unfortunately the sanctuary. the running stopped, the real love came (so many before, none so true), the plateau dropped into another precipice, the love fell away, the running starts again....!
sorry, i find it difficult to articulate any other way, more bluntly - we were engaged, she chose to marry someone else (safety, reliability?) i will always love her, tho we rarely rarely cross paths today
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unfortunately the sanctuary. the running stopped, the real love came (so many before, none so true), the plateau dropped into another precipice, the love fell away, the running starts again....!
sorry, i find it difficult to articulate any other way, more bluntly - we were engaged, she chose to marry someone else (safety, reliability?) i will always love her, tho we rarely rarely cross paths today
Yes it is a bit 'geebers!' - I think it's taken me about 8 years to be able to write that poem (for what it's worth!).
Think I will try and post the last piece of this holiday stint of writing later on tonight, and then leave the poetry alone for a while. Need to make sure my feet stay on the ground....
Cancel my subscription to the Ressurection
Send my credentials to the house of detention
We in here
We're skaters
On a thick surface
Of life that might have been
We each have that quality
Of drifting right through
Of being beyond
living, and often we slide graciously
Our shadows
Shadows more solid, more real
Than our figures
Our shadowy drifts
Away from ourselves
and are stronger
clearer
Darker, darker, realer
than your eyes
than even your body
I know a man
His face was 'doughy'
Clean-shaven
As a child's
He smells of a stagnant bitter palsy
I knew a woman, who breezes
Gently down the hallway
With the breath of semi-sweet
Summer nights, of nightingales
One day her perfume is blossom
The next it makes me retch
She, gliding, glowing, retreating recoiling from touch like a deer, shivering, shaking of the cold, a cold no fire can reach (no man-made fire, no artificial fire), the shaking of bones frozen to the core, the only escape - to glide, glide away from that, glow beyond that, retreat beyond your material bounds, prison cell, holding body, holding mind, no cell yet holds gliding force, and so we glide onwards, inwards, outwards
The man with
Soft face
had hard boots
He said he was a Jew
Yet he certainly wasn't that
We sat talking in the yard his first night and we cried
The next day someone punched me in the face
Another fellow
Told me some brutal facts
That everyone here's a casualty
Of another's' past
Victim somehow
Of someone else's pain
Locked away and yet coming back, coming back
To haunt us
To haunt me
You see, I'm the only one here
didn't have to have that happen
Me, only by proxy
Such a terrible burden to bear
What a duty to shirk
I'm not sure I can
Vulnerability, fragility like this
Is too strong to contend with
Like when you strip back the shellfish, to
see the fragile quivering flesh
It really is terrifying
You have to step away
To see no protection
and gauge what is left
A soft so soft centre
With such brittle shell.
That man wept with me
yet still punched me in the face
Such a tragic figure in his nightclothes
Yet he cuts people's throats I'm told
We can't balance men and boys here,
everyone floats one way or another.
She drags, she cowers
So she learns to float
Frozen, to the outside
Like a stick
Yet deep within her
Coals still rage
She says she has no room
She rarely eats
Yet she survives
On the meagre words
Of a stranger's hope
We need some backbone in here
right now
A spine from which they can strip
personality then we hang it back on
These people need a bit of ament, amore, or something like that
Need a bit more backbone
when we're robbed, robbed of decorum and of right
We really do go wild
'I need to wee
Please, please unlock the door'
Won't you do it?
Just let me outside then
I'll piss all over your fucking yard
We're right down to animal behaviour now
(not rights)
We were genteel, gentle, wise, corrupted, cracked,
Now we're tough, fragile, insipid, the wildest and 'kept'
Kept from being ourselves
Only the one with some spine survives
The spine that endures the snapping back
Go to your basket
Get to your bed
Get out of here?
