"aristotelian" poems
this
poem
started off
intending to be the shortest poem in the world
nay,
more aptly
in the whole wide, wide open uni-verse
but ambition overtook it
and it aimed to stretch far and wide
an Aristotelian hubris, you know
like the ambition of Macbeth
going beyond what Mrs Macbeth intended
and so this ambitious little poem of ours expanded
starting meek as grass
growing zealous
and went beyond itself and its kind
this
poem
that
had such humble beginnings
that dared to want to be the shortest poem in the world
but turned out loquacious
and it could go on, it said,
beating all length, breadth and dimension
and would have -
but it got into convulsions and fits
and shock
when it had gone beyond its shortness
and it couldn’t even spell
couldn't even get words right
floating in a soup of red lines in Word or in Mac’s Pages
and so it took its own life
or someone stabbed it like they did to o’erweening Macbeth
or to our poor, poor misunderstood Rasputin who being a Saint was thought a Devil
but was all humble
as the shortest poem in the uni-verse
Oct 29, 2011
Oct 29, 2011 at 10:06 PM UTC
My sweet Austin Texas ecstasy, my beloved Guadalupe you
gem of the desert. Your family’s a basket-a-bigots but
******* they drink for miles and how near they are to my
heart. This heat’s a drug I swear it. Let's swim in that hole
in the bedrock between two rivers. That'd be nice: me and
you and mobs of Westlake High sophomores with their
blue-raspberry bikinis, a hundred Teen Vogue magazine
covers lined up on the grass like a set of bad church pews.
Imagine that whitewash of a crowd, you and me so alone in
that big static it's better than private. Let’s punch brick, peel
back our knuckles and watch’em clot in the sun. **** gauze,
we’re goin’ to a punk show. I’m puttin’ on short sleeves,
goin’ on parade, gunna flaunt my cigarette burns like a Cadillac:
I want those dorks at the Mohawk to look and love me like
they love gore. I’m gettin’ my black-eye ribbon tonight.
We’re in the Chaos in Tejas show, darlin’, put on Crazy Spirit
and bring your 2x4: skinheads ain’t jumpin’ themselves.
Let's get medicated, hunny, let's get saved. I love watching
Austin bleed out into the sand every dusk. Love the musicians
sailing out grimy and frothing over what night brings:
what a big sky, Texas, you're almost better in the day all
parched ground and azure azure. I love the glass on the high
buildings here, they’re like mirrors. This is God’s powder room.
This is where God sees himself drugged up and beaming in a
beautiful powder room. This is where God goes to remember
youth. I love how youth hasn’t gotten you yet. That unassailable
capacity for charity, that surging belief in belief shouting out
through your temples, I can’t stand how you make me sick of
making myself sick. You slapped the ******** outta me so quick
I’ve never seen grace move that fast. I thought you'd knock the
grapefruit polish right off your nails you hit me so good.
What a sight you are, kid, so proper and fit, Christ, you could
be therapy: so brunette-in-the-Fall, so full-lipped,
unabashed and Aristotelian, frayed like anything but ****
well stitched, impeccable at the seams.
Dec 4, 2012
Dec 4, 2012 at 8:11 AM UTC
He’s a ***** of in-
tellectual acumen. A real conveyor of post-modern acuity.
What he has to say doesn’t make sense to me.
No one understands his esoteric complexity.
He speaks of Aristotelian “virtues”, Platonic Forms, and other
“practical” participation by the particularities.
Part of all that not even he fully understands.
Juxtaposing Quniean “webs of Knowledge” with Davidson Coherantism
He is challenged by McDowells 2nd nature Bildung.
His conventional English is thus un-sung, while meta-physical abstractions are then hung
Out to dry, in the abstract realm sky. What color is that sky?
“Unfair Question” he cries.
“Tell me about God” I ask, “very well” he replies.
My brain is numb after one question, and a few words.
He continues, “Do the God(s) agree upon what is good?”
Yes is my reply. “If so, do they love what is good?” Again yes.
“Then, is the Good whatever the God(s) love, or do the God(s) love what is Good?”
He must be on drugs.
A little philosophy makes a man an atheist.
A lot makes him a believer,
just not in God. He praises Reason, his room is a shrine.
Within four walls one will not find, no not any sign
Of conviction.
What? All this time thinking, reflecting, meditating, abstracting, observing, weaving grand tapestries of thought and still he does not find a foot hold in reality?
What the hell were you thinking about?
He responds.
A stream of consciousness is all that is,
past is a referent future is a predicate.
