"apollonian" poems
Passing through mid-century
these jazz oneironauts reached Apollonian heights
while society drifted into Dionysian drunkenness
the merchants caught on too soon
The most beautiful parts of humanity
enamored to serve the ugliest:
The merchant class, the bourgeoisie
Buddha’s undeserving in charge
If only in past centuries
those noble princesses embraced
even more lowly patronages
all this potential today could be staved off
Saved from the drive to be commodified
People stopped buying jazz as it reached its height
No more smiles to appease the whites
Jazz for the few
the noble, the individual in the know
Until this too becomes the simulacrum
The Ornette Coleman on the bookshelf
to signify your snootiness
your refinement from wealth
Aging Dads in thousand dollar sweaters
kicking out their 22 year old kids
for being ****** addled hipsters
meanwhile Bird on Verve is nodding out
and Dad’s girlfriend pops a Percocet
to deal with all the stress
Jan 15, 2022
Jan 15, 2022 at 10:50 AM UTC
What is it with Apollo,
that draws my heart like light doth to a sunflower?
Is it the solitude
that drew Apollo to the land of the Hyperboreans?
Is it the love
that he had for Daphne which made her a laurel tree?
What is it with Apollo,
that draws my heart like a bee to a honey-laden-flower?
Was it the over-achiever streak in him
which made him Zeus' favorite?
Was it the dark streak in his soul
that added to his romanticist persona?
Now I know that it is...
the depths to which Apollo went,
the jaws of Fate that Apollo bent,
the torrential dark thoughts that Apollo sent,
the hearts of mortals that Apollo rent.
And when HE said,
You're the only one...!
With my dead mind,
I'm a golden mine.
It's my benediction; it's my affliction!
What am I? Apollonian.
Oct 18, 2012
Oct 18, 2012 at 6:53 AM UTC
Long long ago, so long ago, that I never knew how long ago, I was 21.
Back in those days, before I embarked on it, I knew that the battle was won.
Now I look back, and find it ironic that I don't have any place of my own to run.
Ah, how ironic Life is. A few knocks down your soul and you feel you're all outta fun.
Some time in the future, when I would have many a suture, I know I will not have become a nun.
And then in my heart, when I know that I did not with my chosen ways, part, I will once again, with the wind, run.
Oh! how I wish and wait for that day, when I will once again have the love-filled creamy bun.
And I will say with a flourish, "Now that all things have been said and done,
while we were doing it, it was all real, it was all for fun!"
Oh, all of you humeez, trust me-this ain't just a pun.
Lest you think that here is a tale that has been well spun.
Let me repeat from my heart that bears the weight of many a ton,
I speak the truth, "Once again, Apollonian has just begun!"
Oct 20, 2012
Oct 20, 2012 at 2:43 PM UTC
I did not know your eyes were blue
Small suns ring your pupils
perihelion
As you come closer
You become significant
light blurs my vision
Polarizing sun
Perpendicular conscience
Horizontal will
~~~
Eyes wide
Ingenue again
You make my toes curl
~~~
Apollo is come
Dionysus cuts loose
Cassandra moans
Apr 13, 2013
Apr 13, 2013 at 2:00 PM UTC
My God, my Lord, my Puppeteer,
Our ten strings begin to fray.
I’ve crossed and crumbled many times, I fear,
Your voice sounding further and farther away
You leave me live on your foggy land,
but have forgotten that I exist.
Once I stopped grasping for your transparent hand,
Christ! I flew into an abyss:
If sin is death then how do martyrs fall?
By sharing the air with ***** lungs?
Peace and war, Apollonian brawl,
Virtues preach through lustful tongues.
An overheard conversation between Yin and Yang,
In my own mind, God’s voice gently sang.
Jan 4, 2012
Jan 4, 2012 at 3:07 PM UTC
♪♫♪♫♪♫♪♫♫♪♪♪♫
I: Lyric Line of Flight
Cavern Club / black leather / German rockers / proto-youth culture groped its way from Liverpool / TV slowly sped up / modernity invented / flown in planes / swallowed in pills / I watch the second Kennedy funeral on the screen in shades of gray rain / warming to mid-60’s hues / into the stratosphere / a lysergic surge / retinal after-images / intensities of nostalgic color / that British courtesy in understatement / Paul’s voice a bassline / George a guru of six-armed confusion / tasteful: now a meaningless word / it was Apollonian-Dionysiac / my childhood’s soundtrack
II: Poem
They grooved—as our world became another
up from caverns to psychedelic flight.
