"cartographers" poems
Tingly under the daisies;
Glassy-eyed, glazed, greasy;
Shaking, shivering, shuddering,
Wishing, wandering, whimpering,
Westernizing—
Romanizing—
Constitutionalizing—
Institutionalizing—
Perpetually searching
And dying
And living,
Watching Death survive
And scythe the frolickers,
The prancers,
The rompers,
The merrymakers.
A rose clamped between his
Grinning teeth glistens brightly,
And he dances so joyously.
“Yes!” say the naysayers,
Confused are the soothsayers,
Lost are the cartographers.
Oh, Utopia!
The monks are extravagant;
The meditations are a farce!
The preachers are beggars
And swindlers and chargers,
And Machiavelli fulfills his wishes!
Babies are stillborn, stabbed, and
Ritualistically sacrificed,
And their blood is spilled, drunk,
Slathered over the ***** man.
The evangelists scream and lie:
“You are all predestined to die!”
Oh, hail Utopia!
Wedded are the girls to the girls;
Wedded are the boys to the boys;
Wedded is Death to Death,
Life to Life,
And Life to Death.
Wedded are the living to the existent.
And the milking babes are slaughtered
Ceremoniously,
Surreptitiously,
Ostentatiously.
Oh, hail great Utopia!
We are all dead and unintelligent:
Laugh, laugh, Einstein, at your
Stupidity.
Laugh, laugh, Temple Grandin at
Your retardation.
Laugh, laugh, laugh!
Look at the sluggard, thou ant;
Look at the boy, sobbing wolf;
Aesop was drunk,
Aristotle was delusional,
Michelangelo was blind,
Beethoven could hear,
Poe was sane.
And I can't read.
They ramble,
I watch.
They sleep,
I watch.
They dream,
I watch.
They sleep-talk,
I watch.
They scream,
I watch.
They choke,
I watch.
They suffocate,
I watch.
Stone-faced, I stare;
Raspingly, I breathe;
Uncontrollably, I twitch;
Inwardly, I rage.
I hope you die, I hope you die.
I hope you bleed, I hope you die.
I want you begging and crying,
I want you blubbering at my feet,
I want you gnashing at my ankles,
I want you writhing in pain,
I want your arm twisted off,
Cracking with the snapping sinews, I want your beating heart in my hands, I want your genitals uprooted and stuffed in your throat, I want your stomach so I can eat the still-digesting food, I want your shrunken head and I want to force my thumbs into your unblinking eyes and I want to tear your face in two and I want you to die, I want you to die, I want you to die, I want you to die, I want you to die, I want you to die, I want you to die, I want you to die, to die, to die, to die, to die, to die, to die, to die, to die, to die and die and die and die and die and die and die and die and die and die and die and die and die and die.
Nov 3, 2015
Nov 3, 2015 at 9:47 PM UTC
The Real Poets Here
are small craft
sailing between the narrows of crack'd lines,
employ the spyglass and luck to you,
for them to find
their voyages do not widen the chasm of waste,
yawning greater now by propped up boasts of
ugly shipowners who sin by commission,
national ***** crowing of the greatest length of their prow,
thinking that is a measure of prowess,
their tubs,
all but empty wordy new container ships,
that are forever lost at sea,
even before leaving port
they,
the real poets,
are the quiet lost lot,
a troop of forgettable ordinary Marines,
the sailors in the engine room toiling,
exploring cartographers ***** from the ****** crafting struggle,
looking to discover unmapped,
invisible poles,
East and West
opening up new passages,
within us,
with new passages
when called to arms,
the real poets
spill fresh ***** fluids from within the heart and mind borne,
upon the blank spaces,
they stain us with the grasping gasps of their sight insided
fertile are the pastures
where they lay low modest lay thinking,
amidst the splendor in the grass
of them
I
proudly will ever boast,
hold them close and ever nameless,
but deep inscribed inside of me
*Ah,
the real poets keep me
whole within the
ever smaller white purity of this narrow space
that has lost the struggle
to contains the
unceasing ever spawning black letter'd oceans and navies of
repetitive sad, sadly repetitive,
puerile singsong cant
that never sings,
can't never please,
but trends to the masses madly
dewdrops of tears,
are my own trees felled,
an acknowledgement that
when I read their unintended homages to humankind,
that when realized,
they speak with great respect,
all quietly scream this whisper...
