21st century poetry

This is not an experiment.

postmodern_poem_about_mortality

This is not an experiment.

This is an animal
slowly dressing itself
with a garment of stone.
This is a shadow
shedding its bone
in a camouflage of change.
This is a sister
opening a drawer
to hide a wonderful thing.
This is antiquity
growing thick with mighty
buttresses of steel.
This is a mouth
inhaling sweet
movements of moonlight.
This is a perception
flapping in the silence
of the air.
This is a drunk
stealing a plume
from the waitress’ perfume.

But above all,
this is another hand
clinging to the edge
before the fall.

 

Contemporary Poetry

terms and conditions

postmodern_poetry_blog

why don’t

YOU
walk down history
as through a great avenue
to deliver the good news
to a decaying world

why don’t

YOU
speak a language
whose every word
is a cup filled
with beatific light

why don’t

YOU
become
the blossoming bud
of fire that will consume
the wasteland of the earth

why don’t

YOU
release mankind
from its immemorial shackles
and carry the heavy light of truth
to the eyes of every man, woman
and child

why don’t

YOU
reveal the gates of salvation,
or the ultimate purpose
of our petty lives

why don’t

YOU
add up all divinities
and multiply them
into one enormous entity

why don’t

YOU
unite all opposites
sensual and ideal
material spiritual
past future
life death
into a totality of all
totalities

why don’t

YOU
wrestle from the grip
of science and religion
the meaning of all
being

why don’t

YOU
lift the veil of illusion
and disclose the essence
behind this all-
embracing chaos

then, only then

I will follow you.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

thin vicissitude

absurd_poetry_blog

I bumped into the city, the bastard.
Looking around the snow – remembering
my tongue melting as ice in Lascaux and fossilized
toothpicks near the ancient campfire.
I was in Iceland and got drunk,
looking at the cloudless that would die
before the sky reached Sweden.
I have been on the toilet all day,
working, theorizing, and it came
out looking like Nobel’s head,
one day
I will sit beneath a giant tree and forget
my existence as grass never did.
I see why the intellectuals
are enchanted by doom.
But why worship definition as
a totem almighty menacing godly cult.
I see why the poets cancel death
and write lyrics for the music
of meaningless wind.
I observe the visionaries
about to detonate with their unclean secret
like a grenade in their chests . But they can’t,
never finding sunshine in communication,
sadness has overwhelmed language
leaving behind a thin vicissitude
of smoke.

 

Contemporary Poetry

allness

allness

Here in my face
I feel gravity
when light and darkness
are only found in
two eyes that brush
with memory the
portrait of movement

what am I to do
when language’s gone
astray
smashing against
a window like a dumb
bird

we discovered
that the only thing
in heaven are rocks
and columns of gas
that the soul is
an inaudible whisper
returning to nameless,
to a wind to a wave

little man, I hear the elements say:
logic swallowed the world
and reason spat out an abstraction
so, little man, let’s start over
with a new skin around language
caressing the river of change
as only the surface of infinite

dip before death your body
in emptiness
O manifold, never compare
abandon the mistake of identifying
body with body and mind with mind
rather cling to miracle as petals
do to their perfume
and drop judgment like a stone
thru the air and little man
open the mouth the eye and your
bouquet of fingers in the madness
that moves worlds as auras
around the light of stars

fast, construct a minute that is
young fountain and invent a word
that will finally deflower infinity

little man – I hear a voice from all
elements strangling me with all
greenness that is a red orchestra
conducting as a blue cloud
the dance of the night around itself
allness allness

I have a face and it is a seed
at the threshold about to cleave root
in the manifestation of music
so profound
that it enters an orbit
around the love of everything

Contemporary Poetry

on the origin of things

origin_of_reality

There were no instructions
and everything had a gleam
with no in between.

Even for the mind
there was no concept
nothing to break off
from the rhythm
of nature’s
self-portrait.

There was no suffering
of a thousand of years
and the mountains
were idiots with hands
in the sky.

There were no rules
of proportion and
we were born
in the middle
of gray.