They look so young in melancholic light
harmonizing black and white to color.
So distant—yet within our life’s short span
they grow apart as the hair grows longer
(The West’s resolve to expire grew stronger.)
Quadruplex visage: young god sold to man.
I crack up beholding the mid-Sixties
lost in late-night YouTubes, I start to break.
time past: removed from the complexities
Recalling every song, the beat, the shake…
They sang the primrose path to confusion
nostalgia replacing resolution.
Apr 6, 2016
Apr 6, 2016 at 7:57 AM UTC
The Cumaean Sibyl was the priestess presiding over the Apollonian oracle at Cumae, a Greek colony located near Naples, Italy. The word sibyl comes (via Latin) from the ancient Greek word sibylla, meaning prophetess. (Wikipedia)
Songs of prophecy on oaken leaves
Unread; unclaimed; unrequested
Fly from out either of the many entrances
To her cave chambers.
She doesn't mind. Poet or prophet, the
Wind has hands greater than human;
Words without willing ears wrestle away
Without struggle.
Only they and the wind see the beauty
Of it. She? She doesn't mind.
Guide to the Underworld, she has greater
Things to meditate on than
The Infants of the Universe
In their insignificant sandboxes.
*Here; more poetry. Come who may,
To read.*
Who may.
Apollo's twisted payment for her
Pleasures: As many years of life as grains
Of sand in her hand.
But she forgot to ask for youth.
After a thousand years, only her voice is
Left, whispering: *Children, all will
Be well. It already is.*
It already is.
Mar 30, 2015
Mar 30, 2015 at 11:54 AM UTC
The Czech travel guide slumped in his chair, hair disheveled, eyes distracted, sipping a beer, then coffee at the Ostia Antica bar and bistro just past the tiny railway stop. He was tired, he said, of leading groups through the maze of Europe’s famous sights, explaining history, significance, value. His 42-member entourage would soon return from dissecting the massive ruins of the excavated Roman city — avenues, therma, fast-food kitchens, masks. We needed no guide to make our way along the brick-lined streets, stopping to stare at frescoes, mosaics, the sprawling theater. Ostia dwarfed Pompeii in size, if not drama. No contorted bodies, no brothels or sewers. Only a meticulously gridded urban sprawl. Headless sculptures heralded the humanity of history. Crumbling sarcophagi held water like broken baths. Few others like us tread the slick-stone path: The grimy chaos of Roma replaced by Ostia’s bucolic Pax. Its stone-masked ghosts, spent from wandering, embraced the resurrected statues in the stately museum. Peace in Apollonian beauty. New life springs from eroding stone. We needed no guide to show us where the tired spirit rests. Here, in the shadows of Ostia Antica, brick by brick, history was explained.
Oct 14, 2018
Oct 14, 2018 at 6:18 PM UTC
Of no time and place...
save for due Truest North
of no time and place...a kindled
air as such...never a Draconian
night layeth upon...O Hyperborea.
Muse of Muse...whose tacit glory
begot lip and lyre...illumined
wholes that sayeth verily unto
illumined wholes.
Unbroken gaiety...where the only
obscuration's the recesses of
witnesses in full bearing...Beauty's
Knowing...Knowable Beauty.
O Hyperborea...as light, lighteth...
yet lit be not--high heaped upon
high, celebrants of whir and fire...
fire and whir...whir and fire!
Thou danceth a sun's one-upmanship,
to emblazon the dreams of Thracian
peoples.
That the world may know, and know
well...the north wind...of no time
and place--due Truest North of no
time and place...be kindled by
Apollonian graces.
As an urn contains what's trialed by
fire, as fire...Beauty unbridled...poureth
forth under the Hyperborean sun...
never to casteth a shadow.
Nov 11, 2013
Nov 11, 2013 at 1:01 PM UTC
Sacrosanct sacrifices
collide in a mirrored image.