all this,
that I have written,
and will yet to write,
this is all,
to give
greater glory to all human ability
whose
sole purposed to fill us,
wrench us from our lackadaisical comfort,
or urgently comfort us when none else can,
these are my friends,
the real poets here*
god keep you well
my trite words insufficient
so I gift you
some words worthy from
Wordsworth
Jun 12, 2014
Jun 12, 2014 at 3:29 AM UTC
Blazed is the trail made by their mistakes
The high road created for all our sakes
Explorers of lands that were once uncharted
Now the cartographers of the paths they started
We are the proverbial parchment upon which they sketch
Vicariously imbuing their wisdom within each etch
The end of their journey is where we begin
For the trail ahead must be blazed again
Feb 2, 2020
Feb 2, 2020 at 12:02 PM UTC
We live in the sunshine of our broken loves,
Where window curtains flow like pouring water from the aqueducts.
Sunlight is the memory of an old world, and we are just
Watchmakers who labor at the trumpets of time
As if to blow from the mouthpiece and unwind
The second hands and derelict hours of our luminous grief.
So too shines the scintilla of frost that covers the ancient wheat,
Snow falls like the listenings of lovers in the dark, and we are just
Cartographers of snowflakes, mapmakers of frozen eyes,
To zone the parallelogram of her strands of hair across the sky.
These and these and these
Were never ours.
Jul 14, 2024
Jul 14, 2024 at 11:31 PM UTC
.Her adjectives were littlemore than colorful trinkets that splashdark light, even on Sunday mornings therewas no rest for the wicked. My earsrejected the multi-colored grotesque barrageof hateful verbiage crammed in therewith every other simple sentence that you couldprobably see long stains left behindlike a fatal battle scar. Her mother was just as evil--I'm surprised my wife even made it to puberty. I supposeshe wanted a carbon copy just in case of an emergency,because she practiced clenching old mens' esophagus' with herice cold eyes; much, much colder than any sea on the moon;Tranquility must have been banned from her cartographers budget.Her words were like old moon rocks she'd hurl at passers bywith her catapult like tongue and even swifter middle finger. Always aiming at the frontal cortex. Her harsh textured words would kickand claw their way down ravaged ear canals like three ****** off catsin an Italian gondola slowly floating down the over saturated streets.It usually irked me beyond comprehension when she would bring outthe sickly sweetened, over ripe verbal ammunition to pry and beg mefor more cigarette money. I'd give her the money with my favorite feined grin which bought me sacred time and to watch her walk away..
Feb 22, 2010
Feb 22, 2010 at 12:34 AM UTC
**** if I know.
I scarcely understand much anymore.
I am but a puddle of coherent reminiscences
oozing across the floor into decoherence and
diffusing into maximum entropy.
We are in Hell:
all is Maya,
all is Mara,
all is Dukkha.
Yet, we are slaves
who love our chains.
And I am a lifeless, fetal,
**** economicus,
mortifying de rigeur
in the ossified skull of a
long forgotten **** sapien.
If only those kinship instincts could've
survived the havoc we've wrought.
Look at what we've done.
Look at what we do.
**** for money.
**** for oil.
**** for land.
**** for 'justice.'
**** for God
**** for 'the cause'
**** for the sake of killing,
and pave over what's left.
Leave a few trees and bushes for our
dystopic terrarium.
'Our Synthetic Environment,'
old Murray[1] called it.
Now, walk into the forest.
Be there. Stay there.
Do you feel it?
Any of this nonsense we call
'civilization'?
Or
is it that you feel something more. . .
poignant?
More true?
To a point where our heated debates
appear as no more than frivolous diatribes?
When do we stop all this narrative solipsism
and get to the ******* point?
None of this is real.