Get down and beg
But you my friend were different
I had the words
You had the knowledge
We should make lots of money
Swear if we ever get out of here
The three of us will attend a comic show
and heckle Jimmy Carr
He won't stand a chance
And so we made a pact
One I've not broken yet
(Just you fucking wait)
But first learn to break yourself down
Shatter yourself before they do it to you
Start practising now, it gets a lot worse than this
Our looming shadows are
Twice as solid as our figures
Twice as tough as our shadow
Twice as solid as our selves
Our former selves
Innocence - the only thing that will see you through this
Innocence is there, catch it, lock it in your pocket
Absolute fear
You cannot really face it
You have to face it
face it
So I faced it, once
Oh, one more thing -
Tell the truth here once only
And never make that mistake again
Cancel my subscription to the Ressurection
Send my credentials to the house of detention
The January sun spreads its balm
on earth's upturned belly, shadows that have always fitted
their shapes, re-fit them. Breakers spread welcome.
Accept it. Watch how spray will burst
like a cat scrambling up the side of a wall,
gripping, sliding, surrendering; how at first,
its claws hook then slip with a quickening fall
to the lace-rocked foam. That is the heart, coming home,
trying to fasten on everything it moved from,
how salted things only increase its thirst.
Cancel my subscription to the Ressurection
Send my credentials to the house of detention
this is nice... like a paintin... reminds me of one of my sister's paintings.
This poem's haunting... until the end, that is
Thanks. I'm not generally a very visual person - 'aural' ?? But when I go into these 'intense' modes (shall we call them), it's like my eyes are set on fire, and I see lots of things very vividly, very clearly (sometimes way too clearly), and I'm receptive, and the things I see stay imprinted on the 'negatives' running at the back of my brain. When I come back to normal everything is a lot more mundane, and it's my ears that start working again. Is interesting though, because I have a very good memory, so when writing some of these my 'minds-eye' gets very clear images of what I have seen before, in different times, different circumstances.
I know some people access these states with hallucinogenic drugs, but I can't risk that these days - to be honest I think when I see clearly I can see and hear clearer than ever, and largely to do with lots of tai chi / qigong practice (and no drugs) over the intervening years. I'm not trying to be egotistical here - just honest (about me) - i'm not trying to say these poems are all that special. But I'm amazed how some people swear by their drug use, yet can't tolerate the idea that other people (like the ancient Chinese imho) have gone so far beyond some alternative perceptual modes that they have developed some complete systems for going deeper, (whilst staying stable) that Western science etc barely credits with any value at all. What am I trying to say? That a 'clear eye', clear mind, doesn't come with drugs, but with having roots and looking to the heavens. I need to work on my roots....
I don't really know why I'm saying all this here - just thinking aloud. it's just that I have been through a lot of challenging experiences, and I really believe that one of the major things which has helped me to keep myself, my body and spirit together has been the other years of tai chi practice.
Anyway, I would like to see some of your sister's paintings some time!!
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it's something that you see things so vividly when you enter these states of mind; intense modes as you call em...
I have mad vivid dreams which are real and often take effect but in complex ways, which is why I go on believing in this other world of mine, alongside this world...and then I've got clear images of my hereafter...
but what you're talkin about is of course very different, cuz you're awake and that's crazy intense... you're very right about tai chi...it's good shit that you're familiar with those practices... they're pure... no shit, western/ conventional science disregards a whole lot... hell Native Americans are known to reach states of mind in the beyond, and that shows where digging nature can get you so ...
Yeah it's frustrating it has taken us so many years to forget all the wisdom we already knew!
Even in the 1970s altered states of perception, psychosis, delirium, hallucination - were recognised as being aspects of the psyche, and often highly symbolic, meaningful processes, and in many ways 'constructive'. The current obsessions with 'brain', measuring parts of the brain that light up on a machine, observing neurochemical reactions - that is like 50 years of psychiatry and neuro-science, compared with thousands upon thousands of years of human understanding, thought, philosophy and evolving wisdom. It makes me want to throw a brick through a window.
I once saw a talk by mental health commentator RC, who speaks publicly about hearing voices, and the treatments he's received to obliterate those. I remember really really clearly one sentence he said, and it has stayed with me for about 15 years. He said
'You know, the voices I heard, they are not random things, coming from nowhere - they are the voice of the Catholic priest that sexually abused me when I was 6 years old, the voice of my first lover who took her own life, and the voice of my father who died when I was a young man'
Anyway, I should probably quieten down a bit, since this is the 'poetry' forum, and there is no greater crime than speaking about a topic in the wrong place. Thanks for talking. I might delete these last few posts. Not sure. Speak again soon?
