Rainsplashed windowpane/ royalblue predawn/ pavement wetglazed/ birchtree sparrowweighted/ boughbrown windwaving/ gardenhedge diagonalbobbing/ telephonewire trapezeyanking/ Electropulsing morning/ Electropulsing morning now/ Electropulsing growing dawning/now and now and now and now/ electropulsing shooting green in blue/in blooming Junerose wetskin dripping/ open garden greening budding joy just joy just now with the red show in the sky and the bleed of gold and the end of the shower and the rising of stems and the reaching out of birches and love is all and it's all and it's all you'll ever be able really ever ever ever to feel oh feel it yes feel it oh feel it yes be it yes be. Yes. Be.
If you put a dog up on a high chair
there'll come a point when he'll need to come down for a piss.
And it's only fair to get a ladder up to him
when the chair's higher than parliament,
and try to coax him down with a retirement bone.
But the dog in the chair now has his sights on the giant monkey
a little bit to the right of the edge of the world
who's telling him to keep sat
and yelp down at his trained hounds
and to tear apart some beaten up alleycat
bad cat -
but just a cat on the other side of the dogs
and the signifying monkey -
on the basis of a forged doggier
sorry dossier
that says he's planning on using his claws
within forty five minutes of getting a mawling
from the big mufukin dog poh-lice.
But back yesterday
when the inspecting greyhounds from head office went snooping
the cat had no claws that they could see
and yet the monkey said get the cat and get his cream
we'll free the worms
that cat has got claws
he hadn't any to start with
but I sold him some
They're detachable, honest
He says they came off in a fight
But he hid them in some trashcan somewhere
Fuck Officer Dibble
here come the bloodhounds
whoo hoo whoo hoo yessssssurrrreeee.
Well, the alley's on fire and there were no claws
and the worms are confusing the bloodhounds, so many, multiplying,
wanting their soil back again
instead of being run by a changeover from the dogs to some new cats
who are only going to gobble them whole
and the monkey's still waving his arms in the distance
He's like King Kong except he stays up and the buildings fall down
and he's waving at the dog
Git up dog
do it fuhh history
Ah'll jis' stay here wid mah banana yis yis
you command the show!
Well the piss is starting to run down the ladder
into the gutters
into the streets
into the alleys
and when the chair comes down
and people write about the dog
who wanted a place in history
all they'll see is sky and burning smoke
and if they turn around
amid the bones of cats and dogs
there'll be worms
lots of worms
and the lingering stink of piss from the dog king
in the shadow of monkey shitpile mountain.
"They'll cut yer bleedin' balls off if you keep
Writin' about Bu$h like that, you know.
They'll climb the drainpipe an' when you're asleep
They'll get up in your room, then tippytoe
they'll pull the sheets back, an' they'll cut yer tool
clean off. I'm tellin 'ya. So shut yer gob.
One day you'll want some dosh an' I KNOW! Who'll
Be givin' yer the chance of some nice job
When ye've been callin' their own president a chimp?
He is a chimp. A fughin' a$$. But STILL
Unless you DO like walkin' with a limp
an' don't want children, ye're doin' well
To get it chopped. So watch yer gob an' write
about the spring, an' cut the protest shite."
And now the loved ones of fallen US soldiers -
just young men, no more nor less -
have to live the rest of their lives
knowing that their darlings were slain today
under order to suppress
the very people they were sent away to free.
Lyrical poetry gets difficult
in the face of the unspeakable.
Another Bloody Sunday sees
new orphans and new widows.
The day that Najaf disagrees
with forces in the shadows
of Pentagon bureaucracy,
who close newspapers down
(which call for more democracy
in their Iraqi town
against the threat of empire),
the ordered army push,
Commanded by 'phone wire
by pretzel-eating Bush.
Both sides leave dead the young and strong
Who fought for freedom's ring.
Both sides now see their causes wrong
and blood on everything.
Think about Najaf, now, George,
Next time you're at a dinner,
Before you get that well-known urge
To gloat, all-owning-winner:
Those people whom you said to free
because God loves to save
are grieving for their dead today
beside a new mass grave.
Bremner says "The people crossed the line;
The demonstrators this time went too far."
Something scratches in this mind of mine:
Dyer's words, just after Amritsar.