Our thoughts are not our own.
Have they ever been?
The Spectacle [2] reigns supreme
as we idle spectators
speculate idly upon it.
Borges's fable of the cartographers [3]
has reached its apotheosis,
and we are its unwilling
and unwitting victims. . . .
Jan 13, 2021
Jan 13, 2021 at 2:01 AM UTC
We float this concrete river
as trees go about their day around us
Visitors, we are just passing through
to nowhere in particular.
What we seek we may never find
or even recognize.
Still, we paddle on,
subconscious cartographers exploring
every fork we come across
finding our way home.
Jan 27, 2015
Jan 27, 2015 at 2:05 PM UTC
The space between us might disappear
Our mouths, careful cartographers, might record our discoveries with the pressure of our lips,
With our heavy breath and the rhythm of our heartbeats in unison.
Our hands might be like infant satellites charting the skies,
Feeling into the infinite distance and realizing
That what we once presumed were Planets apart
Are colliding and forming into something beautiful and dangerous.
But Oh
*IF he saw me
IF he saw me naked he would see the scars
He would see them, I know, and he would know*
He would shake with the earthquakes
He would feel the tornadoes that ripped apart my rib cage.
He would see the damage that was innocent and invisible from light years away.
I would no longer be a shining beacon of light in the far off distance.
IF he saw me naked he might see my past
Might fall and burn as he enters my atmosphere.
And know that my scars are no longer the tokens of hope that they once were.
They no longer show the past that I once believed might change.
The meteors will keep coming and I won't be able to clean the craters.
The disasters come with the tides
and with each sunset, the eve of the moon curses me with more tsunamis
To add to my naked shame
Kiss me in the dark
And the we shall join together in one great constellation
But you musn't see what I look like.
For I am not the star you think I am.
Sep 17, 2011
Sep 17, 2011 at 6:54 PM UTC
Do you remember that day
We go in your old Volvo after class
And drove west out into west of nowhere
Passing a museum about dinosaurs
And their place in western Mass.
Until we found that old, small town
That belonged in another era,
With small houses, and small streets
And signs on the doors giving various history degrees.
The music you played didn’t fit
With the scenes we passed,
Children on bikes that laughed at us
As we stared down their streets
Hands over eyes like explorers
Notebooks out and ready like cartographers
Pens tips chewed in the ends of our mouths
Like the writers we wanted to be.
And It was all fun and games
Until we had to turn around,
In that corn field of all places,
That seemed to never end,
Because it was fall and the corn stalks yellowed
And I imagined they would have crunched under our feet
In the cool autumn air
I breathed through the open window.
You went deer-in-the-headlights
As some farmer came by in his truck
And you started joking
-Until fear start creeping-
“This is the end for us,”
Because it looked like something from a film
Where two college kids die alone in a cornfield,
****** unsolved
Scythe found with no prints
The beginning of a bad movie script.
But we lived,
Because he gave us directions back home
Back to route 93
Or 94, or 270
Where we parted for one of our final times
Before you left for the big city,
Losing this memory to history
Like all those little houses
And all their little families.
Mar 13, 2015
Mar 13, 2015 at 1:11 AM UTC
He wanted to drown
Not in liquid, but in sound
Raucous rapture bellowing beneath
Hands too heavy to hold his own
Heartbreak.
These lions labeled ladies
Making ****** hearts sing.
The candid caucus of cartographers
With eyes too cold to cry
Mapping and marring,
Partitioning paradox with every stroke
Witless wizardry without
Love and longing.
In a circus tent he found
That circuitous catharsis
Amid tremulous trapeze swinging
Watched by the sloughed skin of sinners
Vice and virtue muddied by malice.
Exploratory tongues
Giving preface to loneliness
Too tranquil to be twisted
Too torpid to be tangible
Romance recondite,
Sold to us by our world
Leaving us with nothing but
Fantasy and
Broken bones
Jun 18, 2014
Jun 18, 2014 at 9:47 AM UTC
To tell you the truth about travel, I hate it.