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Send my credentials to the house of detention
why delete... this is the right shit in the right place... voices and pictures in our heads, that's where freakin poetry, music, art come from ... better yet, post this on The Porch
hahaha - I'm loathe to post anything of substance in the porch - for fear of recrimination & retribution. It is a bit tiresome getting told off for speaking more freely than the subject line. Can you imagine having a dinner party with porch standards? 'Yeah, that's a great point my friend, but I really can't relate, seeing as we are currently on the 'desert' topic - would you mind saving that idea for the 'what I did at the weekend' discussion which is currently being held in the other room'.
A very boring dinner party!!
Why delete? good question. Why remove your underwear from the washing line? even better question!!
I think it's time for me to go to bed!!
Cancel my subscription to the Ressurection
Send my credentials to the house of detention
When my Dad finally
came to collect me
From that place
And take me home,
All I could think of
Was the mass of newspapers
And mess left under my bed.
What would become of them?
A nurse gripped my arm
'Don't worry,
Get out of here -
I don't ever
Want to see you here again.'
Dispatched
To the Outside World
With abrupt steely kindness.
Still, I scurried back to try
and tidy up the detritus.
What chaos to leave
For the next resident.
What if they became haunted
By my horror?
As if every image
Hallucination, vision, terror
and dissolute idea
Still lay there trapped under glass
Between the dull and faded sheets
of last year's magazines
secreted under my bed
And might haunt them too.
My life: the regimen of dormitory rituals;
Of locked and unlocked drawers
Possessions, trinkets, cryptic codes
Cheap amulets and talismen
Which only I knew how to decipher
Had already been meticulously dismantled
Dissolved, dismembered by
The Staff
And now seemed inconclusive
Impotent, insubstantial....
Nevertheless I shuffled
my legs towards the shuffling the magazines
'Leave them, Go!'
Next thing I knew
I was outside,
And as I shut the solid heavy door
Of my father's off-white car
Clunk
I knew it was over
It was finished
The viscous & solid green-blue world
Rose up to surround me
In my Dad's firm embrace.
He looking more troubled
Than me.
I was calm,
Just bewildered
Stunned, staggering
Stumbling blinking
Into daylight
Reeling, drunk, yet still on my feet.
(You would not believe the nightmares I've just seen)
I shook myself alert, awake
Looked squarely into my father's unblinking eyes,
and said
"Can we just go home now please Dad?"
There is no depth
No pit
No door
No lock
from which you cannot escape
No rock
from which you cannot
build
and I was just sayin to Pandora what lil figures in such surroundings do for me... in short, relief from the pain in this world ...and from growin numb... your words are also positive... thank you
and right now we can bounce good karma straight off a geo-stationary satellite in the exosphere- words zipping out across the oceans, across the world in 'real' time; + we still have time to look at breasts or pecs as much as we feel like. People died for this - a right royal mix of the depraved and the sublime.
'Hit submit!'
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Send my credentials to the house of detention
Comments
What would be over, the love or the running.
Or something else.
I have to know these things.
sorry, i find it difficult to articulate any other way, more bluntly - we were engaged, she chose to marry someone else (safety, reliability?) i will always love her, tho we rarely rarely cross paths today
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Thanks.
Geebers!
Yes it is a bit 'geebers!' - I think it's taken me about 8 years to be able to write that poem (for what it's worth!).
Think I will try and post the last piece of this holiday stint of writing later on tonight, and then leave the poetry alone for a while. Need to make sure my feet stay on the ground....
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Thanks sky - you will, we will, but as that Van the man says 'You've got to do it in your own way'. There's a long way to go
You're doing it - you must be, or else seeing your name wouldn't fill me with both excitement and fear!