He has his own customised bowl
The gilded pate of a skull
ripped from a man of the land
whose calloused and broken hand
is now owned by the company board
whose profits per annum have soared.
He has his own customised spoon
That Daddy had given him when
he pleased Mummy by learning to say
"More candy for poor little me."
He sits in his room with the bright
neon lights blurring his sight
of a city grown fat on the spoil
of the labour of folk of the soil.
And writes little poems that cry
"There's nothing more urgent than my
suffering, than of my pain."
He sucks in his cheeks so to 'wane'.
But Daddy will teach him to kill
and soon he'll be happy to fill
his bowl with the means of production
by workers whose meaningless action
has made them the dead and the null,
with no time for philosophy's pull
into privileged lounges of mind
where hand-to mouth fear's left behind
for singing of "poor-little-me
and my soft cushioned hell and my play
with escapist ideas of a field
to which I like the peasant could wield
my sickel and merrily sow
a life in the sun as I go...."
Lokrian Aias is to blame,
For plundering Kassandra in Athene's temple
while the flames licked the jut of the bastion
From which Astyanax was hurled.
You'll never get your nostoi now, soldiers.
Oh, Agamemnon will get back,
But the seer says
Klytemnaistra's got Aigisthos
keeping the bed warm
and the knives sharp for his return.
So it's just games of backgammon for now,
and counting either the campfires along the plain
or the poking masts in the waters
of vessels that chanced the Hellesport winds
which in their fullthroated gurgling drown
became the cries of boys for deaf mothers in Sparta.
Lokrian Aias was impetuous in fire,
toppling statues, letting the slaves burn the citadel
once Helen was led in tears to Menelaos.
Lokrian Aias is to blame.
That Saturday morning of Diana's funeral, I was on
Dad's allotment, round by the back of the football stadium;
pulling what he called Fat Hen, couchgrass and bindweed,
from the furrows of his nine pol spud plot. Fat blue lazy
flies headbutted my arms, hysterically, as I rooted out the tenacious
choking growths by the roots from the soil. As I was freeing the crop,
already I was musing my own conspiracy theories,
in reckoning that this must have been what was happening in the Palace.
It was hot, I was out, the noon sky was open and there were others,
like me, working under the sun, redfaced, sweating and digging
down in the turning earth with their forks pronging and throwing up
baby potatoes, heirs free of the smother of weed perennials.
We weren't escaping history here, though we weren't indoors
watching the flag draped coffin and hearing "We love you" cries
in the undignified electric near-silence of a relayed outside broadcast,
through our television screens. Rather, we were enacting an allegory
of the politics of court
with the ruthless efficiency of an industry protecting its dynasty
in September, before the weather's inevitable turn.
I am delighted to make your acquaintance;
your business attachee has given me assurance
of your trusted support.
I am Barrister Squiggleyquinker O' Radar-Dantooine;
I represent the Most Excellent Highnesses
the Royal Family of Maleftyboobu,
exiled by a coup in their native State in 1974.
They have lived in an undisclosed underground
mountain water filtering system
near the border with Yellatenashus
ever since
and have declared themselves bankrupt
in order to preserve their wealth
for a day of glorious return.
I am writing to you today
To entrust you with 38 suitcases
containing their secret wealth
to be deposited at a Swiss bank of our deciding
a total of 800 million USD
which we will hand over to you
at an agreed time
and
at a specified public location.
For a percentage
which we will generously award you,
plus freedom of the city of L____
you must contact me at ________
with a cheque for $999.99
We know in refracted glass light waves of memory
We know in daytime cumulai shining weaves of starlight
We know how our touch will feel
For we have touched in spirit, heart and mind
And walk together in quiet streets of Cambridge and Seattle
when strangers think us blissfully alone
oh
I know your splendid gift,
your jewel of heart,
and under cassiopeian skies
forever
squiggly
we kiss.
It's because of the beauty of the woman I'm writing about that the words come. And they're simple words, simple ideas. You couldn't contrive complex feelings and images, running on and on, for expressions of love. Not true love. Love's very easy. It's not convoluted or to be chiselled out of the psyche as some monumental testament of altruism, often to the benefit only of appeasing one's ego. Remember when Lear asks Goneril and Regan to protest their love for their father and they produce these protracted speeches, "I love you dearer than space, eyesight"..."that which the smallest square of sense possesses".... Well, Cordelia's love is gentle, simple and true. She can't affect all these grandiose tropes and conceits. And my love for my love is beautiful and true, no more nor less.