I am not the “me” I refer to when I say “my book.”
No sir, I have never spoken to you any knowledge of me.
For that I have none of, but knowledge I am not without.
If it is one thing I know, it is that I know nothing.
I tell him certainly my English teacher would know something to defeat him,
I am soon disenchanted, for he has ammunition for her.
“Ask her”, he says “to ascertain the truth value to this grammatically perfect declarative Sentence.”
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Oct 23, 2011
Oct 23, 2011 at 11:29 PM UTC
there’s usually two ways of writing an abstract
like one might have written one for
a chemistry experiment, a debriefing, a plot
summary as you might have it, although
in philosophy it’s either geometric of algebraic,
to take into account a chance meeting between sartre (b)
and descartes (a) i can only utilise the algebraic
in a framework of a platonic schematic, i.e. dialogue,
and since dialogue then casually, in conversation, like so:
example no. 1 (exercise of good faith)
(a) i think i had
a brain haemorrhage
(b) i doubt it.
example no. 2 (exercise of bad faith)
(b) i had
a brain haemorrhage
(a) how do you know?
(i.e. i’ll deny this statement.)
it really is as simple as that, after all, all the ball of wool
untangling in the standard philosophy books is meddled at times,
it is hard to craft an entry of a decent dialogue without
the one-sided stance of monologues that fill the pages of books,
but take any major tenet of the two philosopher’s works
and set a scene of two buddies talking in a pub, and that’s you
having skipped the best 200 pages of untimely meditations
and about 400 pages of being and nothingness - not out of rudeness
but on the simple basis: **** i understood it!
so if anything can be relevant in modern philosophy, and that’s
modern from 17th century to the present era
it is only relevant when applying a platonic schematic,
because it has to be talked about, and when talked about
simplified, because why would anyone want to over-complicate
and apply an aristotelian schematic of inspection
by writing very crude philosophies by the simple process
of over-complicating the thinking process as that, which
does not necessarily need thought attached to it - like at present,
with western society debasing any original theology
by forcing all the ills of the world as the adequate justification...
the origin of this, you will find,
is not from the people who suffer as such,
but from people who are safe, healthy and satiated with
adequate materialism,
the kind to have a very english middle-class sentimentality
to care for whimsical sensibilities, prudences and etiquette in general,
that's how placebo atheism works, it's still a ****** theology,
the real atheists? hmm, guess... the list is pretty dramatic
in the way they approached coupling freedom and will
and others - that's why i prefer my invention of coupling
a placebo effect with atheism... rather than writing out
a theology of absence - look... here's a trick:
a theology of indefinite absence (a) / theology of definite absence (the),
and then the ism from empiricism.
Oct 22, 2015
Oct 22, 2015 at 8:43 AM UTC
and as the western slavs took to roman calibration and the eastern slavs took to reinterpreting greek with cyrillic, both the eastern and the western slavs lost sight of their pagan "ordeal" by forgetting their once fabled fathers in the stately category of gods, so while the eastern slavs continued to cling so desperately to woman kneeling in shawls by the altar of "innocent" sacrifice, the western slavs experienced a pagan revival on calton hill - so within all this being done, roman lettering had to undue the theological plagiarism of turning zeus into jupiter and jesus into jehovah on that mighty trident of poseidon. (oh... is it really that desperate and annoying and childish to use these nouns? i'd like to see you replace zeus et al. with: hydroxypropyl starch phosphate... or sodium lauroamphoacetate, although i admit, there's one rational and scientific concession to this, zeus et al. are all imaginary nouns, a bit like √-1ª.)
on the shore of loch lomond
i was seduced by zeus to revive
polytheism in earnest with a stern gazing eye,
for zeus heard of the satisfaction of yahweh(ª although
this noun isn't... because why would rabbis
pain over yhwh with ha ha he he hi hi hu hu ** **
disambiguations, while the greeks
didn't ze ze za za is is us us es es os os zi zi zu zu
but instead allowed aristotelian musings?)
at the establishment of the state of israel,
(ah **** had the pictures once...
but words are better than pictures
since pictures are a blockage of memory’s revival
while words penetrate -
although the damnable thing is,
i don’t remember what i said)
then too i saw hades seal the revival having turned
himself into cerberus in the forest of my resentments
unnamed just above bedford’s forest.
