Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Wed. 30 AJPIII Poem:

They savour the ulcerous fruit
Preferring this reproducible rapture
In the stead of true-life feelings

They sit collectively stationary
Raging in their hallucinative nature
Under their psychobiological bliss

They cohabit a malodorous perdition
Hiding languidly from the future
Within their great nectar of Nepenthe

But, while they yet grieve in
Their cacophonous solitude, a creature
Reaches the arterial manna of life.

Monday, January 21, 2008

How long have I sat here listening to the lullabies of dead men. They linger in my brain as my pipe wreathes my head in sweet blue smoke. Their rhythms get into my blood and fuse to my bones, making my mind bend to the possible meaning in a single word. What makes them write of wheel barrows and ravens, of pulleys and regal ice cream, and of phantom funerals and the kinetic potential of withered dreams. What is the transcendence of grass.
I struggle to wipe the words off the soles of my shoes and to stop my heart from beating to that American romance in the lyrical beat.
Even now I sit here sighing, moaning loud and softly crying,
Crying to the night-time o'er his dear and lost Lenore
And for all like him before.
I puff again to wash out the taste he leaves with the thick heady pipe tobacco smoke , and slowly I linger on the thought s of men past, and men yet to come, and I am overcome by the smallness of it all. Even the words of a Spanish man over his lost dog last longer in this world than the wit of the wise. A wildman's knowledge of a woman and a God-king's incomplete journey hold in the minds of men a shining place above deeds and actions.

Through thoughts and words they have found immortality.

Friday, January 18, 2008

untitled...

The bellows of my lungs release more
Smoke
Into the chilling night.

Nepenthe grips my mind and tender
Heart
With logic-cold talons.

My guilt-ridden tongue struggles hard to
Speak
Against the mass of minds,

and Deep within the pent up locked down
Soul
Hunger cries for freedom,

While I feel behind a barrage of
Words
Battering my turned back

With a deafening deluge of defunct
Pleas
And pestilent promise.

Beat down and betrayed by the shining
Light
On high-

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Today's thoughts...

So, love. What is it exactly? I don't think anyone actually knows. And I'm just intelligent and cynical enough to think about the possibility that its all just a throwback to our evolutionary ancestors picking the best candidate for the carrying on of their genetic material. I'm also just romantic enough to not be satisfied by that sort of thinking.

The hell of it is that like to know the way things work. I like a working definition of the things going on in my world, and when I don't have one I'm usually at a loss as to how to go about things.

Its just not so in this case. I know I love her in the same way I know I'm consciously breathing. It just sort of is, I don't have to think about it.

I know I love her because I love her.

I think about her when she is absent, I hold her and don't want to let go, I wake up at five thirty to drive for an hour to see her for twenty minutes, I smile when I think of her, I adore her quirks, she inspires me to write trite little poems like this:

In the cold and rainy winter,
On a stoop in mid-December,
I give to you this dying ember
In the hopes I will remember
That those things that did me hinder
Were farther out than they were in here,
And far more within the heart their sender
Than they were within my heart so tender,
And that those feelings that you engender
Are far more real and far more grander
Than were those in my past could master.
And so you make my heart beat faster,
And I pray that we shall last, Dear.

.... and make me extremely proud they were written.

I think and feel all the million other cliche things that men have thought and felt about women since the beginning of time.

I don't have a clue what love is, but I'm glad I've found it.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Thoughts on writing. Kind of rant-ish, so beware...

A friend and I were discussing a most distressing (to us anyway) trend in the popular writing of today. Most all of the writing that people enjoy to do and gush over when they read is completely lacking in structure. It is a stream of consciousness-style outpouring of ideas. They jot down their scrambled thoughts and slap a title on them and think they are the next Kerouac (what a grand delusion that is. Kerouac was great because he was one of the originals. Once your writing style of choice has a "neo-" in front of it you aren't likely to be remembered for writing that way...)
It makes for an interesting read , to be sure, but it lacks that final punch that deliberate writing has. Reading "Spontaneous Prose" can paint an eclectic picture in your mind, but only at parts. Words and phrases grip you and can take you to unimaginable heights, but nothing like the power of structured prose and poetry.
Not to say that there isn't plenty of prose that follows a structure that doesn't have any emotional appeal at all. The goal would be to mingle the two styles together, to harness the raw emotion of spontaneous prose and deliver it just where it is needed.
Consider for a moment Gwendolyn Brooks's powerhouse "We Real Cool." In eight lines she sums up her feelings about the youth of her time, while at the same time creating a rhythm and a structure that highlights her point. It packs an emotional punch and still has an extraordinary economy. She maintains a masterful control over her words and makes every one count. There isn't a single wasted syllable or a solitary wasted beat. There is the truest essence of writing.

It is truly a shame that so much of today's writing is a giant circle jerk of academics with the readers being the ones to eat the cookie at the end.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Random story thoughts...

I can't get to sleep on these salty-stiff seamen starched satin sheets that they lay out for you in this den of banality. I feel like a trick for a lazy whore laying in this lie of room. All the amenities of a fictitious home from a world that never existed. The colors especially selected to lull one into a false sense complacency and ill comfort. All of it a delicate dance to keep you from wondering exactly how many strangers had exhaled and excreted and possibly expired in this most intimate of shared spaces.
I wonder at the cleanliness of the whole thing. Its someone's job to clean it all, but how many times have half-assed my way through work?
There is probably more UV reactive material in this twenty by twenty swatch of paradise then there is in a pot head's basement.