Whiles I peruse the archives of the past,
Occurs a mental transformation fast—
As thru accounts I search, and journals read,
A bold mid-cent'ry impulse seizes me.
The words I write, in structured meters fit;
Infinitives begin to slowly split.
I have at last attain'd a style so grand,
It captures an Augustan poet's hand.
O what great writers we might have today,
If Dictionary Johnson had his way.
Jan 17, 2019
Jan 17, 2019 at 12:26 PM UTC
No world could explain me; no daughter of life,
No saint, no flowers that watch in warm silence.
They are of surroundings—I feel separate.
No tongue could untie me; language I scorn, in
Thoughts I rest uneasy and unknowing.
Deeper through layers abstracted I lie.
What I know I have no way to prove. I sit in a
Room of no walls, on a chair that houses a ghost.
No words, no words, from hence the sadness comes.
Jan 17, 2019
Jan 17, 2019 at 6:16 AM UTC
History shoves. I am whisked down Maudlin Street
In the crisp eye of the living noon. Women
With children pass and shake their heads.
Can't you see what he's strung up for?
I don't know, myself.
My self, I know, however. It wreaks
Horrible imagination, wrong times, wrong places,
Each pull at words sending me further.
Let's file it under 'not to be'.
Dec 23, 2018
Dec 23, 2018 at 8:55 AM UTC
You think about all the words you've ever written,
Reams upon reams, spiralling spell-like back
To when you first scrawled an 'I' upon a dotted line
In school - think staggeringly of it all, then visualise
Where these endless written words might have gone:
Pages lost, thrown away, forgotten, left to
Rest with all the lost works of Antiquity,
Though never destroyed (as nothing really is) -
For every character we carve, whether on stone,
Papyrus, paper or type, lingers in a reflex,
In a human constant, a further spiral into the future,
A carbon copy always in a cabinet of the mind
For when among friends you can pull out and show
In the form of a memory, a knowledge, a history.
Dec 23, 2018
Dec 23, 2018 at 8:40 AM UTC