ideals

counting the ideals

Sleep Modern Poetry

Now that I have
a can of soup
I have been guaranteed
a few more lingering hours
perhaps days

 

my ambition is to do nothing
because everything is worthless
and by knowing this
I can stay peacefully alone in
the alcove of anonymity

 

my ideals
were a roll of bills
I accidentally found
on my way to sleep
unmarked and eager
to be poured into
the greedy hands of the city

 

I have spent them all
while meticulously counting
the days to my impending
poverty

 

now I have a can
of soup
and all the time in the world
to be
sound asleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

contemporary poetry

Turbulent Purple

The fiery afternoon had transformed itself into a turbulent purple. How else could I describe it? It had no other name than Turbulent Purple. I am by blind necessity bound to call it by that denomination, I am a slave to that ambiguous name. Leaping in and out the oblivious space of mind, short and poetically vague sensations occupied most of my purposeless time. Without explanation or warning I could read in the papyrus of thoughts scriptures such as these:

           
            Centuries of dancing shadows
            Has the strong wind of fate
            Extinguished Man´s recurrent dream?
 
Ah! From where do all these voices arise but from the nocturnal?
 
How senseless it is to reveal in words the impenetrable mystery of the mind, how lame an attempt to reproduce the wilderness of wonder. The afternoon had turned into a Turbulent Purple and I became sure the existence of written language had no purpose but to express the shock of our encounter with reality — it could never explain a thing. So, without regret I had survived numberless fears of imminent death so I could experience once more the unnatural beauty of nature.
 
Ha! So many years organizing my thoughts so that in my final despair I found every cell in my body to have a life of its own and my thoughts faithful pilgrims in the inhospitable lands of paradox. Therefore I studied my body with care as if it were an extraterrestrial lump of matter and completely gave up the hope of a systematical account of human experience. Then I focused again on the sky and the world was still a turbulent purple. It was not long after this that for the first time I started doubting of the ancient and perennial pillars of art. It seemed to me that if all things go wrong the last desperate redemption would come through art — art had a special bond with the essence of all experience, it embraces the whole multitude of feeling and all genre of action and yet it transcends them all — or so I thought.
 
“Life and death for art” would have been my motto two years ago. But in my rebellion against all dogma the mutiny of doubts turned against my ideals and the sky of my convictions became turbulent — perhaps purple to a spectator of my consciousness. If myths, religions, wars, slavery, races, countries, continents, suns, and galaxies all have an allotted time, art surely is as ephemeral as the rest. Alone and destitute I stood while the echo of a turbulent purple sunset reverberated in the coffins of memory. At last I got rid off the most obdurate preoccupation, second only to death — namely, life no longer lived for art, love, money, fame, joy or by instinct alone; it seems likely to be here for no reason in particular. One last thing remains certain:
 
               Returning from the underground
               Reflections in echoes
               From the pit of despair
               The fountain of wonder
               The irony of this paradox
               From the art of Nature
               Conceived the death of Art
               A dying fire. . .
                       Turbulent Purple
                          turbulent purple

Contemporary observations

If Kafka’s works became so renown for expressing a sort of futility in life, a conformist frustration with the operations of society; it must be a sign that people have shared in this same suffering. Each generation must have some idiosyncrasy that the most representative writers get to explore and express. What peculiarity belongs to the early years of the 21st century? It’s hard to imagine any human ever devoid of The Search, a hunt for something, whatever it may be—considering we are desiring animals. So desire (fulfilled or frustrated) will always be playing a role, but the conditions where it arises are different each time. Our age’s most predominant traits are the expansion of technology, communication and the understanding of the cosmos through science. Everybody still eats, sleeps, fucks, travels, watches sports, marries, gets divorced, believes in God or no god. The difference now is the scope of our vision, enlarged by the aid of technology and science. There is still uncertainty in what the ideal politics should be (not unlike the Cold War era), and the optimal economic doctrines (aren’t the world poverty rates an alarming setback in our hopes for the success of a free market economy?). Life nowadays is an acceleration of pleasure. Society rears a career-hunting crowd TRUSTING in the utopia of happiness through material well-being. How long will it last, will natural resources outlive our greediness? Or will human immoderation cause the demise of our consumerist ideals when global warming or another oil crisis takes hold of the world? And when we turn to the individual’s inner life can we claim we have gained greater interior harmony with the easily accessible pleasures that technological entertainment affords us?