True love is far from ahistorical, apolitical, asocial, insular and in a vacuum: it TRANSCENDS the convolutions of life by working through them, unblocking their knots of fear and reticence and allowing freedom to share. It not an escape from the past but a channelling of one's life towards the freeflow of connection with another, and a celebration of that achieved objective: unrestrained, trusting oneness. True love is easy when the energy of love is channelled out to another and keeps flowing, keeps flowing, is reciprocated and trust is built.
King Lear in Shakespeare's play of 1605 had three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. An old man, vain and lacking in judgement, Lear decided to abdicate his power and divide his kingdom in three, and, in order to award good lands and chattels to his daughters, organised a love test: "Tell me, my daughters...which of you shall we say doth love us most?" Goneril and Regan came out with these complex expostulations and conceits on the nature of their love; Cordelia said she would say nothing in honour of her father. Lear, mistaking her refusal to cheapen her love by dulling it with complex speeches (ultimately only self- referential and aggrandising), banished Cordelia to France, and thus began his reversal of fortune. Cordelia and Regan took his lands between them and rendered him homeless, blinding his trusted Earl of Cornwall and throwing the country deeper into turmoil. Lear in the end realised, with his kingdom restored to him after wars that one way or another left all his daughters dead and his sanity shattered, that Cordelia's love was the truest for being the easiest and the least accommodating of other kinds of discourse. It was the realisation of true love's lack of complexity that restored him just before death to sanity and to the prospect of an all encompassing humanity.
George Eliot in "Middlemarch" tries to convey how the web of affinities between people - true social concordance - will not permit convolutions of ego and individual past experience which impede the flow of vital energy: love must be utterly free from the tendency to convolute its path or rather turn back inwards, thinking itself a centre of illumination (in "knowing" the nature of love and society by seeing intricate correspondences between past and future, personal events) :
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person...
And actually, squiggly love is the love of pragmatic idealists.Carnival polyphonies of happysquigglysilliness bring forth the freest laughs of deepest love. And you know what Brecht said, even miserable bastard Brecht: "Nothing needs less justification than pleasure."
An habitual poet
is like a window cleaner
who, dreaming in his bed at night
wakes up his wife by kicking the covers off
and making climbing motions,
up some invisible ladder,
while flat on his back on his mattress.
His wife nudges him awake,
"Hey, where are you going in that dream?",
and the window cleaner replies,
"I was going to the shops."
An habitual poet is like that,
Always dreaming one can get from A to B
Living vertically, lying on the horizontal.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots An habitual poet
is like a window cleaner
who, dreaming in his bed at night
wakes up his wife by kicking the covers off
and making climbing motions,
up some invisible ladder,
while flat on his back on his mattress.
His wife nudges him awake,
"Hey, where are you going in that dream?",
and the window cleaner replies,
"I was going to the shops."
An habitual poet is like that,
Always dreaming one can get from A to B
Living vertically, lying on the horizontal.
do you want to be a habitual poet, or rather a poet of the moment?
Write. Wind each new thought upon the stream;
and in its contradiction of response,
Or seeming stagnance, see that rippled gleam
That might suggest true movement. If you sense
a hidden wave in what seems blanket still,
Write more, wind each desire, and you'll see
The willows nod and rustle, and you will
hear the rushing babble of the free
gush of water, brimming, charged with light
That is your reader's understanding heart.
Orange is the brightest colour, mixing
carrots fresh from the wild mind, mixing
Mashed potatos and desire, stirring
Broccolli shoots with pepper rain.
Merlot kept us warm, covering
Nights in forgetful glows, feeding
A lot of life to the Pearl Jam message pit....
If anybody asks you where I'm gone
That they don't see me quite as much these days
Just say a woman dancing in the sun
Makes my loose words and finger tapestries
And I'm just wishing for a merchant ivory smile
I'm just living for a merchant ivory smile
She paints a Turkish king and spider queen
She paints a palace bird that flies outside
She paints a night of sleepy bottle green
She paints a dance of angels in the shade
And I'm here dreaming of a merchant ivory smile
I'm here learning from a merchant ivory smile
(Covespool waters web me
Lead me to her call
If I had ten beginnings
I'd choose this one from all.....)
