I am Not One Who is Easily Impressed.

I am Not One

You say you make your own
ice-cream.

I'm not impressed.
Make some poetry thing

that is sweet'n
cold as aches fill

the teeth, then will
I be impressed.

But you make ice-cream.

Dominai es Requie


These things I have marked
like shallow visions
sparked by endless markets,
are passing on to where
may be called the dead.

The desk is a cobblestone patchwork of brandy,
shotglasses, and other empty vessels.
But fear is all of the above and I wonder
if when I saw the angel of death come,
I wasn't already gone into the ether.

Now will I tell you of the event:
not through the door, but my window
came he, adorned in fables and phonemes,
whispering the chosen words I would
write down. Lifted one black finger did he

and brought it down again on my shoulder.
The jumbles I sought to explain were--
as it appeared then-- nothing nothing
to see. You stumble through the days
in gazing glory of brighter ways

and although you, the poet, stay
the rhythm of the black dog's bay,
these things you write will die away
and not a lover heard a thing you say.
Rhetoric washed over me and sandied

me. There are things in the world
I love that do not love equally
oh, for some God to say how, how
things are not symmetrical, or to give
a taste of the glory before I live

would be a precious metal to spell.

Courageous, Cowards, Catharsis

Oh, no! How has this happened? I've allowed my blog to become a thing of preteen catharsis...the black background...the soppy poetry. My only recant I have is the rule of the Byronesque-- typically the man was somewhat of a poetic scoundrel. Now the rule has to do with Poesy, otherwise known as the entire flipping practice of verseification of anything from building a sandwhich to meditating under a cherry tree. As you can see, the possibilities are endless. Not only are they endless, they are ALL cliche! It seems to me that in order to write something poetically, you're surrendering your sense to a formula; either the thing is praised or wronged, but either way, something is exalted in always more than realistic terms.

Perhaps I've a bit too much of Yeats or Frost in my blood to be able to write something ordinary. Everything thing I keep secret screams to be taken out and straightened, but in order for this expungation to occurr, the formats must be chosen.

Sonnet, triplet, heroic couplet. I have a Book of Forms pretty much telling me everything I need to know about writing something into a small tattered coat of form. In fact, my poems are like twigs in coats because nothing I write now can ever hope of fulfilling the entire justification of one form. Ah, they were all invented eons before my primordial ooze and now there is nothing left to discover.

It seems rather harsh of myself to be criticizing a favored practice of mine so close to the period in which I will be one-and-twenty. The essence of winter sleep is different from the summer slumber, I stand firm that the crisis I have in my identity NOW is a necessary worry in order to prepare myself for a fine adult journey. To recall a grandly written line from being exhaustingly (and blankly) stated, "The world is turning too fast." Where are the essences of sleep? Perhaps I should ask my African room mate because he seems only too well versed in the matters of REM sleep.

The rant is ending, and the total existence of everything I work towards is now coming to a close. My god, the fear I have is that everything is nothing in terms of what one might call the first half of life. Before I was 21, I did nothing spectacular except mark the earth with my unexceptional presence. There is nothing to reflect upon, no pools set up in which I might see the image of who I was contrasted against the mug I possess. It's over. I've lived to 21, and not a damn thing will meet me here.

Triplets

She wants a commonplace book for
her room-- at least that is what
she calls it. It sits crooked on her

bookcase propping up Ayn Rand's
Fountainhead like some fake leg
with the mechanical bits and

pieces facing out, the spiral
dangles over the edge.
Every so often she will

look at the book, thinking of
Shakespeare or Proust (men well
versed in the art of love),

and reach a bare arm. She'll
halt mid extension because
she feels the elbow pop reel

from the elongation. She said
it doesn't hurt, it never hurts
and why would it hurt? She said.

She'll retreat her arm, naked
and smooth as a paper towel from
all the invisible feminine hairs,

and swear her elbow, her mind,
and the book. Sleep is calling
and wrenching her guts into sublime

surrender. It will only be a
few more moments before she--
the let-go is sweet and rewarding.

She wishes she could write it
all down, but her head hits
the pillow and she is lit...

the poetry in motion is gone.
The essence of summer sleep
is the battle for ruthless ambition.

There was a play that evening,
something classical called with a
cast like warriors of an arena;
they crept dead-like in either wing.