Oct 15, 2015
Oct 15, 2015 at 11:46 AM UTC
*my my, ain't it June?! Juno, why have you given these poor people snowballs?! it's June and my central heating is on, it's close to 10 degrees Celsius, Bavaria is flooded, people embraced Einstein's relativity of the collapse of the = sign using a parabola, forgetting the basic Newtonian: cause & effect - the moment i coupled Socratic abhorrence of moral relativism, i took to dislike relativism kindred of: claustrophobia and agoraphobia... at some point Einstein's relativity equates space as time, rather than what Newton would suggest trans linear: algebraic squared, Newton still resides in cause & effect, space = ~space, given: 1 = millimetre, kilometre, and any other division... likewise with time... 20th century fashion being the perfect crop of quantum plagiarism, although in the 21st century the dance loop jumping between decades, back in the 20th century a linear expression, an evolution; quantum physics doesn't deal with linear excavations necessarily repeated, it's just repeats what is unnecessary. global warming and the mini ice age, June's here, Einstein too, Newton too, relatively speaking we're aether imprints... speaking via causality we're leaving a carbon footprint - well, **** me, two plus two... it's still scientific negativism, dietary requirements of modern man overshadowed all the scientific progresses in the field... never mind the cure for cancer! never mind that! as long as we can dress a diabetic in Lycra for bariatric surgery - never had i had i heard of such gastronomy, should it have been a pork chop smoked using zyklon B.*
we are living in the age of scientific negativism,
atheism a third limb
and our existential concerns reduced to
hamsters, calories and treadmills:
the basis of all modern inquisitiveness /
Aristotelian awe reduced to rubrics of dieticians
rather than theologians: at least with the latter
we could see the simple mind, hunched
in prayer... with the former we are experiencing
robots repeating the daily 2000 Kcal intake requirement
for a flat stomach... honestly, i prefer the praying
type, than the type regurgitating facts concerning
their diet - at least the former state of affairs
kept them shut up and mumbling, gesticulating
a type of shadow boxing while befriending
Jacob wrestling with an angel - at least that!
Jun 2, 2016
Jun 2, 2016 at 7:49 PM UTC
for the Missouri Ma'am, a reminder, for the "show me" lady,
who should know better than
like a novice lawyer,
never ask a question,
the question,
you don't want to
know the answer to...
struggling for months to answer truly
your Aristotelian query,
from now over a year ago:
who the hell writes poems like this...?
the older early answers are writ in another place, three, four drafts,
by another's face, and another hand, curdled and burdensome,
none to ever see complete-shun
now I believe, those early answers provided are out of sync,
life is messy and stressy and my pre-pubescent, precipitously yet
carefully considered, visionary imaginary invisibles, naive,
now comes similar, like this piece, which sat down and wrote
in a minute, charging myself a lot,
mostly the costly breathing the stupid from a failure stench,
whose face is locked into a grimace
without missing a heartbeat,
messy and stressy,
fully forged, seeing a head ahead,
breathing out the fire of the dying dragon who does not,
give no longer giveth a good god ****
see the man on the street, the man,
lying on the street whose cardboard sign says:
for two bucks,
will write you a commemorative,
custom tailored for the occasion, name and season,
no waiting, done in five minutes
**four lines $2
eight lines $4
(obits cost more)**
who the hell writes poems like this...?
the sad angry ***** *** on the concrete,
who stinks from
overuse and misuse,
everybody's fave faun, now gone,
now writing *****
for a living dying
now, that's who writes poems like this!
ask him nothing, and he will rhyme it for you, child,
the prior life, previous name, the perchance poems, ah, who cares...
just don't ask a question, that you may not want to know
the answer
Sep 19, 2017
Sep 19, 2017 at 2:21 PM UTC
Excerpt from my newest book
The demon gods of pathos
Book by David John Clare
The lost works of Aristotle reimagined
I'm a lost lamb on the dark side of the moon hiding in the forest that can't be seen through the trees hmm is there a man in the moon? The only moon in this solar system with no name! On a long and winding road that leads to no door.
Like putting two mirrors together that echo for infinity. Trying to figure out the Aristotelian rhetorical question as the demon gods of pathos hover above us in alien spacecraft.
Like the time I felt I was abducted off the streets in Bangkok only to find I was in the hospital after getting beaten senseless by a late night gang who bashed my head in the doctor said my neck was broken
I thought he was joking as I was choking on a neck brace how disgraced and sad my life had no worth I was hoping I had left this earth to join the demon gods of pathos...
