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I stand here;
outside my balcony
amidst darkness
in the company
of loneliness

My soul impertaburbly
trapped between forlornness
and peacefulness


Yin and Yang perhaps,

Forlorn because the soul,
wounded and damaged perniciously by loneliness..

And peace;
because the herb...
well the herb heals
to some extent

My vessel the arena

On a forbidden course
Yang battles Yin
the odds are in his favor
THC to Yin is like aconite to wolves;

And so he weakens with every hit

The melee ends
like it was destined to
tranquil and pure bliss prevail

At that moment;
the wind starts to sing her song

Calling, whistling to his lover
the king of the night
she whistles a beautiful song
that sounds of a gentle breeze
zephyr like pushing aside clouds that
guard his majesty;
grandiosely his image is revealed
in the nightlife

Observe they all gather under the nightsky;
selenophiles
far away from each other
all in different worlds
but it's this energy that coheres them here
together

The wind starts to sing
the song of halcyon,
ogling at the moon
in veneration and exhilaration
selenophiles danced away into the night.
1.

Minds break apart at midnight,
piece together in dreamless sleep.

Robert Lowell poaches pen-and-ink
drawings for Life Studies.
Sylvia Plath dons Ariel’s red dress,
but loses Ariadne’s thread.  

Lowell raises For the Union Dead,
mythic monument to his family’s best.
Pigeons decorate it with their ***** mess.
Plath pins a ******* to her chest —  
shockingly pink —
and stands beside the kitchen sink,

Stirring a *** of poet’s gruel.
Madness and death the golden rule
no artistry can break. Not even the careless
reader can take leave of these senses

Once they’re rendered on the page.
Confession doesn’t age well,
as Lowell knows oh so well,

unless it suggests more substantial fare,
say, a flannel bathrobe for him to wear
in a Boston psychiatric ward — if he dares.

There’s something wrong with his head.
Crown him Caligula; his lineage has fled.

“What does that have to do with me, Daddy?” Plath artfully whines.
“Fill the tulip jars with red water, not wine,” he replies.
“The bridegroom cometh. Turn off the oven.”
But it is too late. She has met her fate before it predeceases her.

Like a teacher’s pet, she bets her life on a recitation
of Daddy, a term of endearment,
a term of interment in a stark, loveless miscarriage,
a dark, masculine disparagement of her freedom. O Daddy dearest.

Lowell shoots up to salute the younger poet, guessing
she has given the year’s best reading by a girl in red dresses.

At this stage, what does it matter that his “mind’s not right”?
What can he do but give up his right to pray, as every insight
       slips away?

But no Our Father for Plath. For her, the Kingdom comes too late.
Colossal poetry cannot save; the poet raves and raves and raves
       into that dark night.
Turn off the oven, turn out the lights. Daddy, too, is not right.

2.

Blake fired his Proverbs of Hell
in the dull, damning kilns
of England’s Industrial Age.

A poet’s no sage, but Lowell earned
his wings when he doctored Blake’s phrase:
“I myself am hell.”

A stone angel directs his descent:

Fortune favors the bold.

Never discount the power of chance.

Affliction of the senses is a gift.

Invisible seeks invisible.

Darkness obscures our limits.

We carry darkness within us.

Anarchy breeds spirit.

Artistry breeds no merit.

Appropriate beauty, at all costs,
whether, man, beast or angel
.

3.

Poetry births an artifact of words; we unearth them, and they adhere.
We bury them, and they fall flat — hollow sounds, futile splats,
       prehistoric grunts ground into the ground.

Bathed in lithium and alcohol, here bobs your calling, Robert:
Everything matters; nothing coheres.
Build a shell of a soul on this maxim, a notebook of negation.  
       Grind your axes.

Sanctuaries may crumble, gates may close. Press on. Press on.
Corkscrew your identity into the iambic line; rouse the reader to find
the misleading promise of Eternity in the sonnet, the sonnet,
       the endless sonnet.

For minds lost in madness, tree limbs dangle like kite tails in the wind. No one flies here anymore. Gather reddened kindling while ye may.

What exiles you from the ancients — Homer, Virgil and Horace —
springs from vision, not technique: You lack the requisite blindness.

Absence absents the soul. Here, now, forever, shimmers only presence,
only the present, only Presence: divine, human, animal, marmoreal.
       Skunks, sails, cars and pails. Sing on, O son of New England!

Day by day, failing all, fill your void with fiery
hieroglyphs of verse. Then call your duty done.

4.

Behold: You are not the favorite, after all, but Camus’ stranger,
trapped in the blinding sun, stumbling on the burning sand.

Only what dies in you endures.