Oh, the actor's vanities serve
my verse with comedy, because
I can see through their cause
down to the gesture's swerve

of an upstage arm. Now the craft
they employ is a full body
experience; I am lucky
to have half my mind to adapt

a poem like many others. I
try I try to be wittier
than most who would love to flatter
The newer masters who deny

the older misers so clean with
form and rime and structuring
cement into a something
that confirms the poetry myth.

It is out there. The shinging bright
men and women acting out their
joys and falls, the fairer than fair,
write again the classical, right

again the night.

Reversal

What is it I saw today, this morning
that caught me so off guard I should crumble?
See again. Revision. You were standing
Not quite right there, but quite away, able

to reach me with the fully gracious arm
though. And I-- I stood here shaking with the
strictest heart I had; expecting some harm.
No...no. Go back. Review the history:

What is it I feared today, this morning
that shook my shoes so that I should tumble
into the stool across my path leaning?
Sometimes, it seems, that under the rubble

nothing breathes, none for answers but trouble;
the question is a raging dying bull.
The sonnet remembers, it books the loss,
and solemn oaks cloaked in moss.

What does Europe mean except for
the vaguely albino pop'lation
with a small bit of a better bead
on a landmass' unpopped core--

When Calv'ry comes in elation,
through aisles and upon a steed,
then I will have the answer to
your suff'ring, the indignation

of playing savages who feed
in dark on human flesh. Until then,
Pride is a bright and shining pin
tacked firm onto the faded tweed

Of your lapel-- should you happen
to have one handy and ready.
They know it for what it is,
Nothing said will or can open

Their eyes. This world invents wonders
too grand to be bitten by verse.
I should-- I would-- I could recant
these words, this belladonna plant

and see us apart from it all.

Sonnet 9? I've lost count...let's say 10 the BIG 1-0!

Writing Sonnets at Night

It's night again, and the moon is a little star
giving way to larger worlds; it's ephemeral arms pull
a weight from behind the planets like an ant pulls
a crumb of bread. She-- a luminescent clock far

far away-- tugs playfully at the corners, but never
the body: she has a tight tight grip and a loose handle.
Nothing but a haze, a glimpse, a blank slate waiting to fill
itself like a vaccuum would, she refuses to sever

a knot neither can plot.

and I cannot finish this now.

A Collection of a Dark Night

Free Write

Too many people do have the same name as I. "I" begins as a poetry of existence, significant in the only way that a bus running over an old retired veteran is ironic only if the banner is an "Army of One" ad.

Let me think a moment, here, silently
pondering the matter of the universe and
the smaller stars cradling smaller planets
serving as beds for the dust of infinity.

There's a freckle or two upon my weary arm--
they don't follow a pattern, these rogueish spots,
but careen chaoticaly from the elbows to the knots
of my fingers. They pleasure none and harm

No one. As a child, I would bite at them,
thinking them battered and embedded splinters;
I know now from learning by many winters,
that the freckle is not the spot on the hem-

lock tree decaying, but the signal of the earth
changing and redressing its minor pictures.
And so it is, with no star a system fixture
will remain past the miles of life left the earth.

For it is just a name we've given it. Alone
without our meaning, 'earth' is rock and rubble,
only apexes and abysses, cliffs and surf bubbles.
Of all the things apparent, it is world we own.

Adonis in the Afternoon

Ernest Hemingway, with vine leaves in his hair, calls out to Adonis,
That he should come and drink a little, a little, he says

“The beautiful and the thoughtful are a dangerous combination,
Especially if the Gods ever got wind of it.”

Ernest laughs big and jolly through his hairy face,
Adonis is smooth on the chin, feminine and flower-like,

Not unlike a hyacinth or an orchid, in the face smooth as petals.

Into the Night

Walking Out Into the Night

She knows the rain as something as soothing
As butterscotch on his tongue, grass clippings
In the passing breeze. The complete sameness
Of a face---its fleshy frame of madness
And the cooling breath of God.
I love like a stranger the night; open
Fields of ancient lights, like a garden of
Dead sights made in a glorious Summer
To welcome the cold dead burn of Winter.
Barefoot as I be on this cool May night,
I may now see how bent my feet can be
And my mind well moist with lyric, mostly.
The rain stands, but it does not. It rebels
And has wings and fights weakly gravity,
Pulling on the stars---the few stars alive
To see the stormy sight. But I am not,
I am not the thinker to think these thoughts.
I am so convinced in the thick dark life
I am someone else. Someone who, in life,
Knows the rain as something as soothing
As butterscotch on the tongue, grass clippings
In the passing breeze. She is a burning light,
A colorless rainbow. I am a hollow candle.
But love, like a stranger, walks me out into the night.