She's like someone who lived here long ago
She's like someone you'd think had never been
She lets me count the colours I've to know
She lets me see the magic that she's seen
She's like the film star
with the merchant ivory smile
She's like the film star
with the merchant ivory smile
I'm just wishing
for a merchant ivory smile
I'm here living
for a merchant ivory smile
Kaspar sowed his name in seed
in his patch of garden,
and in time the signature grew, green
Between the cabbage and onion drills.
He would inspect his name every day,
Watching it grow there, watering his little self
and remembering those years in darkness, as
the foundling locked in the cellar.
One morning he went to the garden
and saw someone had trampled upon his name,
Breaking the loops and flourishes
and grinding the tall characters into the soil.
Kaspar cried until sunset,
but said he would sow his name again.
The trampler came back in the dark
and killed him as he dreamed in hope.
I watched her, alone by the Kilbunny Graves
Her face between fuschia, in noon's wind ablaze.
I wondered, when, weary, she knelt down to sleep
At the head of a stone she had brought from the sea.
And deeply she mourned as her tears fell to ground
So softly she cried that her grief had no sound
Till she looked in my eyes and said unto me:
"We'll sleep soon, my love, 'neath the dead soldier's tree".
And, wandering on through the old Coolfin road
She looked in my eyes for a trace of her soul.
She rested herself at the tree and we lay
Until the last light of the dusk fell away,
Till the light of the dusk fell away.
"Hey, Man, check my prayer mat out", Tom moaned,
pointing to an orange spiral weave
nailed up on his wall. "Man, that was owned
By one cool guy like you would not believe",
This hippy drawled, crosslegged on the floor
Though there were three good comfy chairs about.
"I was in the Outback, hiking. More
than three days walking, man, without
food, just water. Then this well cool dude,
A tribesman dude with dreads came up to me
there, in the desert. He said 'You need food?
I've not got food but what I have for thee '-
yeah man, like he said 'thee' - 'is this good charm,
This prayer mat that I've carried all my life.
It blesses you and keeps you free from harm.
It's yours, my friend, for ten bucks ninety five,
and you'll find your oasis before dawn, yaaa.'
I gave the dude the money, and like wow,
I found this burger bar just round the corner!
So, like, that prayer mat's special to me now.
It might have been the dude's great grandad, in
spirit form, protecting me from badshit,
or like the spirit of some King who's been
leader of this tribe, now in my bedsit,
on my wall. The dude's name, I've forgotten ...
It'd blow my mind if that got stolen."
I spied the map up close. Right at the bottom,
A label (faint but clear) read "Made in Poland".
Strange attractors, cyclone vistas,
Mandelbrot-curving new births in the death of a star
Make bright refractors, lightpulse trysters
Which spin out a dervish seducing the dark of afar
A bell and a curl, an hourglass eye
The wave of a sonic whirl, sticking
so
viscous
in light and sound
I
can
feel
now
Strange attractors, Kochcurve twisters
Endless beginnings of ends linking heaven into one
Galactic reactors, roll the seven sisters
Goldenblue mythos of jewels fusing all into one
round into one
spiral into one
spiral into one
spiral into one
A surge, a curl, a balleen laugh
massing dorsal plains, fins adance:
the foragers
turn in surf.
Ocean forests breathe
between the grooves of twenty throats
and
whitened viscous curves
eternally splay,
endless in sunlight,
burbling vistas of foam.
Then, gyrating masses splash back
tendril orbits of reed
and giddy jellyfish,
sending each spinning, current-bound
from under whipping flukes.
Together they forage, these dancers,
by social instinct.
Together, they are tasking this sharing of krill.
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Down where windheaving bogrush grows,
Siltsabled rivulets incline
Loveled to where the ocean knows:
No joys repine.
And in the greening breakers where
the currents rise beyond Dooagh
an echoed shadowed light lives there:
Andromeda!
I love the meter variations there. I'm in the process of learning my poetry terms, but it seems you go like this:
A 8
B 8
A 8
B 4
Just for my own education, that would make the first three lines tetrameter, followed by a 4th 'quad'rameter. Plus, the stanzas are organized in a quatrain, which my packet says is the most common stanza form in English.