“Is getting well ever an art,
or art a way to get well?”

The skunks scurry, scavenge and survive far too long for you to answer.

You lie down beside orange fishnets, facing the shore.
At midnight, you will dream of dreamless sleep.
To follow the development of this poem, it's important to know the works and lives of the confessional poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. If you are unfamiliar with them, I suggest you first read "Skunk Hour" by Lowell and then "Daddy" by Plath. Short biographies would help, too.
I am the grand central
swirling vortex of the known universe

pathway of consciousness
a worldwide metaphysical interconnection

hub of modernity’s magnificent  metropolis
prime mover of it's empowered citizenry

eye of a Mid-Atlantic megalopolis
bridging an expanse from Boston to DC
trajectories of an Acela Express
accelerates time, coheres a region

magnetic compass axis
gyroscopic core
web of iron rails
touches all
transcontinental
cardinal ordinates

my constitution of chiseled granite blocks
manifests steadfast immutability

opulent terminus of marbled underground railways
subconscious portals to inter-borough worlds


the Zodiac streaks across my painted heavens
splashing aspirational mosaics of
bold citizens onto universal canvasses
my exhalations burst galaxies,
birthing constellations
promising potentialities of
plenteous abundance
as a right of all
global citizens

transit vehicle for mobilized classes
of fully enfranchised republicans

my tendrils plunge deep into
cavernous drilled bedrock
firming an unshakable edifice
-a new rock of ages-

rails splay out to the
horizons farthest corners
northern stars, southern crosses
nearest points on a sextants reckon

I am the iron spine
of the globes anointed isle
I co-join Harlem and Wall Street
as beloved fraternal twins

commerce, communication and culture
is the electricity surging through my veins

the worlds towering Babel
rises from my foundations
the plethora of tongues
all well understood

I open the gateways of knowledge
guarded by vigilant library lions

route students and scholars to
the worlds most pronounced public schools

beatific Beaux Art is boldly scrawled on my walls
in dark hued blues sung in gaudy graffito notes

swanky patrons sip martinis,
nosh bagels with a smear and **** down
shucked lemon squirted oysters

reason, discovery and discourse tango
to the airs of Andean Pipe flutes
with violence and discordant dissonance
deep within my truculent bowels

I am the road to work,
a pathway to a career and
the ride to a Connecticut
home sweet home

my gargoyles and statuary laugh
at pessimistic naysayers

I am the station for
centurions, bold charioteers
homeless nomads and
restive masses

I stir a nation of neighborhoods
into a brilliant *** of roiling roux

beams of enlightenment
stream through colossal windows
today's epiphanies of the fantastic
actualize resplendent zeitgeists

sipping coffee in my cafe's
the full technicolor palette
of humanity is revealed;
civilizations history is etched
forever upon the mind

eight million stories
of the naked city is bared
as splendorous tragedy
it's comic march
of carnal being
exalted

a million clattering feet
scurry across marblized floors
polishing the provenance
burnishing a patina
exuding golden footprints

I am 100 years young and
thousand years away from
the crash of a demolition ball

Doric Columns and
elegant archways
coronate commuters
each day with a
new revelation of a
democratic vista

I am the grand central
my spirit flows as
one with the mass
in the vibrant
heart of our
throbbing city

Music Selection: Leonard Bernstein, On the Town

written to mark the 100th Anniversary of Grand Central Station


Oakland
2/8/13
now, I will try to abandon time and space
in this form of truancy.

what is this abandonment trying to measure?
  the abeyance of presence.

what is the measured variable trying
to dissect? the impossibility of absence.

a poem aspires to be something concrete. a poem
   is what is real and imagined in the same context.

I try to invoke Abad -- what is imagined is most
   real.  this shall be its leitmotif.

now, i imagine the horizon as a point

of origin, or a template to some familiar projection,
  or a tagebuch summarized into a fine line
of allegories and denouement.

what this line tries to prove is that

an enjambment is a mimesis.

acknowledge the sublimity of a
  creation. notice that the sequence that will
be promised is diegesis of absence as form
     but not a poem as in a poem that enshrines
lucidity -- but the lack of it.

there is only the photograph of horizon
   as hypothesis of perpetuality. this now

is a subject, a speculative undertaking rearing a
   poem -- writing as preparatory for absence,

finishing a line as pursuit of thesis, gravity of
    its heft as tabulation of emphasis, or
verbosity, which may be telling of meaning or chronology.

a poem that is not a poem,
  But poem as a form of absence

that aspires to be a poem.

