A Recipe for Insanity

eviscerate and bone me
batter and bake me blind
take my sweetness to the hard-crack stage
and caramelise my mind
splinter me brittle
with mortar and pestle
quadrille me with sanity
fine-edged with a sharpening steel
from your batterie
de cuisine of the surreal

Kim M. Russell, 2016

recipe-for-insanity

My response to dVerse Poets Pub Tuesday Poetics – Recipe Poems

For this week’s poetics, Mish has been inspired by the approach of the holidays, when many of us begin the task of baking and cooking festive treats. She remembers her grandmother’s crescent moons that melted in her mouth and her Napoleon ice box cookies with stripes of pink, green and white. Whatever the ingredients, Mish says she always knew that one of them was love.Which is why she has asked us to create our own ‘recipe poems’, but not of the culinary kind. Instead she would like us to write about something more abstract such as ‘a recipe for love’, perhaps including the language of a cookbook – Mish found quite an extensive list of cooking terms at Atomic Gourmet.com and has given us a list of abstract nouns for inspiration.

36 thoughts on “A Recipe for Insanity”

  4. Another poem hit right out of the dVerse stadium. You had me at the first line; very clever & creative. Shame on me, though, for “bone me” has several meanings, & for a moment I strayed to the dark side; smile.

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  7. Oh my! I am blown away by this! “de cuisine of the surreal” WOW!
    I’m a bit embarassed now by what I’ve posted. I’ve gone the silly route…my brain is mush from jet lag still, although I wonder how long I can use that excuse??? Oh well….this is absolutely amazing.
    It reminds me of the people we saw making rock candy in Australia….you could hammer it and it would break into shards.
    Splinter me brittle with mortar and pestle — and the title is perfect!

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    1. Thank you Lillian, that is praise indeed! I’m flushed with pleasure! I will be reading more a little later after I’ve posted a couple of things. I hope your jet lag is wearing off now. How’s the weather after so much sunshine on your travels? If you’ve got the same sort of weather as we have, wrap up warm. I’ve never been to Boston and only really know it from TV and film, but it’s one of those places I’ve dreamed of visiting and never got the chance. Do you have similar weather to New York? My husband was there two years ago in November and said the temperature was below zero and he’d never been so cold!

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      1. Yes, quite similar to NY City. We love Boston. Many times in the winter it gets quite cold but it’s often sunny…so I like to think of it as “crisp” weather that makes your nose cold. You can always add on more layers. A good wool hat, scarf and gloves are a must. We are by the ocean so that often “softens” the effect. This global warming is also having some effect. Two winters ago we had 108 inches of snow over 4 blizzards, on 4 weekends in a row!!!! Last year, barely any snow at all. Mother Nature is fickle no matter where you are. If you ever make it out our way, let me know in advance. I can give you a tour! 🙂

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  8. I don’t where to start. This an auditory delight! Love, love “batter and bake me blind” and “splinter me brittle”. To use “quadrille” and then actually write a quadrille too! And who begins a poem with “eviscerate”? YOU!!

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