There’s a dual grace in the anguish
as the High Priestess tears
a beating heart out —
It lures a half-crazed
Apollonian hymn from you,
harmonized to the devil’s interval,
for my repertoire of Dionysian dance,
attuned to ballet’s feral ceremonies.
On the lunar stage of ecstasy,
we sedate and ******
But how far do you dare to rival the muses?
“As far as it takes, and then some more.”
You say to me, in consummate hunger.
Or are we just fools drunk on nectar
in a tug of never-ending war?
Sep 1, 2019
Sep 1, 2019 at 10:27 AM UTC
Creativity freed
from the structural
prison the decision
to pen the consciousness
within won out over the thin
argument of conformity’s
Apollonian demands,
and like sands falling
through the glass
the words are flowing
past my eyes and my
fingers don’t linger
long upon these keys
that for so long stared
with derision and laughed
at my poetical decisions
A block that mocked
and castrated the spirit
of creative bliss
This is freedom
in poetical existence
and the distance I cover?
Only time will discover
if any of it was worth
a **** at all...
Jul 1, 2012
Jul 1, 2012 at 10:26 PM UTC
An Apollonian
will dehydrate
swamp in
petri dish
if platitude
shall inhibit
crab to
crack shell
ramble in
vicissitude that
anymore is
congenial with
genesis rational
in mode
with a
seance inhabit
extreme viability.
May 20, 2017
May 20, 2017 at 8:17 AM UTC
Writing is a gesture that ties my pleasure
As people walk in and out after a search
For the luminescent touch of knowledge
And the manipulation they wear dares
To become the only monster they treasure
Myriads of erudition and contemplations
Of the human mind, of the human kind
Is it not the wisdom bestowed by academia?
The biased subjective assessments
The reduced objective indoctrination
The social constructions of the reality itself
Is it not the wisdom bestowed by academia?
Such a relative weighted in apollonian seams
That makes doctors to treat ailments
That makes a judge to rule a deluded justice
That makes a teacher drill a curriculum
Is it not the wisdom bestowed by academia?
Which make us question creation
Which reduces the metaphysics to nothing
Which validates the seen and not unseen
They offered us schools, those glass rules
That brings scholars to warm the benches
Such cruel rues, after years of toil
And there is neither guarantee for jobs
Such a robbery, a dare of mere mockery
So watch those children, as they wear bags
And trek to school everyday, another dystopia
So watch those children, paraded and uniformed
And as their eyes are matted with a bright future
The reality of the future they hold is contrary
For loans will bear the apex of their ribcage
For jobs will become a rare commodity
Artificial robots and self-driven cars
Automated rackets and self-serving checkouts
The obsolete conquest of human labor
Shall time be the only resource we bear?
It’s eventual but ever so inevitable
Mar 28, 2018
Mar 28, 2018 at 1:24 PM UTC
not really the gay science by definition nietzschean...
just... pure... narration / uninhibited narration,
narration ex “anonymousness.”
anyway, he misguided his theory,
he thought that goethe
epitomised his dyonisian qualifying
orientation... goethe was apollonian
as a judge... so much so that
he wrote all his verses sober;
oh the dross that my hangover brings
so much clarity i'm actually content
with it;
but the loss of narration, that fine art
of expressed and kept tribalism ("barbarism
by the camp fire") is neurotic in western
societies... with retort it re-emerged...
just jumbled up... thanks to tristan tzara...
exploited to full potential by william burroughs
via the polaroid / cut up method /
ransom letter of cut out letters glued onto
a piece of paper / as ****** up as quantum physics;
so the next time you meet your friend,
remember the quanta, he has a particular
expression to give you, minus the obvious mannerisms
that are self-explanatory, and kept to him knowing himself.