D. Clare
Jan 30, 2015
Jan 30, 2015 at 9:39 PM UTC
you know, people like
to write about their lives
in terms of likes and dislikes
about their their loves and hates
another poem about
how they feel today
which is the same as they did yesterday
and no prizes for guessing
how they’d feel the next day -
and as you know
how people like to write
about truth, justice, and love
and about the dark corners in the mind
about their religion, their nations and eternity?
their culture, their identity, their sanctity? -
but me, I like to write
about nothing
cos I’m just the same
as them other poets
(we’re all human)
for all that is nothing too
so in natural conclusion
Socratic fashion
or Aristotelian school
so when I write about nothing
I write about what them other poets write about
and when they write,
like me,
they too write about nothing
We all do, vainly speaking
Nov 2, 2011
Nov 2, 2011 at 4:13 PM UTC
The astronaut’s behind the wheel of ’91 Saturn
(Aristotelian, a machine of all the elements:
silver paint like water, the lingering smell of earth,
a driver of air, an engine of fire),
with quintessence, the road.
I forget which came first: gravel or stardust;
we’re trying to get lost but can’t seem to shake the Big Dipper.
I’ve one hand on the leather and the other on your face;
we’ve parked somewhere by Neptune, cold and blue, always morning.
We should pretend to be real people for a while, waste some precious oxygen;
stop trying to remember we’ve been here before.
Remember that uncharted was the point.
Jan 19, 2016
Jan 19, 2016 at 7:28 AM UTC
*islam provided a change of etymology,
ha satan is no longer
a matter of definite or indefinite accusation;
more a case of the accusing
deceived, for it it now know
that the downfall of israel due to king solomon
was due to an accuser indeed,
but its resurrection could only be
incremented by a deceiver.*
p.s. a philosopher that does not meddle
in theological nouns will continue, time and time
again, entrenched in whether
hydrochloric is true to qualify
rather than already lose to the aristotelian
quantification parameter of naming, cf., properly;
apparently there's an atom spare
and it justifies socrates uttering he
knew nothing while being paradoxically engaged
in the previously un-discovered dialectics
to undermine rhetoric with a methodology (i.e.
knowing something).
before they pulled my upper madible wisdom teeth out
i was asked a question by the anaesthetist
to which i replied quo vadis, odd, because i
should have said qua vadis, meaning in translation
not where are you going, but in second in command:
*what is your manner of travelling the path being fulfilled?
by foot or by hoofed trot?*,
which would make up a chiral momentary inertia
where i, a poet, about to have his wisdom teeth pulled
out, and he, an anaesthetist induced a coma on me;
so it made sense, basically.
Jan 14, 2016
Jan 14, 2016 at 8:45 PM UTC
It came back.
After all my attempts against, and all my fiercely believed immunity, it came back
Surrounded me with instinct-clear, instant-clear physiological reaction that told me in the wordless way the body talks to the concious mind:
this is true.
Aristotelian resilience against a story with no winners or happy endings.
And then it left again, as it always does. As It should be.
A wake of hardly remembered pain, and some fuzzy ideals holding me together, barely worth the name.
Jul 22, 2022
Jul 22, 2022 at 9:48 AM UTC
with enough writing material
at your disposal,
you end up playing at a metaphor for
the children's game of hide & seek.
the beauty of writing is that
whatever you write, it still leaves
everyone else: being busy.
koala busy though?
panda busy? probably not.
we never managed to imitate
true mammals... insects? we've got
that covered until the next meteor.
and no, that leaves us without
the dinosaur nighttime story to
care for;
i'd swear monkeys don't live
on the savannah but in thick jungle...
what were the benefits of shedding
fur? a haircut?
i'm still trying to consolidate
Darwinism in Platonism...
i can see the Aristotelian
incremental +, but beyond what's already
idyllic and has to be disturbed...
never seen a monkey molester
and other akin to Hinduism's arguments...
and without any negativism,
my voice is already speaking into a shadow
rather than on a stage and into a crowd;
over and over again...
surrounded by very finite expressions of
truth, e.g. water boils at 100ºC...
there is nothing worthwhile the daily
life that needs a Darwinistic foundation...
i just see Darwinism as the emergence of
24h news and a loss of faith in the media
akin to the loss of faith in parliament:
when Darwinism encountered history
after arguing theology down to the point
of, well... um: mongolian harmonica?
