original, preserving the syntax but crackling the beauty into a twisted reflection in a broken mirror--a mirror into which the reader themself is looking. The analogy between "scalP" and "spHere," strengthened by the capitalized letters in each, generalizes this from the plight of one sufferer to the pains and trials of the entire universe. The agonizing line of grammatical marks is the division between life and death: on the other side, we find ourselves oppressed by the forces of modernity, stifled under the weight of nondegrading styrofoam and eerily twitching sugar spiders that would rot the teeth and insides of our children--of our very future.  The mysterious ending brings us even closer to the cruelly subjugated Mother Earth, as the reader is lost in the confusing jungle jumble of paradoxical terms, marks, and themes.

IcyHot glowing spHere Snowflakes set fire to my scalP ;,#.*&>>>>:::@$>”;:.*(.;’: There is no nothing Only eVery thing styrofoAm candyCane spiders Tovac