John Ashbery

Breezeway

existence free verse dreamlike

Breezeway - meaning Summary

Dislocated Domestic Life

Ashbery's Breezeway presents a collage of domestic and storm imagery to convey dislocation and failed agency. The speaker describes being ineffective, buffeted by weather and pop-cultural figures, obliged to manage trivial tasks and experimental obligations while larger forces pass by. Scenes shift abruptly and register an ironic, bemused resignation: attempts to call, to organize, or to be noticed are undermined by distraction, spectacle, and an elusive, indifferent world.

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Someone said we needed a breezeway to bark down remnants of super storm Elias jugularly. Alas it wasn't my call. I didn't have a call or anything resembling one. You see I have always been a rather dull-spirited winch. The days go by and I go with them. A breeze falls from a nearby tower, finds no breezeway, goes away along a mission to supersize red shutters. Alas if that were only all. There's the children's belongings to be looked to if only one can find the direction needed and stuff like that. I said we were all homers not homos but my voice dwindled in the roar of Hurricane Edsel. We have to live out our precise experimentation. Otherwise there's no dying for anybody, no crisp rewards. Batman came out and clubbed me. He never did get along with my view of the universe except you know existential threads from the time of the peace beaters and more. He patted his dog Pastor Fido. There was still so much to be learned and even more to be researched. It was like a goodbye. Why not accept it, anyhow? The mission girls came through the woods in their special suitings. It was all whipped cream and baklava. Is there a Batman somewhere, who notices us and promptly looks away, at a new catalog, say, or at another racing car expletive coming back at Him?

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