Send my credentials to the house of detention
We in here
We're skaters
On a thick surface
Of life that might have been
We each have that quality
Of drifting right through
Of being beyond
living, and often we slide graciously
Our shadows
Shadows more solid, more real
Than our figures
Our shadowy drifts
Away from ourselves
and are stronger
clearer
Darker, darker, realer
than your eyes
than even your body
I know a man
His face was 'doughy'
Clean-shaven
As a child's
He smells of a stagnant bitter palsy
I knew a woman, who breezes
Gently down the hallway
With the breath of semi-sweet
Summer nights, of nightingales
One day her perfume is blossom
The next it makes me retch
She, gliding, glowing, retreating recoiling from touch like a deer, shivering, shaking of the cold, a cold no fire can reach (no man-made fire, no artificial fire), the shaking of bones frozen to the core, the only escape - to glide, glide away from that, glow beyond that, retreat beyond your material bounds, prison cell, holding body, holding mind, no cell yet holds gliding force, and so we glide onwards, inwards, outwards
The man with
Soft face
had hard boots
He said he was a Jew
Yet he certainly wasn't that
We sat talking in the yard his first night and we cried
The next day someone punched me in the face
Another fellow
Told me some brutal facts
That everyone here's a casualty
Of another's' past
Victim somehow
Of someone else's pain
Locked away and yet coming back, coming back
To haunt us
To haunt me
You see, I'm the only one here
didn't have to have that happen
Me, only by proxy
Such a terrible burden to bear
What a duty to shirk
I'm not sure I can
Vulnerability, fragility like this
Is too strong to contend with
Like when you strip back the shellfish, to
see the fragile quivering flesh
It really is terrifying
You have to step away
To see no protection
and gauge what is left
A soft so soft centre
With such brittle shell.
That man wept with me
yet still punched me in the face
Such a tragic figure in his nightclothes
Yet he cuts people's throats I'm told
We can't balance men and boys here,
everyone floats one way or another.
She drags, she cowers
So she learns to float
Frozen, to the outside
Like a stick
Yet deep within her
Coals still rage
She says she has no room
She rarely eats
Yet she survives
On the meagre words
Of a stranger's hope
We need some backbone in here
right now
A spine from which they can strip
personality then we hang it back on
These people need a bit of ament, amore, or something like that
Need a bit more backbone
when we're robbed, robbed of decorum and of right
We really do go wild
'I need to wee
Please, please unlock the door'
Won't you do it?
Just let me outside then
I'll piss all over your fucking yard
We're right down to animal behaviour now
(not rights)
We were genteel, gentle, wise, corrupted, cracked,
Now we're tough, fragile, insipid, the wildest and 'kept'
Kept from being ourselves
Only the one with some spine survives
The spine that endures the snapping back
Go to your basket
Get to your bed
Get out of here?
Get down and beg
But you my friend were different
I had the words
You had the knowledge
We should make lots of money
Swear if we ever get out of here
The three of us will attend a comic show
and heckle Jimmy Carr
He won't stand a chance
And so we made a pact
One I've not broken yet
(Just you fucking wait)
But first learn to break yourself down
Shatter yourself before they do it to you
Start practising now, it gets a lot worse than this
Our looming shadows are
Twice as solid as our figures
Twice as tough as our shadow
Twice as solid as our selves
Our former selves
Innocence - the only thing that will see you through this
Innocence is there, catch it, lock it in your pocket
Absolute fear
You cannot really face it
You have to face it
face it
So I faced it, once
Oh, one more thing -
Tell the truth here once only
And never make that mistake again
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Settled
Put it away
Empty the cup and
Flush it away
Restock the box and
Pack it away
Dad's model glider
Another beach
Another day
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Derek Walcott (2010)
The January sun spreads its balm
on earth's upturned belly, shadows that have always fitted
their shapes, re-fit them. Breakers spread welcome.
Accept it. Watch how spray will burst
like a cat scrambling up the side of a wall,
gripping, sliding, surrendering; how at first,
its claws hook then slip with a quickening fall
to the lace-rocked foam. That is the heart, coming home,
trying to fasten on everything it moved from,
how salted things only increase its thirst.