Realizing this information, how do you decide what effect you would like to make on the reader, by making use of various poetic devices?
The 4th line of the last stanza is happy and interesting, which seems to be because of its 4 beat phrase, and also because it is one word that flows easily.
Though poetry is more than poetic devices, the message doesn't come across as strongly unless the proper devices aren't present, and I'd love to be able to get my message across more strongly.
p.s. I do believe this is the 600th post on this thread.
Liberal Douchebags that Blame Bush for Everything are Useless Pieces of Trash. I Shit on You.
Comments
was in a boarding house in South East London."
"What did you have to eat then, Dad?"
"Cats' pricks, shite, boiled leather, nails ... and... and... onions."
and the stars, unborn babies,
find tonight's lovers.
If you put a dog up on a high chair
there'll come a point when he'll need to come down for a piss.
And it's only fair to get a ladder up to him
when the chair's higher than parliament,
and try to coax him down with a retirement bone.
But the dog in the chair now has his sights on the giant monkey
a little bit to the right of the edge of the world
who's telling him to keep sat
and yelp down at his trained hounds
and to tear apart some beaten up alleycat
bad cat -
but just a cat on the other side of the dogs
and the signifying monkey -
on the basis of a forged doggier
sorry dossier
that says he's planning on using his claws
within forty five minutes of getting a mawling
from the big mufukin dog poh-lice.
But back yesterday
when the inspecting greyhounds from head office went snooping
the cat had no claws that they could see
and yet the monkey said get the cat and get his cream
we'll free the worms
that cat has got claws
he hadn't any to start with
but I sold him some
They're detachable, honest
He says they came off in a fight
But he hid them in some trashcan somewhere
Fuck Officer Dibble
here come the bloodhounds
whoo hoo whoo hoo yessssssurrrreeee.
Well, the alley's on fire and there were no claws
and the worms are confusing the bloodhounds, so many, multiplying,
wanting their soil back again
instead of being run by a changeover from the dogs to some new cats
who are only going to gobble them whole
and the monkey's still waving his arms in the distance
He's like King Kong except he stays up and the buildings fall down
and he's waving at the dog
Git up dog
do it fuhh history
Ah'll jis' stay here wid mah banana yis yis
you command the show!
Well the piss is starting to run down the ladder
into the gutters
into the streets
into the alleys
and when the chair comes down
and people write about the dog
who wanted a place in history
all they'll see is sky and burning smoke
and if they turn around
amid the bones of cats and dogs
there'll be worms
lots of worms
and the lingering stink of piss from the dog king
in the shadow of monkey shitpile mountain.
"They'll cut yer bleedin' balls off if you keep
Writin' about Bu$h like that, you know.
They'll climb the drainpipe an' when you're asleep
They'll get up in your room, then tippytoe
they'll pull the sheets back, an' they'll cut yer tool
clean off. I'm tellin 'ya. So shut yer gob.
One day you'll want some dosh an' I KNOW! Who'll
Be givin' yer the chance of some nice job
When ye've been callin' their own president a chimp?
He is a chimp. A fughin' a$$. But STILL
Unless you DO like walkin' with a limp
an' don't want children, ye're doin' well
To get it chopped. So watch yer gob an' write
about the spring, an' cut the protest shite."
just young men, no more nor less -
have to live the rest of their lives
knowing that their darlings were slain today
under order to suppress
the very people they were sent away to free.
Lyrical poetry gets difficult
in the face of the unspeakable.
Another Bloody Sunday sees
new orphans and new widows.
The day that Najaf disagrees
with forces in the shadows
of Pentagon bureaucracy,
who close newspapers down
(which call for more democracy
in their Iraqi town
against the threat of empire),
the ordered army push,
Commanded by 'phone wire
by pretzel-eating Bush.
Both sides leave dead the young and strong
Who fought for freedom's ring.
Both sides now see their causes wrong
and blood on everything.
Think about Najaf, now, George,
Next time you're at a dinner,
Before you get that well-known urge
To gloat, all-owning-winner:
Those people whom you said to free
because God loves to save
are grieving for their dead today
beside a new mass grave.
The demonstrators this time went too far."
Something scratches in this mind of mine:
Dyer's words, just after Amritsar.