No Amount of X

Sonnet 9
(the Previous 9th was Reworked)

No amount of shadows is thick enough
to cover her burning. She is the sun;
Yes, but the Dark swarms with generations
of victims. Dark is only killed
(it cannot smother, only replace),
and only Dark is prey to light.
So what should I think when night
succumbs to dawn in murderous
purple glow-- some sort of surrender
to a galaxy that is treacherous?
And so it is not sentimentality
that I make her a light bulb,
but a catchy eye-ball modernity;
her looks could kill the shadows behind me.

The Benefits of "The Sound of Sense"

I have here, a snippet of a short story...now WATCH as it is transformed using Frostian rhythm.

---------------------------------------------
Bacchus stood up in the back of the bus.
He was expecting his stop soon and he wanted
a good lead before the masses coagulated
and hardened in the aisle, maybe preventing
him from escaping the bus. To his right,
an old woman took tiny sips from a Coke bottle
filled with a opaque yellow liquid.
The label was torn off the bottle,
but Bacchus knew the Coke by its shape.
A good many things in the world
were only known by shape.
They say Bacchus' shape was like a pear.
That's what they said before
he disappeared, of course.

He counted off the passing signs
through his nearest left window.
Bartram Street. Coleman alley. Another Bartram Street,
this one dubbed "North."
He tried to relate them all,
but it was useless, the order
of streets never produced the next street,
it wasn't a formula. One could only predict
through memorization because
everything was ugly and certain.

The old woman took another sip.
A man ruffled his mahogany leather jacket.
The bus driver scratched at his knuckles.
He kept scratching.

Everything is moving,
Bacchus thought to himself,
everyone is fidgeting. Anxiety.
She is waiting at the kitchen table,
crossing and uncrossing her bruised thighs,
the calves dangling from knees
like slabs of meat being smoked.
She would be nervous and anxious to see me.

Stressman Street.

After Stressman, three more streets.
Bacchus grabbed the metal support bar
running the perimeter of the bus' interior.
He liked the icy touch
of the steel length in his hand.
For some reason, lately his palms
had felt fiery and itchy towards the end of the day.
The bus driver was still scratching
his knuckles and Bacchus wanted
to see the driver press the knuckles
to the dashboard in an effort to cool them.
That would be great, to see a connection
like that between two real human beings.
Real humans interacting on a sublime level,
like a massive orgy of similarity and thought.
He guessed the other passenger's anxiety
must be due to the lack of this gracious connection.
No one shared anything, and if the bus driver
would only press his knuckles, if he would
only press his knuckles to the cool
dashboard or even the shiny bar
and lever connected to the door. But he didn't,
and Bacchus felt a depression
like whenever he talked to doctors
about faraway things.
-----------------------------------------
It's a decent experiment.

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Link: The Commonly Confused Words Test written by shortredhead78 on Ok Cupid

And I ask myself, "Why am I better than 73% on BEGINNER!?" The world needs English professors.

sonnet 9

The Things I Cannot Help Myself To

She told me-- if she had spoken to me--
to not enamour her with stupid lines,
with child-like wonder in cliched
poesy. She demanded not to be likened
to any bird or else foul her temper
would fly. And as she limited the world--
as my world was unlimited at the time--
her lipped jaw flexed toward heaven till
the cheeks could bend no more and snapped
valleys of dimples, enough to lose myself
in them. I transformed her whole frame
into some pastoral painting, with the eager
trunks of black cedars glorifiying the sunset
over cottages tidy on reflecting pool sides.

Truer Words Were Never Spoken

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
and then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to better.

Sometimes I have my doubts...but let's just break down this snippet:

Typical of Frost, the movements by the speaker are playful and shift constantly between paradoxes. This is Frost's unique gift as a thinker because he shifts his stance so much so that the paradoxes lose their finality until everything appears just as a state of flux. "I'd like to" connotates a preference but not solidarity with the choice (reference "Two Roads" to see the theme continued) as it is immediately followed with the paradoxical choice.

