The career of the Safavid poet Mīrzā Jalāl “Asīr” Shahristānī (d. ca. 1639) is remarkable in the history of Persian letters for a number of reasons, not least among them his pioneering of a new literary style and his apparent lack of formal patronage. The literary output of his short life took Persian lyric poetry in bold and experimental new directions, pushing meaning creation to its semantic limits. The approach to poetry he promoted went by various names (the “strange style” or ṭarz-i bīgāna, the “complex style” or ṭarz-i pechīda, or even “absolute poetry” or shiʿr-i muṭlaq), but perhaps came to be best known as khayālbandī, which I translate here as mind-bending poetry. His independent standing and self-indulgent poetry both came to exemplify a kind of “art for art’s sake” attitude central to the khayālbandī movement which spread across much of the Persianate world, becoming especially popular in South Asia. In this paper, I will discuss a central feature of Asīr’s poetry—his use of metapoesis—and argue that this technique helped shape the values of the khayālbandī movement and position Asīr as a figurehead for it. After drawing attention to Asīr’s penchant for writerly images and interlacing statements concerning the craft of poetry itself into the conventional images of Persian verse, the bulk of the paper will examine one ghazal which I infer to be a programmatic exploration of his ideas about poetry. Adopting the refrain of sukhan, a polyvalent word meaning both speech and poetry, and teeming with abstruse, grammatically ambiguous verses and abstract, metaphysical images, in both form and content I read the poem as a manifesto for the literary attitudes associated with khayālbandī. A close-reading of the poem will also reveal techniques by which conventional images of the Persian poetic universe—gardens, wine, and the coy beloved—were reworked by the mind-bending poets as analogies through which to contemplate what they considered to be the hidden subject of all poetic composition: poetry itself.