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Send my credentials to the house of detention
this is nice... like a paintin... reminds me of one of my sister's paintings.
This poem's haunting... until the end, that is
Thanks. I'm not generally a very visual person - 'aural' ?? But when I go into these 'intense' modes (shall we call them), it's like my eyes are set on fire, and I see lots of things very vividly, very clearly (sometimes way too clearly), and I'm receptive, and the things I see stay imprinted on the 'negatives' running at the back of my brain. When I come back to normal everything is a lot more mundane, and it's my ears that start working again. Is interesting though, because I have a very good memory, so when writing some of these my 'minds-eye' gets very clear images of what I have seen before, in different times, different circumstances.
I know some people access these states with hallucinogenic drugs, but I can't risk that these days - to be honest I think when I see clearly I can see and hear clearer than ever, and largely to do with lots of tai chi / qigong practice (and no drugs) over the intervening years. I'm not trying to be egotistical here - just honest (about me) - i'm not trying to say these poems are all that special. But I'm amazed how some people swear by their drug use, yet can't tolerate the idea that other people (like the ancient Chinese imho) have gone so far beyond some alternative perceptual modes that they have developed some complete systems for going deeper, (whilst staying stable) that Western science etc barely credits with any value at all. What am I trying to say? That a 'clear eye', clear mind, doesn't come with drugs, but with having roots and looking to the heavens. I need to work on my roots....
I don't really know why I'm saying all this here - just thinking aloud. it's just that I have been through a lot of challenging experiences, and I really believe that one of the major things which has helped me to keep myself, my body and spirit together has been the other years of tai chi practice.
Anyway, I would like to see some of your sister's paintings some time!!
Send my credentials to the house of detention
I have mad vivid dreams which are real and often take effect but in complex ways, which is why I go on believing in this other world of mine, alongside this world...and then I've got clear images of my hereafter...
but what you're talkin about is of course very different, cuz you're awake and that's crazy intense... you're very right about tai chi...it's good shit that you're familiar with those practices... they're pure... no shit, western/ conventional science disregards a whole lot... hell Native Americans are known to reach states of mind in the beyond, and that shows where digging nature can get you so ...
Even in the 1970s altered states of perception, psychosis, delirium, hallucination - were recognised as being aspects of the psyche, and often highly symbolic, meaningful processes, and in many ways 'constructive'. The current obsessions with 'brain', measuring parts of the brain that light up on a machine, observing neurochemical reactions - that is like 50 years of psychiatry and neuro-science, compared with thousands upon thousands of years of human understanding, thought, philosophy and evolving wisdom. It makes me want to throw a brick through a window.
I once saw a talk by mental health commentator RC, who speaks publicly about hearing voices, and the treatments he's received to obliterate those. I remember really really clearly one sentence he said, and it has stayed with me for about 15 years. He said
'You know, the voices I heard, they are not random things, coming from nowhere - they are the voice of the Catholic priest that sexually abused me when I was 6 years old, the voice of my first lover who took her own life, and the voice of my father who died when I was a young man'
Anyway, I should probably quieten down a bit, since this is the 'poetry' forum, and there is no greater crime than speaking about a topic in the wrong place. Thanks for talking. I might delete these last few posts. Not sure. Speak again soon?
Send my credentials to the house of detention
A very boring dinner party!!
Why delete? good question. Why remove your underwear from the washing line? even better question!!
I think it's time for me to go to bed!!
Send my credentials to the house of detention
read this a while back... what a gripping story
and I was just sayin to Pandora what lil figures in such surroundings do for me... in short, relief from the pain in this world ...and from growin numb... your words are also positive... thank you
and right now we can bounce good karma straight off a geo-stationary satellite in the exosphere- words zipping out across the oceans, across the world in 'real' time; + we still have time to look at breasts or pecs as much as we feel like. People died for this - a right royal mix of the depraved and the sublime.
'Hit submit!'
Send my credentials to the house of detention
You lock me up
You beat me up
You strip me of my lighter
And drug me up
But I come back
tougher
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Send my credentials to the house of detention