Frost realizes the dangers of wanting too much and wishing for both sides as he fears his wishes will be granted; "may no fate willfully misunderstand me," is a recanting to his own language and it is curious how Frost, while building his poem, undercuts the rhetoric he uses to construct it. It seems Frost is not enamoured witht he word play in the poem, but the useage of sentences to convey meanings. Sentences can be manipulated, gone back to, and inverted for the purpose of implying something "at play," and it is the boy he mentions "whose only play was what he found himself."

Thus, the rhetoric of the poem mimics the birches as grandly arching things in the setting of a forest. Frost says "though bowed /so low for long, they never right themselves," as if he knows the permanence of print in that the words and structure of poetry, once accepted, is accepted as it is forever, paradox and all. Like the birche's "trunk arching in the woods/ years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground," so is Frost's poetry making that subtle curve in attention and theme for "years afterwards."

Frost is no deep romantic, and "years afterwards" is nothing close to eternity. They might be seen for years, but the trunks will NEVER be righted, attended to or not. In a way, it is also a testemant to the impermanence of poems. The boy riding them "down over and over again" is like the poet returning to the same themes over and over again so that poem never stands as straight as it once did before being overused. These are acts of whole love.

Frost does not want to be "snatched away/ not to return" because although the poems would live forever without an audience, it is a worthy sacrific for love, as far as Frost knows because he "doesn't know where it's likely to go better" except on earth and earthly things.

All in all, the poem exists on a fantastic plane because it does not condescend about love and the such, but it makes poetry more real, more calming. Reading the poem, a reader gets the sense of worry and release simultaneously, a magnificent paradox captures by the one and only Frost.

The Cynical Audience

I want a sonnet because I am in the mood for poesy.

The Cynical Audience

When the bows move in straight and tidy
motions, the music comes like after a
doubling over whollop from a walrus-sized
man thing. The orchestra here is fine as all--
dandy men and women paying their tributes
to Bacchalian delight-- but the stage
echoes a little deeper when they're on it;
Oh, I'd say like when a boy hollers
into a damp cave, hears the voice,
and begins to talk to himself like a thug.
That is so generic and unoriginal,
if it was not for the notes straddling
the measures from binding to bluff,
I would say, in one word, "bah,"
then wait for God to prove me wrong
with a list a million things long.

Diatribe

What is so wrong about wanting a poem centered on sentences as units? Poetry is ultimately an expression of the art of language and how it is used, NOT indulgence of words. Some of us work hard to try to write something effectual and understandable, but there are nihilists in this world who would kill to reduce the unit to its dimension just so they never have to learn the bigger issues. You see it when emo kids write poems full of hurt and sadness because those are the only words they care to know. They don't care to learn the direction of language in terms of pessimism. I tried to make the comment on "Sentences of Sense" at a mock "Write Club" and I was immediately challenged by the idea of e.e.cummings. It seems there's only one writer mindless neo-poets refer to as their savior in nonsense and that is e.e.cummings.

Me: I think this poem would benefit from some structural cohesion like subject/verb/direct objects, so that way there's an apparent action instead of just words. In other words, I'd format these lines to make a sentence.

Useless emo-poet kid: e.e.cummings didn't use sentences.

Me: Actually, he did. It may look like gibberish, but you still read his poems and they read like sentences.

UEPK: What are you talking about? Cummings made up words! <---(proves my point on where the focus is with the new generation of poets)

Me: Yes he did, but he put those words into sentences.

Kid: nuh uh!

Moderator: I think what Sean is trying to say is that the poem needs a cohesive theme.

Me: No. That's not what I said. DO you people even understand grammar?

Kid: All I know is if it flows right...
(Enter my fantasy)
Me: What the hell does "flow" mean?

Kid: Um like when the rhythm's all good.

Me: Oh, fine, I didn't know you just scanned the poem now. Tell me about the rhythm. Is it iambic, trochaic, dactyllic? Does it emphasize irregularity in spots of lyrical resonance? How about the rhymes? Do you think the poem would work better with masculine slant or feminized off rimes?

Kid: Look, it just sounds good to me.

Me: You're done.

Kid: Aaargh I am slain!