Houses are looted
Forms are filled
Trains are weighted
Camps are built
Stars forge flesh
Heads get shaved
Ovens burn
Bodies pile
Sleep is broken
Houses are looted
Forms are filled
Planes are weighted
Camps are built
Love George Bush
The East is saved
Bridges burn
Bodies pile
He has his own customised bowl
The gilded pate of a skull
ripped from a man of the land
whose calloused and broken hand
is now owned by the company board
whose profits per annum have soared.
He has his own customised spoon
That Daddy had given him when
he pleased Mummy by learning to say
"More candy for poor little me."
He sits in his room with the bright
neon lights blurring his sight
of a city grown fat on the spoil
of the labour of folk of the soil.
And writes little poems that cry
"There's nothing more urgent than my
suffering, than of my pain."
He sucks in his cheeks so to 'wane'.
But Daddy will teach him to kill
and soon he'll be happy to fill
his bowl with the means of production
by workers whose meaningless action
has made them the dead and the null,
with no time for philosophy's pull
into privileged lounges of mind
where hand-to mouth fear's left behind
for singing of "poor-little-me
and my soft cushioned hell and my play
with escapist ideas of a field
to which I like the peasant could wield
my sickel and merrily sow
a life in the sun as I go...."
For plundering Kassandra in Athene's temple
while the flames licked the jut of the bastion
From which Astyanax was hurled.
You'll never get your nostoi now, soldiers.
Oh, Agamemnon will get back,
But the seer says
Klytemnaistra's got Aigisthos
keeping the bed warm
and the knives sharp for his return.
So it's just games of backgammon for now,
and counting either the campfires along the plain
or the poking masts in the waters
of vessels that chanced the Hellesport winds
which in their fullthroated gurgling drown
became the cries of boys for deaf mothers in Sparta.
Lokrian Aias was impetuous in fire,
toppling statues, letting the slaves burn the citadel
once Helen was led in tears to Menelaos.
Lokrian Aias is to blame.
Dad's allotment, round by the back of the football stadium;
pulling what he called Fat Hen, couchgrass and bindweed,
from the furrows of his nine pol spud plot. Fat blue lazy
flies headbutted my arms, hysterically, as I rooted out the tenacious
choking growths by the roots from the soil. As I was freeing the crop,
already I was musing my own conspiracy theories,
in reckoning that this must have been what was happening in the Palace.
It was hot, I was out, the noon sky was open and there were others,
like me, working under the sun, redfaced, sweating and digging
down in the turning earth with their forks pronging and throwing up
baby potatoes, heirs free of the smother of weed perennials.
We weren't escaping history here, though we weren't indoors
watching the flag draped coffin and hearing "We love you" cries
in the undignified electric near-silence of a relayed outside broadcast,
through our television screens. Rather, we were enacting an allegory
of the politics of court
with the ruthless efficiency of an industry protecting its dynasty
in September, before the weather's inevitable turn.
I am delighted to make your acquaintance;
your business attachee has given me assurance
of your trusted support.
I am Barrister Squiggleyquinker O' Radar-Dantooine;
I represent the Most Excellent Highnesses
the Royal Family of Maleftyboobu,
exiled by a coup in their native State in 1974.
They have lived in an undisclosed underground
mountain water filtering system
near the border with Yellatenashus
ever since
and have declared themselves bankrupt
in order to preserve their wealth
for a day of glorious return.
I am writing to you today
To entrust you with 38 suitcases
containing their secret wealth
to be deposited at a Swiss bank of our deciding
a total of 800 million USD
which we will hand over to you
at an agreed time
and
at a specified public location.
For a percentage
which we will generously award you,
plus freedom of the city of L____
you must contact me at ________
with a cheque for $999.99
Thanking you for your time
Yours faithfully
Sound familiar to anyone?
We know in daytime cumulai shining weaves of starlight
We know how our touch will feel
For we have touched in spirit, heart and mind
And walk together in quiet streets of Cambridge and Seattle
when strangers think us blissfully alone
oh
I know your splendid gift,
your jewel of heart,
and under cassiopeian skies
forever
squiggly
we kiss.