Someone once told me
that travel is a compromise
for teleportation.
Everything
is basically a compromise
until higher tech arrives.
To tell you the truth about travel,
I really don't want to.
I want to let you hold my image
against long winding roads,
against the sad shrubbery
by the side of the highway,
and believe
that I'll be happy
when I'm not at home.
My loud voice and excited manner
may even trick into believing
that I adore the hustle bustle of a new place,
new people,
new traffic,
new smells,
sights,
sounds.
But to tell you the truth, I really hate travelling.
Save me from suffering the pains
of packing a bag
with the most essential items
designed to make you look like
a Prudent Traveller™ - I want to carry
only my fatigue
and annoyance
at being asked to move out.
(Some Hajmola, perhaps - the green and purple flavours)
I am not seduced by lines on a map
telling me where to go,
and how to get there,
I swear.
I would rather have
someone trace the edges
of imaginary continents
across my mind
by virtue of their words.
Cartographers aren't redundant to the world,
perhaps - but have you ever had
a laid back holiday with
only
i n t e r m i t t e n t naps?
Apr 1, 2017
Apr 1, 2017 at 8:53 AM UTC
Where are the lines when the time has aligned?
And is there a way to accountably die?
I seek but a grave for this body to lie
Yet cannot submit to the ground, it is dry
A desert of trouble is all I can find
Desperate, I wander and tangle the vines
Here in the moment our steps are entwined
But who was the first to arrive, you or I?
Take up your pen and the hand that you hide
Use all the ink that is harbored inside
Bleed like a wound, it will keep you alive
Why do you fear what you simply deny?
Bury the questions, one sand at a time
Under the doubt that displaces your mind
Come be unraveled, prepared and refined
Then help me uncover meridian lines
Sep 30, 2013
Sep 30, 2013 at 3:05 PM UTC
Those of us who were born cartographers
In the modern age, have been doomed from the start.
Our white spaces have been filled and shaded,
Sketched-over and even rent.
Not even a half-inch by half-inch square
Was left to us, and I suspect that
Were we to find a time machine,
Fittied with a working Flux Capacitor,
You would find us all in the midst of the heart of darkness,
armed with pencils and stencils and pregnant maps.
Feb 4, 2010
Feb 4, 2010 at 3:34 PM UTC
'Twas such an iridescent masquerade
Upon the gestures all,
Flower guises floating freely about
This mansion chamber's ball.
Medieval castle tapestry dwarfing them
With the lofty hall,
And there arrive and vacate portal
Fading unto the wall.
A gateway whereas such events unique
When arrivals call
And departed bid final farewell from
This mansion chamber's ball.
Values grouped and danced entwined
All over the chamber floor
Gaggling, babbling, in glorious glee
Ever since eve silence tore.
Yet, one lonely soul biding his life
Blended within the wall decor.
Scanning masks inefficiently in the chamber,
Electing in mind to who adore
Then a rapping of energy is heard around
Tapping at the mansion door.
Spiriting masqueraders slide inside here
Ever since eve silence tore.
Inevitable capture of the silent statue
No longer blending of absent joy.
Given assortment of masks to be as play,
And being the ball's brightest decoy.
Wisping to and fro he goes to furthermore
Echo his mask and employ
Silent cartographers of party unto the wild
Festival masqueraders enjoy.
So this Napoleon of dance and sing aware
He twas nevermore of coy
Stunned as struck to his guise hiding inside
And being the ball's brightest decoy.
The accursed mask pried off at last
Hence he carried his glee
And surmised so to unhide inside feelings
Selecting the costume every wisely.
Those who fight of ownerright cause,
Grasping back unrightfully.
To amass the mask unto the masquerader
So inside they cannot see
Nevertheless, grasping suppressed he philosophized,
"Why hide the face? Let them see.
Life here today is an entire masquerade.
Select the costume ever wisely."
