The inclined towers the oblique skies
The cars descending into the void of roads
The creatures along the country lanes
Branches covered with hospitable virtues
With leaf-shaped birds at their crowns
You walk but another walks in your footsteps
Distilling her spite through fragments of memory and math
Enveloped by a robe almost mute the clotted sound of capitals

The seething city dense both with proud cries and lights
Overflows the saucepan of its eyelids
Tears flow away in streams of wretched population
Over the sterile plain towards the smooth flesh the lava
Of shadowy mountains the apocalyptic temptations
Lost in the landscape of a memory and a darkened rose
I roam the narrow streets around you
While you too roam different wider streets
Round something other

Basic Set-Up:

This is the full poem, "Volt," by Tristan Tzara.

The speaker of this poem is following someone. He says, "I roam the narrow streets around you/ While you too roam different wider streets/ Round something other." Everyone is following everyone, in other words: in love, or ambition, or inspiration.

There is something dark and dangerous about the landscape that the poem describes. Cars descend into a "void of roads," "Tears flow in streams," there's a "sterile plain," and "apocalyptic temptations." It's not the happiest (or sunniest) of places.

We can see automatic writing in action in this poem. First of all, there's no punctuation, which suggests that the speaker is speaking or writing without pause. The sentences just flow into one another: "The inclined towers the oblique skies/ The cars descending into a void of roads/ The creatures along the country lanes."

And we're not quite clear on who is following whom. Who is speaking? Who is following? Who is being followed? The poem doesn't really explain this to us. This effect is also the result of the automatic writing. After all, if we write without pausing, not everything we write is going to be clear and comprehensible.

But we do get a sense of something being conveyed, even so. It's just up to the reader and critic (that's you, Shmooper) to decide whether this Surrealist technique works as magically as Breton & Co. thought it did.