what is transpiring now is that i am assuming
   an utterance: utterance as being here,

and perhaps voice as sound of becoming but not finality
   of presence, and sound as disappearance

post-peak. its point-source silence and formation
   of thought, and then a poem is written as

evidence of disappearance in deep and close
   contest with a vision coming from another

audience as an objective supposition or
   reaction that may propel an exchange

but only when silence is entertained does
  silence happen, and so this may be dismissed

as a monologue among dialogues insofar as
    only to pinpoint this arrogant feat:

i may be speaking glossolalia, or in tongues,
  and that i seek no reprieve nor vestige,

all the more response -- intone of voice
   stilling itself in the tense setting

of being gazed upon, glazed with coherence
  of senses from one identity to another say,

you hear me speak as in speaking
as baring sound.
   but now that i have spoken, i have already undone

  the quiet to stir volumes and amplitudes
to attest sound-fade as vital component of absence,

whereas this poem produces ample sound
  if you pay close attention to yourself reading

in the lull form of reading (your
breathing will have intensified here,

your reasoning will have made so much
  noise here) as i continue to whittle

away in form of verse, verse not as poem,
  verseliteration not as occupancy of space,

but all in all, a body of work
that is a visage of movement - or a trace of absence, physics of space and kinesis of departure.

a delineation of a thing that was once
   thriving in threshold accompanied

by its tendency to wane: sound may be an
     analogue of unheard, as sound is impervious
to quietude but quietude conscious of sound
     and its potential,

that quiet coheres to its inclination to consummation,

this completeness so emphatic,
this allegory as
  absence the somatic, axiomatic,

indefatigable machinery of a presage,
   or continuity -- this poem that is not a poem,

but an excess of sound, a body that
   deserves end,  a punctuation.
     verity of this argument in basest form.

this body of work as absence
  and its completeness, volition

of its enigma: is this the end
  of sound or your silence summoned?

to drag it back, its recalcitrant body,
   is form of revision, then possession

of an absence, a recollection that will have granted
   seamless entry and translation

which passes on from its origin to
  a new clause -- to end it here, now and pass

over as readable only in the background that is
   an embellishment of absence amongst

things in exclusive continuity, to have this produced
   in space as empirical of absence,

and to punctuate this, a mystification,
or say, acceptable fabrication,

to read and extricate as acceptance of an absence
   as form: this poem that is not a poem but

only a physicality delimited -- to speculate
and study
as disbelief, and to have done such simply

demystification of its transition.
A deconstruction as evidence.
Mass appeal is mistaken for quality.
Communication makes a poor commodity.
TV shows you how to be and what to think.
This normalization is enforced vulgarity;
in the common, Value is lost in translation.

For a slave, meaning comes from authority;
guidelines from following superstition;
truth from the politicization of science;
acceptance from the surrender of identity;
morality the mortar that coheres the chains.

Beware accolades, whether peer or stranger.
A tempting gratification yields mediocrity alone,
self-indulgent narcissism too shallow to measure;
for in the end, it is always so that the unremarkable
is celebrated most vehemently by the unremarkable.
If everyone likes it, it's probably crap. Hipsters aren't wrong about that.
Lizzi Mote Apr 2014
Pure like an
                  APPLE
                            that's SWEET like
                                                     SUGAR-DROPS
Which are FRAGILE as a
                                       SMILE
                                               that CURLS as
BEAUTIFUL as a
                          RIVER which coheres like a BOOK.
                                                                               Whose words REMIND is
life is YOUNG as a
                                  NEWLY PLANTED SEED and as
                                                                                        EASY as a CROSSWORD
that's missing CLUES for the BLANKS we
                                                                   SEEK.
COMPLICATED like POLITICAL NEWS as
                                                                       TRUE as a
                                       THEORY
                                                      yet to be PROVED.


Pure like a CHILD'S MIND that's as
                                                           IMAGINATIVE as a
                                                                                                CARDBOARD BOX.
Tawanda Mulalu Sep 2017
Not everything coheres.
          Remember: not everything
                         coheres
Emily Rebecca Feb 2014
There's something about the sky before it rains.
So tranquil and silent.
As though the clouds are at peace with each other.
Happy and content.
Though it's in sync with each other.
Similar to the sun and the moon, it's often that tragedy coheres with simplicity and beauty.
In which case I don't want to be just another raindrop in your storm.

I want to be the whole **** downpour. Drowning you in every thought.
Keeping my head above water and surfacing in your mind.
I want to be your everything.
And I will be.
Once it rains.
Onoma Feb 2019
down to the very dream

of a welling black sea--

whose frothy fingers tear

out of joint.

grabbing at a mountainside...

whose natural steps are the

inexorable linkage of its

holy pinnacle.

the whole dream coheres

to a forehead, that places itself

upon the first step.

— The End —