Dec 24, 2012
Dec 24, 2012 at 10:39 PM UTC
for me,
there is an undeniably
exquisite beauty,
in an aged face
it lies in the lines of life,
etched by angels,
as unseen cartographers.
it hides behind the crow's feet and creased frown lines. it is so apparent in the mryiad of tiny wrinkles
at the movement
of the faded red lips.
it is carried in the baggage under the eyes
and the luggage of wattle
at the throat.
it winks from slow
moving eyelids and thin arching brows.
it glows in a smile
that folds and creases
the skin like origami.
it is the beauty,
ethereal,
of a life lived,
of love found
and lost,
of hardship suffered,
and joys revealed,
of working hard each
and every day,
yet still finding time
to sing and dance
and play.
it is beauty,
created by endurance.
not manufactured
by cosmetics and pills
and machines.
it is a beauty,
so honest and true,
that it needs not
these things,
to embellish or frame,
it is the beauty,
of the years passing by, standing proud,
without fear or shame.
it is the old woman
sitting on the bus,
in the park,
having a quiet cup of tea,
it is my mother,
asleep in front of the tv.
and one day,
i hope it will be me....
Jun 23, 2014
Jun 23, 2014 at 4:04 PM UTC
it is a constant struggle,
running trains to their edges and
withholding movement from cartographers/
whose only true love is
finding out
this movement;
nomadic sponsored dream
that denies being a symbol, or
having ever given up,
collapses on itself
pocketful of maps
but no stars, no compass
it is a viscous walk back and forth/
and as pacing substitutes
affirmative action, melting on the tracks
seems refreshing
May 17, 2013
May 17, 2013 at 9:49 AM UTC
I want to be an artist's muse
And sit in sunlit hallways
As she draws me in the ****
Her eyes wandering across my body
Cartographers of the flesh
Mapping every shadow
that every curve casts upon itself
As she paints me beautiful
In colors never fading.
Mar 19, 2013
Mar 19, 2013 at 12:25 AM UTC
in the sweeping sepia tones of my monotonous,
rushed life, my chest aches to be sprung free.
the urge of flight has never been more viscerally real,
more capable of pinning me to the spot
until my very bones burst from this body bag
suffocating my chest. never have i felt
so wickedly sick, so obviously the cliche
broken fragile thing bleeding out all over the page.
never have i felt so devoid of words.
it's like before, i was full - brimming with half-thought
ideas and plots and characters, thrumming with
elementary concepts and words but at least i was flooded,
at least my soul was alive.
with the pain came a different flood, a tidal wave in the dead of
night, a cool soaking of the wicked flames that etch in
the monster's shadows. with a muse came my best
works, my raging thoughts, my torment and despair
and bloodthirsty butterflies battering my guts. with
the depression came the rawness that they lapped up,
crowed about, choked back tears. with another muse, i found
desire and passion and lust in the sinful tonguelipsteeth,
the bony handshipsframe. with all these things i found
the words and found a freedom, however temporary.
with change, i found an empty cavern.
the bottom of the grand canyon, less spectacular up close than from the top. less than. empty. hollowed out.
there is before the fall, there is during. they don't talk about the after.
or rather, they do, but there's aftermath - there's cracks and broken
bones and heaving chests and blood gushing, rushing
to the surface to see the light of day.
i bled out before i hit the ground. what happens when you get
the perfect ten, when you land with ease? what happens
when the potential is there, but the words dry up?
i feel potential in the moments wasted,
the beauty in all the strangeness,
the agony of existence. i see the people and
i want to be their storytellers, their cartographers,
their artist. i want them all as my muses.
i collect them and name them and tuck them away
in pockets too full of secrets, putting them aside for tomorrow,
another day, when i get back to the room but find
myself drowning out my words in other worlds.
i know the potential like the sailor knows the seas.
i see the beauty like the diamond in the rough.
i feel the agony in every second like the swish of
the guillotine.
swish. swish. swish.
out of time, out of mind
existence was a phase; here is the end
of our glory days.
Sep 30, 2015
Sep 30, 2015 at 12:51 PM UTC
There is no doubt that his hands have traveled before,
They're experienced explores.
Over her gentle skin he cruised slowly back and forth,
To the nook of her neck,
Down,
To the warm welcoming crevasse between her thighs.