It's because of the beauty of the woman I'm writing about that the words come. And they're simple words, simple ideas. You couldn't contrive complex feelings and images, running on and on, for expressions of love. Not true love. Love's very easy. It's not convoluted or to be chiselled out of the psyche as some monumental testament of altruism, often to the benefit only of appeasing one's ego. Remember when Lear asks Goneril and Regan to protest their love for their father and they produce these protracted speeches, "I love you dearer than space, eyesight"..."that which the smallest square of sense possesses".... Well, Cordelia's love is gentle, simple and true. She can't affect all these grandiose tropes and conceits. And my love for my love is beautiful and true, no more nor less.
True love is far from ahistorical, apolitical, asocial, insular and in a vacuum: it TRANSCENDS the convolutions of life by working through them, unblocking their knots of fear and reticence and allowing freedom to share. It not an escape from the past but a channelling of one's life towards the freeflow of connection with another, and a celebration of that achieved objective: unrestrained, trusting oneness. True love is easy when the energy of love is channelled out to another and keeps flowing, keeps flowing, is reciprocated and trust is built.
King Lear in Shakespeare's play of 1605 had three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. An old man, vain and lacking in judgement, Lear decided to abdicate his power and divide his kingdom in three, and, in order to award good lands and chattels to his daughters, organised a love test: "Tell me, my daughters...which of you shall we say doth love us most?" Goneril and Regan came out with these complex expostulations and conceits on the nature of their love; Cordelia said she would say nothing in honour of her father. Lear, mistaking her refusal to cheapen her love by dulling it with complex speeches (ultimately only self- referential and aggrandising), banished Cordelia to France, and thus began his reversal of fortune. Cordelia and Regan took his lands between them and rendered him homeless, blinding his trusted Earl of Cornwall and throwing the country deeper into turmoil. Lear in the end realised, with his kingdom restored to him after wars that one way or another left all his daughters dead and his sanity shattered, that Cordelia's love was the truest for being the easiest and the least accommodating of other kinds of discourse. It was the realisation of true love's lack of complexity that restored him just before death to sanity and to the prospect of an all encompassing humanity.
George Eliot in "Middlemarch" tries to convey how the web of affinities between people - true social concordance - will not permit convolutions of ego and individual past experience which impede the flow of vital energy: love must be utterly free from the tendency to convolute its path or rather turn back inwards, thinking itself a centre of illumination (in "knowing" the nature of love and society by seeing intricate correspondences between past and future, personal events) :
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person...
And actually, squiggly love is the love of pragmatic idealists.Carnival polyphonies of happysquigglysilliness bring forth the freest laughs of deepest love. And you know what Brecht said, even miserable bastard Brecht: "Nothing needs less justification than pleasure."
is like a window cleaner
who, dreaming in his bed at night
wakes up his wife by kicking the covers off
and making climbing motions,
up some invisible ladder,
while flat on his back on his mattress.
His wife nudges him awake,
"Hey, where are you going in that dream?",
and the window cleaner replies,
"I was going to the shops."
An habitual poet is like that,
Always dreaming one can get from A to B
Living vertically, lying on the horizontal.
do you want to be a habitual poet, or rather a poet of the moment?
and in its contradiction of response,
Or seeming stagnance, see that rippled gleam
That might suggest true movement. If you sense
a hidden wave in what seems blanket still,
Write more, wind each desire, and you'll see
The willows nod and rustle, and you will
hear the rushing babble of the free
gush of water, brimming, charged with light
That is your reader's understanding heart.
carrots fresh from the wild mind, mixing
Mashed potatos and desire, stirring
Broccolli shoots with pepper rain.
Merlot kept us warm, covering
Nights in forgetful glows, feeding
A lot of life to the Pearl Jam message pit....
That they don't see me quite as much these days
Just say a woman dancing in the sun
Makes my loose words and finger tapestries
And I'm just wishing for a merchant ivory smile
I'm just living for a merchant ivory smile
She paints a Turkish king and spider queen
She paints a palace bird that flies outside
She paints a night of sleepy bottle green
She paints a dance of angels in the shade
And I'm here dreaming of a merchant ivory smile
I'm here learning from a merchant ivory smile
(Covespool waters web me
Lead me to her call
If I had ten beginnings
I'd choose this one from all.....)
