postmodern poetry

Tautology

For poets make sad mechanics with their lyric lore
– Byron

tautology_lyric_poetry_byron

A rock is heavy
hard supposedly static
with jagged edges
and deaf surfaces
like a stone or a pebble
in fact they are the same thing

language is light
flimsy supposedly manifold
with soft melting angles
and loud exteriors
like a concept or a word
in fact they are the same thing

poetry is buoyant
insubstantial supposedly spontaneous
with brilliant measures
and reiterative layers
like a sadness or a depth
in fact they are the same thing

 

 

 

21st century Poetry

a thing imagined

new_poetry_2013

Preferably soft,
jelly-like
but resilient to heat
and the precarious nuisances of the jungle
tender but defiant
able to camouflage among
stones and clouds alike
its softness must be delicate
but decisive not necessarily static
as it can be allowed rigidity at times
equivalent to that of taut velvet
not too colorful nor flaunting
the impenetrability of black or white
capable of evaporating without dispersing
(i.e. losing its cohesion without sacrificing its wholeness)
different from the rest of its kind
without becoming an example of freak
it should waver at twilight at the risk
of turning ambiguous but never incomprehensible
its upper part magnificent
and evasive like the current of time in a dream
its lower part glorious and ubiquitous
like dawn in a desert’s sky
preferably sophisticated without being pompous
straightforward without being wholly divested of enigma
and existing mainly between
the eternal and the transient.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

the origin of birth

poetry_of_origin

 

If you tell a kid
that can’t remember being born,
you were born of your mother,
from your father’s seed
you come from a line of lovers
that started way back
before the instrument of love
when there was only form
forming flux and
the structure of diamonds
everywhere protruding
from the mystery
of dark pulsation.

 

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

eleven short cantos

contemporary_poetry_blog

I

Around my neck who knows how history made a voice out of silhouette.
From my lips a hand tore
away in tragedy
the chord
that screamed for more.

II

Time was a pebble I threw into the bucket of space.

III

Today the pond was patient.
Swallowing from the hot dust
the stupidity of the shadows.

IV

The light was hanging from a branch,
bending space like the surface of
a habitual dewdrop.

V

The mirror is red with rage.

VI

The world is still glowing, next
to an enormous fire.
I picked up a shadow that was untouched.

VII

I was just waking from the misery of being born in a place so big, I’d never see it all.

VIII

The streetlight turned red.
Grass burning
through the wings
under the sight of the moon.

IX

No one dead has come back
to tell us
anything.
It’s nearly midnight,
there’s no exception
to that.

X

How decisive is the blindness
of the storm
& the twigs are still shivering
in memory.

Xi

When murmur is no longer a labyrinth,
when I see the teeth biting the dark
and how the depths of earth
have been waiting for me
behind a cluster of
soft sorrows.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

first time

21st_century_poem

 

Remember the beginning
when even purity was a hot coal
in our hands.
The waves of genesis
and we built a clock, a molecule at a time.
We followed the river and
craved of its skin like white fur and foam
to be annihilated as beams and ripples in the sea.
Society was a coffin where we learned a dialogue of echoes.
But now this ear of mine hears the throat of time gutter
so timeless motion of reiteration
its old blossoms of fine appearance.
Now the distance is glazed with my breath.
The elements are trapped in the hard wombs of words
but everything else crumbles as shadows being
faceless in the ash.
Memory, remember when memory was a fruit we had only
tasted once?
I’m frightened because the sky is immense
and I am naked in its clouds
like a prostitute in the
wind.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

how to write a poem

contemporary_poet

The trick is to close the eyes.
To look for the thing
crawling below the carpet of darkness of the lids.
Remain still like a hunter. Do not stir
even if a sliver of light echoes through the emptiness.
You’re looking for a boom.
It starts with a swirl of symbols
curling around each other
in wild experiments of mutation.
You’re looking for a spark, an isolated
hazardous word that will scale
up the fence of perception, to consume
the whole plantation of thoughts.
Venture into this plague of accidents,
advance as a whirlwind upon the dunes of ash.
Soon the darkness begins to burn bright,
you are a sun leaping into a single atom
witnessing a birth to the naked eye.

 

Contemporary Poetry

thirst

windows to soul

Sed is Spanish for thirst. Cyrano de Bergerac sat one day to write his tragedy, La Mort d’ Agrippine, for reasons no one will ever know or understand. He wrote, perhaps before midnight:

Ces beaux riens qu’on adore et sans savoir pourquoi….

Beautiful nothings that we adore without knowing why. He was referring to the gods. So there is thirst for absolutes, some people sense it and yet die athirst. For centuries mankind has looked for this totality through a window they’ve called the soul, which is rather unfortunate that today it has been reduced to myth. Not because the soul is an actuality, but because we need the image of the cosmic window. Alma is soul in Spanish. But I don’t want to say, tengo sed de alma (I am thirsty of soul). It is peculiar that in Spanish “to be thirsty” is expressed literally “to have thirst”, as if thirst were a possession, an accretion to one’s being. For this reason I prefer to express myself in a double language: I am sed of soul. That is to say that I AM the thirst of soul, I am the empty dark room desirous of an aperture, of the link between my personal darkness and total illumination; I am the emptiness craving a flood of light that will inundate the cavity of my cavernous being.

In the same play, Cyrano wrote:

Une heure après la mort, notre âme évanouie sera ce qu’elle était une heure avant la vie.

One hour after death our vanished soul will be that which it was an hour before life.

That is to say, the window will soon be shattered.

So quick, let’s raise the curtains of alma.

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

the end

this_is_the_end

Sorry,
I can’t tell you here
what value, how important,
where everlasting.
Haven’t found it, every bit
is rising like a moon
no matter if it’s a thing
or a thought it disappears
somewhere.
I feel human, literally
a heart pumping veins
in rings of muscle. And
also empty space between
all of you and this isolation of brain,
language, dark brown eyes,
I let you walk pass me
passersby. If I touch
you by chance by accident by love by desire
by dinnertime by church by antiquity by destiny
by skin by Friday by crying by leaving
it will be my memory moaning for
togetherness again with the ebb and flow
of zeroes echoing in the silence.
I do not claim
my isolation is unique,
my brain bottled in language
looking out into the world
through dark brown eyes.
But I cannot touch you
when you are a tricklebird
dripping from the skyline.
Sorry,
our days are numbered and
we must face the tough blue earth
as if it were the end–

 

Contemporary 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