His hands gradually walked over to her backside where his hands simply rested,
Taking in the view.
Her body was the map,
And his hands were those of a skilled cartographers who desperately needed to know every inch,
Every mile between her poorly painted pink toes,
To her sun streaked gold hair.
And so the experienced explorers wandered,
Roamed,
Strolled over the many dips and curves and bends and twists that she held.
When his hands came to her wrist,
He stopped momentarily to admire the slenderness.
When his hands ventured to her shoulders,
He felt the muscles that lay under the polished skin.
When his hands finally made their way to her legs,
He was aware of how sturdy and stocky they were built.
With every brush,
Graze,
And glide of his hands,
She couldn't help but think,
There is no doubt that his hands have traveled before,
They're experienced explores.
May 11, 2015
May 11, 2015 at 8:44 PM UTC
I used to wonder
Where the road would
Take me but
That was before I knew
I would pave it
On my own.
Draw the map in lead
With your fingertips
We are
Cartographers.
Dec 10, 2013
Dec 10, 2013 at 3:00 PM UTC
We pull our knees in and listen to stories,
wait for our own name to appear. Floating by
on a six-panel door or stitched into fabric scraps
still raw at the edges but slick
as mirrors or chalked on the ceiling too high
to brush away even with a telescoping hand.
Our name comes marching from the five
o’clock shadow tree line howling itself
and blocking the light switch.
We lag on hinges but keep it outside
never asking how it came and where
from. It can’t break and enter
if the door is already open. Only enter, listen
for bootsteps, for hot handprints in the snow.
We learn to slide our names under the door,
crawl back behind it. Shove our fingers
into locks, feel around for the trigger. We are
drainpipes thickening with sediment
bit by bit for years, everything passing
through, waiting like an open mouth.
Our name leaves stepping
in its own tracks and we follow,
find solid ground. We build bridges,
draw maps to it, curl our edges in around us.
Since we are not cartographers--we cry
too easily--our whole lives are spent
killing time, searching for seams, more folds
to get lost in. Lives spent like pennies,
faces pressed hard into the fountain bed.
Apr 25, 2013
Apr 25, 2013 at 4:30 PM UTC
No man is an island
but you are a continent
cartographers cannot map your shores in their complexity
pioneers risk death and drowning just for the chance to see your coasts
in your expanse there is the potential for life
and death
and in your valleys and ridges there is beauty
each blemish a vista
each freckle a point of interest
each scar a historic site
no one looks at the earth and calls it ugly.
Jul 1, 2014
Jul 1, 2014 at 1:16 PM UTC
Canada is renaming the Great Lakes.
Lake Superior..........Lake Canada
Lake Ontario............Lake Ontario (stays)
Lake Erie...................Lake John A. Macdonald
Lake Huron..............Lake Jacques Cartier
Lake Michigan........Lake Trudeau (that should **** him off... but we
know we mean Pierre, not his bonehead son)
Lake Champlain....Lake Quebec (although not a Great Lake, the
orange guy wanted to make it a Great Lake back
in 2018).
We have our own cartographers.
Gimme the Sharpie.
Jan 29, 2025
Jan 29, 2025 at 8:02 AM UTC
To shake the powdered atoms
from the flaking cavern walls
That fossil horn
has summoned tribes
from different walks
alive tonight
Loose trousered hounds of pedal drums
are swilling bass for rocket fuel
All spastick in the rinks of treble,
animating vertebrae
draw talismanic creatures
rolling planets from
their shoulder blades.
Into the gathered sound
The ritual breaks a rip- tide sweat
A chance to wake the daemon
through those coronets of frequency
for stussy armoured Sufi
whirling
pneuma to humidity
A circled dharma rhythm-grasp
a knowledge passed from
Astronaut cartographers.
Acoustics of the standing stones
the hunting party hill-top chants
a triumph in the sacred groves
two hundred thousand years
of dance,
Have brought us here.
Jul 1, 2017
Jul 1, 2017 at 9:28 AM UTC