Dec 12, 2015
Dec 12, 2015 at 10:57 AM UTC
another sober day, and another day spent gardening,
trimming hedges, forming bulbs from shrubs,
only yesterday i cut a 7ft tree to a hardly seen stump,
today the weeds got the treatment, while a
strange cohort of bees were flying under the decking
with pollen pouches attached to their hind legs,
a little colony, rebellious bees that escaped from
a beer keeper - all of this attached to a hope for a new
rigour: a new year or new techniques, an invested
in the discourse between Dionysian and Apollonian
poetics - only because it annoyed me that the man
who invented this conceptualisation actually thought
Goethe's poetry was the latter... the man died like a
patriarch in a bed, apparently uttering the words:
more light! he enjoyed the latter's rigour, a statesman
and a respected member of the established...
so long have i wished to remember how i wrote sober,
but there's an ulterior reason... i can't be left
with scraps of £9.00 as a bank account,
here's the arithmetic:
monday, wednesday,
friday, sunday -
£11.00 x 4 = £44.00
carton of romanian cigarettes
£4.00 x 10 = £40.00
a weekly saving of ~£50.00
(give or take)...
an hour with a girl: £110.00, entry fee for
the madam £10.00...
how many weeks is that
to save up for the pleasure?
let's call it an even month of saving up...
i just remember that one time i was walking from
a pub tipsy... the rumbling in my stomach
was so great, it weren't butterflies in there...
honey bees! 10 metres from the brothel entrance...
diarrhoea... i **** myself from excitement...
i took the seat of shame on the bus, squid of ****
in my trousers, then a cab home with the cabbie
being polite enough to not mention the smell...
that was one time... it's what i learnt about
England and the "roses" of Devon and Stratford-upon-Avon...
cold like the lions of Trafalgar Sq., i've been living
here TWENTY TWO YEARS... guess what?
NEVER HAD AN ENGLISH BIRD...
i must really look like Quasimodo or something, anyway:
you just have to learn to compromise, a healthy
appetite for the carnal in youth - because who really
dreams of wrinkly lechery? even the brothel girls
said that to... one just said: 'who'd want to **** old men?
not me!'
May 27, 2016
May 27, 2016 at 8:37 AM UTC
(pretend this is centered) Autumn Leaf
for a dear friend who died in the night
O may her life close like a leaf that falls
And laughs in falling at its happy end
Air-dancing through a sky of Dresden blue
Sun-sliding sideways in a blithesome breeze
Soft-singing in a sweet sinopian sun
Who smiles grandfatherly on each blest leaf
Remembering its spring, and summer too
Pushed from the wood after the last fell frost
To grow from mother-tree and taste the air
In that Apollonian sun of youth
To work and play in Saturnian summer
And then to glow in ripe Pomona’s dusk
In celebration of all life, and then
At last to leap into eternity
Jan 28, 2019
Jan 28, 2019 at 2:53 PM UTC
*Apollonian vs Dionysian virtues
imperfect forms storm the acropolis
in temple halls the dreamers wept
for the old gods to bend
their icy paws once again
saws cut through the logos
in lieu of cedarwood we got cement
now only short stints of sunlight
descend from the heavens
and the gods pretend not to notice them
but i'd like to take you on a trip
through my thoughts
and around my mind
between my skin and my spine
and define words and feelings
archetypes, images and concepts
that have barely begun to surface
to the light i rise again
beyond sighs and fears we fight
for our right to awaken them*
May 30, 2017
May 30, 2017 at 10:46 AM UTC
America, land of the free
Is it wild sarcasm or exclusive pedigree?
Things are getting better
Certainly it is for you
But what about your neighbors
Things will get better
Said street walkers collect loot and spoils
All you ever want is money, designer bags
As bystanders gazed in cold blood
What is eternal is never owned
My years as an outsider has shown me:
To love even if it is unrequited
To question incessantly
To see the humans inside the systems
To never take Truth for granted
What makes America great?
I’m saying it not to flatter or frame
Why did so many immigrants rush in?
It‘s not what the ‘has been’, the ‘is’ that matter
It’s the ‘can be’, the ´will be’, the ‘shall be’
The Dream, the Pride, the Fearless
The organizers, activists, writers, artists
Grassroots, gathered for a common good
The pearls of blaze unstrung from the Statue’s torched hand
East to West, ideas spun and in good faith, left human wills to run
As long as you chase down the horizon, track down the rails of Apollonian glory
There in Liberty you shall be found
Jun 22, 2020
Jun 22, 2020 at 12:29 AM UTC