She's like someone who lived here long ago
She's like someone you'd think had never been
She lets me count the colours I've to know
She lets me see the magic that she's seen
She's like the film star
with the merchant ivory smile
She's like the film star
with the merchant ivory smile
I'm just wishing
for a merchant ivory smile
I'm here living
for a merchant ivory smile
in his patch of garden,
and in time the signature grew, green
Between the cabbage and onion drills.
He would inspect his name every day,
Watching it grow there, watering his little self
and remembering those years in darkness, as
the foundling locked in the cellar.
One morning he went to the garden
and saw someone had trampled upon his name,
Breaking the loops and flourishes
and grinding the tall characters into the soil.
Kaspar cried until sunset,
but said he would sow his name again.
The trampler came back in the dark
and killed him as he dreamed in hope.
Her face between fuschia, in noon's wind ablaze.
I wondered, when, weary, she knelt down to sleep
At the head of a stone she had brought from the sea.
And deeply she mourned as her tears fell to ground
So softly she cried that her grief had no sound
Till she looked in my eyes and said unto me:
"We'll sleep soon, my love, 'neath the dead soldier's tree".
And, wandering on through the old Coolfin road
She looked in my eyes for a trace of her soul.
She rested herself at the tree and we lay
Until the last light of the dusk fell away,
Till the light of the dusk fell away.
pointing to an orange spiral weave
nailed up on his wall. "Man, that was owned
By one cool guy like you would not believe",
This hippy drawled, crosslegged on the floor
Though there were three good comfy chairs about.
"I was in the Outback, hiking. More
than three days walking, man, without
food, just water. Then this well cool dude,
A tribesman dude with dreads came up to me
there, in the desert. He said 'You need food?
I've not got food but what I have for thee '-
yeah man, like he said 'thee' - 'is this good charm,
This prayer mat that I've carried all my life.
It blesses you and keeps you free from harm.
It's yours, my friend, for ten bucks ninety five,
and you'll find your oasis before dawn, yaaa.'
I gave the dude the money, and like wow,
I found this burger bar just round the corner!
So, like, that prayer mat's special to me now.
It might have been the dude's great grandad, in
spirit form, protecting me from badshit,
or like the spirit of some King who's been
leader of this tribe, now in my bedsit,
on my wall. The dude's name, I've forgotten ...
It'd blow my mind if that got stolen."
I spied the map up close. Right at the bottom,
A label (faint but clear) read "Made in Poland".
speaks prose as clear as gin.
But that guy who is the Boss of us
Talks mudballs through his grin.
Mandelbrot-curving new births in the death of a star
Make bright refractors, lightpulse trysters
Which spin out a dervish seducing the dark of afar
A bell and a curl, an hourglass eye
The wave of a sonic whirl, sticking
so
viscous
in light and sound
I
can
feel
now
Strange attractors, Kochcurve twisters
Endless beginnings of ends linking heaven into one
Galactic reactors, roll the seven sisters
Goldenblue mythos of jewels fusing all into one
round into one
spiral into one
spiral into one
spiral into one
massing dorsal plains, fins adance:
the foragers
turn in surf.
Ocean forests breathe
between the grooves of twenty throats
and
whitened viscous curves
eternally splay,
endless in sunlight,
burbling vistas of foam.
Then, gyrating masses splash back
tendril orbits of reed
and giddy jellyfish,
sending each spinning, current-bound
from under whipping flukes.
Together they forage, these dancers,
by social instinct.
Together, they are tasking this sharing of krill.
Siltsabled rivulets incline
Loveled to where the ocean knows:
No joys repine.
And in the greening breakers where
the currents rise beyond Dooagh
an echoed shadowed light lives there:
Andromeda!
I love the meter variations there. I'm in the process of learning my poetry terms, but it seems you go like this:
A 8
B 8
A 8
B 4
Just for my own education, that would make the first three lines tetrameter, followed by a 4th 'quad'rameter. Plus, the stanzas are organized in a quatrain, which my packet says is the most common stanza form in English.
Realizing this information, how do you decide what effect you would like to make on the reader, by making use of various poetic devices?
The 4th line of the last stanza is happy and interesting, which seems to be because of its 4 beat phrase, and also because it is one word that flows easily.
Though poetry is more than poetic devices, the message doesn't come across as strongly unless the proper devices aren't present, and I'd love to be able to get my message across more strongly.
p.s. I do believe this is the 600th post on this thread.