In the midst of howls,
the happy blood-stained
gesture, but there was no
relationship with being
and non-being.

We killed until
ethics was an abstract
form of tool. And language
built a house for
loneliness.

This was long ago.
When something came
to dance and we were its
feathers.

Contemporary Poetry

in a distance

phenomena

I’ve wondered
to know nothing.

Seeing
my sea
of conscious,
weave wasted waves
of experience
into hairdos of light.

I’ve wondered
of returning
to enormous view
and an amorous
climax of confusion.

I’ve wondered to drink
night from water,
in unabridged absence
of divisions,
without order ,
with rain ribboning
the eclipse of impulse.

I’ve wondered
to forget
the sounds and the signs,
to find a strange design.

I’ve wondered
to know again.

Spying new round volume,
phenomena impenetrable else
glitters like a city;

in a distance sleepless to remember.

 

Contemporary Poetry

another age

happy_ash

The dichotomy of any echo,
and the complementary laughter
that stings the heaps of sad
like a muted ray of moonlight.
In the lungs an aurora fills,
nails the stars and releases a joy
that I feel breathing for labyrinth
& the sun has a vein
with the footpaths of June.
If all these years the veil
or unbinding a wall brick by brick
allowing essence to flower like a spiral,
I’ve been telling a tumbling few
of the essence tucked in the
foliage of the song, but who
waits with me for morning
for a Cluster of Sails to Seville,
for two centuries of warm
illiterate frenzy;
for nothing left, and
come back another age
to tell the world that its angry jaw
cannot transfigure our pile
of happy ash.

Contemporary Poetry

no memory of shine

touching_light

I must convince
you of the truth
that I often
see soften
the beam of light
that unites the things
of thought.

I must have
you agree with reality
which evaporates
desire on skin’s petal.

I ask you to slough
opinion – nakedness in
the water and nebulae,
all after these
layers of years and
emptiness then.

All is firm glimmer
in loud ambiguity
this instant is cold
shredding the world
in absence
to the strangeness of the gods.

All is there to see,
I’ve added nothing new to this
box of history and often speak
as a flattened mirror
carving the light in no memory of shine.

I must convince you
of boundless disappearance
and this awakening toward
death has the taste of liquor
in the mouth of a man
that knows he’s
alone.

 

Contemporary Poetry

on a white couch

white_couch_poem

 

Poetry doesn’t prove a thing.
It disproves the authenticity of language,
the permanence of meaning and the
universality of reason. Suddenly,

I thought, on the couch, while
reading a history of Christianity. Christ!
what if that’s true. Dispensing order
the poet returns to a formulation
of disorder, a verbal approximation to
natural chaos. I thought,

while sinking in the couch. Silly
ruminations, I often say. But not
this time. I think I was on to some-
thing. Poetry as the last human act,
a summary of lived, thought, felt
experience, an attempt to crystallize
our plight in an image of poetic flight. I

thought, while slouching and setting
the book on the table. I wondered.
Have these architectural feats of language,
these monuments to image, any
lasting foundation other than soft voice?
That’s the question,

I pondered, while breathing deeply on
the white but dirty couch. What if this
coagulation of exasperation, these
swollen metaphors of pain, are merely
dissonant echoes drifting in the void?
I hypothesized,

while heavy on the couch. That is white
and somewhat stained.

Contemporary Poetry

this alone is clear

pond_of_universe

enswathe me
with the leaf
of another name

if a violet flower
quivers like ornament

on the ephemeral rawness
of this earth
so a tiny poet

cleaves like thistledown
to the thin vastness

of the word

if it was genuine
my standing by the pond
weighing the quantity of universe

in these thoughts

if it was certitude
that clung as cascade
to the branches

of renewing blood

upon exiting the flesh
I thought unto death
to look back toward

this pallid clarity of ash

this has been important to me
to fling final words as anchor
in the hidden plethoric ;

time as billowing toward
some lambent exit

without us,
this alone is clear
all these residual things

will remain
spilled in darkness.

 

Contemporary Poetry