Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marilyn Mei Ling Chin’s "Horse Horse Hyphen Hyphen: Border Ghazals: 2" is an intricate, surreal meditation on fragmentation, betrayal, exile, and transformation. The ghazal form—comprised of loosely connected couplets—amplifies the poem’s shifting, unstable energy, allowing Chin to juxtapose the personal, historical, and absurd in ways that resist easy interpretation. The poem engages with themes of authority, loss, imperialism, and identity, often through biting irony and dark humor.

The opening couplet—"The bad conceit, the bad conceit police will arrest you / Twin compasses, twin compasses cannot come"—establishes a self-referential tone. The phrase “bad conceit” could be a playful jab at poetic metaphor itself, critiquing overused or forced comparisons. The “conceit police” suggests a force that polices language or thought, introducing a sense of surveillance or self-censorship. The second line, referencing twin compasses, evokes images of direction and duality, yet their inability to come suggests a failure of guidance, reinforcing the theme of displacement and uncertainty.

The second couplet introduces the father as an elusive, almost mythic figure: “Your father is not a car, not a compass and not God / Though he vanished in his sky-blue convertible Galaxy with a blonde.” The father is defined by negation—he is “not a car, not a compass, and not God”—rejecting traditional roles of provider, guide, or divine authority. Instead, he is an absent figure, disappearing in a “sky-blue convertible Galaxy”, a name that ironically evokes both the vastness of space and a popular Ford model from the 1960s. The image of him leaving “with a blonde” suggests a familiar narrative of abandonment, exile, and male privilege, further deepening the speaker’s sense of loss and disillusionment.

Yet, the father does not remain entirely absent. “He kept crawling back to us, back to us / Each time with a fresh foot mangled.” This grotesque image suggests a cyclical return, but not one of redemption—each time he reappears, he is wounded, symbolizing a pattern of self-destruction or repeated failure. The phrase “back to us, back to us” echoes like a refrain, emphasizing the paradox of his presence: even as he returns, he remains broken, diminished, and unreliable.

The poem then shifts into historical absurdity: “One emperor was named Lickety, the other named Split / Suddenly, the soup of chaos makes sense.” The humor here is sharp, playing on the phrase “lickety-split”, which means something done quickly. By attributing these names to emperors, Chin reduces imperial authority to a joke, perhaps critiquing the arbitrary nature of power. The “soup of chaos” suggests disorder, yet the absurdity of the named rulers paradoxically creates an internal logic—history, for all its absurdity, follows patterns of repetition and folly.

The next couplet turns to the displaced and dispossessed: “Refugees roaming from tent to tent to tent, looking for love / The banknote is a half note, an octave above God.” The repetition of “tent to tent to tent” mimics the restless movement of those seeking shelter, suggesting exile or forced migration. The phrase “looking for love” adds a personal, emotional layer—displacement is not just about survival, but about searching for belonging. The second line introduces a bizarre financial and musical metaphor: “The banknote is a half note, an octave above God.” This could suggest the devaluation of currency (a “half note” implying something diminished or insufficient) or the elevation of money to a status above divinity—capitalism as the new god. The musical metaphor (“an octave above”) suggests distortion, a world out of harmony.

The following couplet—“O the great conjugator of curses: shit, shat, have shut! / I have loved you both bowl-cut and shagged”—introduces playful, almost incantatory wordplay. The phrase “conjugator of curses” transforms grammatical structure into a form of hexing, turning language itself into a kind of weapon. The shift from “shit” to “shat” to “have shut” suggests movement from crude expression to finality—perhaps a metaphor for severance or rejection. The second line’s contrast between “bowl-cut and shagged” humorously references changing hairstyles, but it may also symbolize changing identities, phases of attraction, or the passage of time.

The next couplet moves toward apocalyptic imagery: “There are days when the sun is a great gash / Nights, the moon smokes hashish and falls asleep on your lap.” The “great gash” evokes violence, rupture, or an open wound in the sky, turning nature itself into a body that suffers. The moon, by contrast, is intoxicated, indifferent, collapsing into unconsciousness. The imagery here suggests both destruction and escape—the world is burning, but one can still seek oblivion in altered states.

The poem’s final couplet returns to the idea of transformation and failure: “Sorry, but your morphing was not satisfactory / Shapeshifter, you choked on your magic scarf.” The accusation—“your morphing was not satisfactory”—suggests disappointment in someone’s attempted reinvention. The term “shapeshifter” implies fluidity, adaptability, but here it becomes a liability. The “magic scarf”, often associated with stage illusions, turns into an instrument of suffocation. This could symbolize an inability to fully escape past identities, a self-imposed downfall, or the limits of reinvention.

"Horse Horse Hyphen Hyphen: Border Ghazals: 2" is a darkly humorous, deeply fragmented meditation on inheritance, power, exile, and transformation. The ghazal’s form allows Chin to move fluidly between personal and historical narratives, between linguistic play and sharp social critique. The poem is filled with ruptures—absent fathers who return broken, refugees in search of love, emperors reduced to jokes, shapeshifters who fail to escape. In this chaotic, shifting landscape, authority is unreliable, identities are unstable, and history itself is absurd. Yet, in its defiance of coherence, the poem achieves its own kind of clarity—a recognition that fragmentation is its own truth, that dislocation and contradiction define the world it inhabits.

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