Nov 15, 2016
Nov 15, 2016 at 11:31 PM UTC
after a ten year wait
in the longest winter ever recorded
Christmas finally arrived
amidst changing styles
and varying outlooks
the dusty gifts and slightly worn bows
stood ready for their fate
they would pass through
the Aristotelian concept
of potential versus actuality
from expectation to reality
then the day would travel most like any other
Dec 25, 2013
Dec 25, 2013 at 9:45 AM UTC
adherents of Darwinism
never ask the right questions,
they never ask awe-inspiring
questions...
they always ask the
self-assured
permanent questions...
sure, Aristotle was wrong
and Darwin was right...
but at least Aristotelian thinkers
asked the wrong questions
and prolonged life:
while Darwinian thinkers
asked the right cul de sacs
worth of ******** -
Darwinism merely said:
philosophy begins with yawns...
truly it begins with awe...
but yawns it is...
you can be right
but nonetheless insolent in approach...
while also being wrong
but nonetheless solvable
and accommodating in approach...
what is the meaning of life?
to ask impermanent (particular) questions
rather than ask permanent (universal) questions...
a |
straight |
line |
Berlin
|
Palestine
|
Churchill
Stalin
|
^
evil good
morality
without a compass.
to ask but never ask in order to
encompass an answer (replication) -
to ask in order to
experience the full potency of asking per se,
and to ask it to stage
the fullest mobilisation of
creating ontological
momentum...
a life not questioned
is not a life worth moralisation: akin to
the Socratic investigation and the worth of living...
hence the morality analogue:
a life not investigated is not worth living...
a life not questioned is not worth moralising...
to question is to become moral:
the more questionable the more moral -
the more moral the less impressionable.
Oct 1, 2016
Oct 1, 2016 at 10:31 PM UTC
philosophy is a cul de sac venture
for old men,
for old men are inexperienced
in terminology of change,
no chance of a plateau before the drop
that's death,
philosophy need youth and inexperience
to feed the Aristotelian maxim
designating the essence of philosophy:
genesis of bewilderment, genesis of awe...
old men have seen too many repeats
for the youth to grapple with in order
that the bewildering status quo be kept
like the firmness of the architecture
of complacent tourism allows for a photograph...
unearth the hidden routes, shelter the
most encouraging roads...
limit the old to simply die rather than
allowing them to philosophise...
take away the cushions of duck feather
from their bedded heads and replace them
with blocks of stone... and see how quick
they'll philosophise a return to the drama of life...
but so ineffective their return will be,
they will become shamed by the opulence
they were given, a greedy voice for change
they could never make gunpowder evoke
a volcano birthright of boom.
Feb 27, 2016
Feb 27, 2016 at 8:11 PM UTC
*the only thing that is, is that - which is immediate;
with a loss of immediacy, or a sense of urgency,
without an impeding imagining for a scenario of calamity,
what happens to being, when the there rapes the instance
of being, as that, which is here?*
(dasein... a there-after - d-a and being in general,
which for a fan of aristotle, as heidegger was,
is very much platonic) -
of course the immediacy of being,
but then there's the subversion of artistotelian
logic in heidegger...
namely the da / there...
which doesn't imply: a here...
i have to excuse myself within accordance
to how latin was read, and how the "barbarians"
inverted it, on its head...
e.g. if latin was written from left to right
in the "airthmetic" of sentence structures...
then the "barbarians" read it right to left...
the "airthmetic" implies how words were interwoven,
the basis of writing left to right is still intact,
we're not talking hebrew of arabic...
so i will excuse myself...
heidegger is a platonist in disguise,
the mere reason that he appreciates poetry
so much, exposes him from being a true
aristotelian...
on the basis of dasein...
let's play...
there's being...
and being there...
sein-da...
which works wonderfully in translating german into
english... sein-da...
but where's the there supposed to imply
if not the platonic world of ideas and thoughts
that compete with aristotelian sensual materialism
of an empirical point of view, that the now,
the here needs our attention more?
the jetztsein, the hiersein?
i know some ******** is going to point something
contradictory in my writing,
but at least i have heidegger allowing me the gratification
someone might gain, given enough insight into
what i've written so far...
heidegger subverted aristotelian phislophy
with a shade of, actually being a platonist...
fair enough, he made the evolutionary step from
cartesian subjectivity of the pronoun inclusive cogito ergo sum,
into the objectivity of dasein;
it seems like cartesian pluralism than, say, being somewhere
dedicated to a there of being per se...
to me, it just implies a continuum that
allows a form of mortal transcendence and the allowance
of further history to happen... i.e. there's being, and being will
persist in being "there", i.e. a future, which i will not be part of
on the argument that i'm trapped in an immediacy of hiersein.
p.s. *i'm going to ******* **** that pizza with my gob,
it's just sitting there, and i'm thinking...
too much fruit today... i need some dairy fat
and dough.*
May 29, 2017
May 29, 2017 at 4:57 PM UTC