Poetry

we still cling to noise

absurd_short_poem

 

Some people think this thing will burn their eyes.
So brave they stare at the thinghood of the thing.
They say this stuff is a knife of pain and a cutting flame.
So brave they stare at the sharpness of its shape.

Some people think this object will blister their skin.
So brave they touch the surface of the structure.
They say this stuff is a sun of swelling suffering and a sea seething with steam.
So brave they touch the furnace of its frenzy.

Some people think this entity will poison their tongue.
So brave they taste the entirety of the whole.
They say this stuff is a gulp of gunpowder and a drop of death.
So brave they taste the viscosity of its violence.

 

 

 

AbSURd PoEtry

the art of definition 

the art of definition

There is no method for definition: to learn how to define. Definition is a consequence of imitation, its foundation so deeply grounded in our perceptual models of reality that any reform would only be an aberration of the original fortuity. We learnt to use a system of language through imitation and even the precision of mathematics remains illusory as a result of being an imposed code of rules embedded in the ambiguous amalgam of imitative language.

I would live,
dedicate my entire life
to defining a single word
properly – justly. 
That word would be:
	melancholy
I do have other candidates,
perhaps I would define another
still stranger word: mysterious.

What is mysterious?

That which cannot be grasped intellectually.
That which is still unknown, unexplained,
perhaps the truly mysterious is
that which can never be explained by thought,
that which is intrinsically unknowable. 

Here I am defining a word with other words. 
But I would not stop there. 
I would access zones of intuition,
a series of instruments predating language,
like an amulet that contains an entire cosmology
or a monolith that served as genesis to historical memory.
I would anchor my word to other unreliable words,
vague words that by their very nature would
serve as examples of the intangibility 
of my definition for mysterious.  

I would, for example, make mysterious 
synonymous with Life, Happiness, Nirvana, etc 

ect.

Contemporary Poetry

load of la

random

he knife of shy
it tries to cut
through smoke
and so many
whole bars
are full of assholes.

I have smiled waiting
for a drink

Feeling puke inside.

The world seems drunk
at this single cell.

so fine and pregnant
an Old English
a loaf of fool.

Nobody ever
came here.

To notice
the good
I burnt.

AntiPoetry

a poet’s last thoughts (quod nihil scitur)

poet's last thoughts

Then he’ll realize, when the last moment comes, that he never knew what life was, that he held to a truth that was only belief, that he struggled, loved and suffered in a reality that was only illusion. He will realize that he has only known his perceptions and these have been in perpetual flux incapable of leading him to anything everlasting, definable or knowable. He will realize that life is a faint spark vaguely shivering under an approaching darkness; that it was so insubstantial that the exhaustion of sleep could erase it wholly in the deepest hours of the night and that soon an eternity of profound death will shrink it to nothing, as if it never happened.

beer and smoke

beer_and_smoke

The carvings in the wood. Steps up, turn right, unzip, let it rip.

There is some necessity for being unconscious of the process.
Of the origin. Of the consequence and significance.
There is some necessity to intonate without ideal,
to fling actions all of the sudden
as dice without any odds of winning.

Fix hair. Zip, down the steps. Smoke fury of flurry. Beer; what’s the score?

The second, while being a vehicle of careless novelty, is actually
heavy, almost pregnant with the expression of expired millennia.
Seamless actions operate unconscious of the thrust of heavy history.

Running out of beer. Was it 25? Come one Jones, put it in the box!

Poetry is an exercise in distillation. An appropriation of the
universal, namely, to compress the universe into the right word.
It is mutiny against language, a futile revolution against excess.

For fuck’s sake, that’s it. What a poor effort. Let’s grab a bite.

There is nonetheless an element of arbitrariness in all postures.
The only sin is definition, that is to say, narrowing the flux
to one single image, fluid as this representation may be,
that will necessarily congeal the real nature of impermanence.

The clouds are suspended as the self. Return my symbol; I’m under the influence of the absolute.

This is not the language of the everyman. But the poetic is an
elevation of ordinary life, a dissection of the vital rhythms
that run through the flesh of form and the bone of force.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

A rose above fury toward sea

copper_sea

A rose above fury toward sea
life holy hole
I here stretch the song
of earthly length
to dwell in portrait and silk,
bushes of fire
decorate the string of minutes
like quick summits expiring
everywhere, every orient
framed in the dark charcoal
that is art of the dream,
a sky beneath violence toward star
death anchored across
thin perfumes of morning and love,
I hear strange technologies
building a mad edge,
in fog twine comets and flora
coexisting with the habits
of our blood, everywhere
every white memory
finding a violet conflagration,
to sleep united with some knot of
violin in the tremors
of the sudden heart;
that rose fuming with essence toward a copper sea.

Contemporary Poetry

existence as fiction

existence_as_fiction

Our existence is an exercise in fiction.
And it’s through a perversion of this art
that fiction becomes simulation of reality,
thus problematic.

The task is to comprehend
the problem without attempting
to provide a solution for it.

The greatest actors convey
an understanding of the problem
and are applauded as heroic
because they continue thriving
in contradiction with the unsolvable
(fictitiously real) problem.

This is theater of the mind
and valiant acts have been written
with the futility of blood.

The tragic hero’s only
certainty is his ineffective success
and our only consolation is his
acceptance of suffering.

This is our pathos.
The tragic man makes the problem
his only audience.

He must feign suffering until its pain
becomes as real as the simulation of the problem.

He then says that the salvation is unattainable,
that freedom is nothing more than
the purest state of fiction.

And in the irony of his language, he’s dead right.

 

Contemporary Poetry

Pose for me

body_despair_sketch

 

Take off your clothes.
Peel off every last layer.
Squat, further down.
Place your left arm over your left knee. There.
Bend your upper body to the right. Just there.
Right foot a tad over to the right. Lean forward
the other arm straight down touching
the coldness of the earth. Don’t look
at me, look down as if something
great and heavy was pushing you down
restraining your mobility, locking you
with the awkward chain of the body itself.
Untighten your abdomen. Relax the brow,
look defiant as if you’ve been angry
for years, but tired and nearing hopelessness,
like an irrational animal that’s exhausted
from growling in its cage.
There, let your member hang. Let the
pain of the bones and joints led
to convulsions, feel the crush and the pendulum.
Begin to accept this position as your end,
as your skin’s predestination.
There, that’s it. It will be over soon.
I almost got it.

It will be over …. soon.

 

Contemporary Poetry

the joy of Heidegger

desolation_landscape

 

Throughout itself,
ordinary nature
would no longer
be its opposite.

Truth occurs

within itself
no longer in earth

but open,
clearing, never rid of primal conflict

notice this Open

the world of paths
lighting
the self-closing
center

at bottom
intended to denote
that the essential
has rid itself
of everything
concealed.

 

(All the words, including minor phrases were extracted from page 53 of Heidegger’s essay The Origin of the Work of Art, found in the book Poetry, Language, Thought as translated by Albert Hofstadter, printed by Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Contemporary Poetry

against the poets

Image

It is a sad thing to be a poet.
Pick out a few strands of impermanence.
Sit and write in fever and sweat
on how the ash is sweet and immense.

But it is in vain
I tell you.
Nothing will remain
beyond the faded terrain.

For art’s sake. Can there be anything more pathetic?
All we do is lace pigment on fragments.
All this perversion of language, an erratic
falsification of meanings and judgments.

I am being honest finally.
I tell you.
Don’t even care how this ends really
because I’ve started to drink myself silly.