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zebra Oct 2017
Here is a primer on the history of poetry

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate
ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake
originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations
ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond preference for allusion (often private) rather than description
world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states
themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view
use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal
cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter
estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms
maintenance of a wary intellectual independence
artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness
search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness
exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

writing more cerebral than emotional
work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions more than answering them
cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized
open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection
involuted: the subject is often act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

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Expressionism

Expressionism was a phase of twentieth-century writing that rejected naturalism and romanticism to express important inner truths. The style was generally declamatory or even apocalyptic, endeavoring to awaken the fears and aspirations that belong to all men, and which European civilization had rendered effete or inauthentic. The movement drew on Rimbaud and Nietzsche, and was best represented by German poetry of the 1910-20 period. Benn, Becher, Heym, Lasker-Schüler, Stadler, Stramm, Schnack and Werfel are its characteristic proponents, {1} though Trakl is the best known to English readers. {2} {3}

Like most movements, there was little of a manifesto, or consensus of beliefs and programmes. Many German poets were distrustful of contemporary society — particularly its commercial and capitalist attitudes — though others again saw technology as the escape from a perceived "crisis in the old order". Expressionism was very heterogeneous, touching base with Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, many of which crop up in English, French, Russian and Italian poetry of the period. Political attitudes tended to the revolutionary, and technique was overtly experimental. Nonetheless, for all the images of death and destruction, sometimes mixed with messianic utopianism, there was also a tone of resignation, a sadness of "the evening lands" as Spengler called them.

Expressionism also applies to painting, and here the characteristics are more illuminating. The label refers to painting that uses visual gestures to transmit emotions and emotionally charged messages. In the expressive work of Michelangelo and El Greco, for example, the content remains of first importance, but content is overshadowed by technique in such later artists as van Gogh, Ensor and Munch. By the mid twentieth-century even this attenuated content had been replaced by abstract painterly qualities — by the sheer scale and dimensions of the work, by colour and shape, by the verve of the brushwork and other effects.

Expressionism often coincided with rapid social change. Germany, after suffering the horrors of the First World War, and ineffectual governments afterwards, fragmented into violently opposed political movements, each with their antagonistic coteries and milieu. The painting of these groups was very variable, but often showed a mixture of aggression and naivety. Understandably unpopular with the establishment  — denounced as degenerate by the Nazis — the style also met with mixed reactions from the picture-buying public. It seemed to question what the middle classes stood for: convention, decency, professional expertise. A great sobbing child had been let loose in the artist's studio, and the results seemed elementally challenging. Perhaps German painting was returning to its Nordic roots, to small communities, apocalyptic visions, monotone starkness and anguished introspection.

What could poetry achieve in its turn? Could it use some equivalent to visual gestures, i.e. concentrate on aspects of the craft of poetry, and to the exclusion of content? Poetry can never be wholly abstract, a pure poetry bereft of content. But clearly there would be a rejection of naturalism. To represent anything faithfully requires considerable skill, and such skill was what the Expressionists were determined to avoid. That would call on traditions that were not Nordic, and that were not sufficiently opposed to bourgeois values for the writer's individuality to escape subversion. Raw power had to tap something deeper and more universal.

Hence the turn inward to private torments. Poets became the judges of poetry, since only they knew the value of originating emotions. Intensity was essential.  Artists had to believe passionately in their responses, and find ways of purifying and deepening those responses — through working practices, lifestyles, and philosophies. Freud was becoming popular, and his investigations into dreams, hallucinations and paranoia offered a rich field of exploration. Artists would have to glory in their isolation, moreover, and turn their anger and frustration at being overlooked into a belief in their own genius. Finally, there would be a need to pull down and start afresh, even though that contributed to a gradual breakdown in the social fabric and the apocalypse of the Second World War.

Expressionism is still with us. Commerce has invaded bohemia, and created an elaborate body of theory to justify, support and overtake what might otherwise appear infantile and irrational. And if traditional art cannot be pure emotional expression, then a new art would have to be forged. Such poetry would not be an intoxication of life (Nietzsche's phrase) and still less its sanctification.  Great strains on the creative process were inevitable, moreover, as they were in Georg Trakl's case, who committed suicide shortly after writing the haunting and beautiful piece given below

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SYMBOLIST POETS
symbolism in poetry

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), the high priest of the French movement, theorized that symbols were of two types. One was created by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed as nascent words that slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a state of mind initially unknown to their originator.

None of this came about without cultivation, and indeed dedication. Poets focused on the inner life. They explored strange cults and countries. They wrote in allusive, enigmatic, musical and ambiguous styles. Rimbaud deranged his senses and declared "Je est un autre". Von Hofmannstahl created his own language. Valéry retired from the world as a private secretary, before returning to a mastery of traditional French verse. Rilke renounced wife and human society to be attentive to the message when it came.

Not all were great theoreticians or technicians, but the two interests tended to go together, in Mallarmé most of all. He painstakingly developed his art of suggestion, what he called his "fictions". Rare words were introduced, syntactical intricacies, private associations and baffling images. Metonymy replaced metaphor as symbol, and was in turn replaced by single words which opened in imagination to multiple levels of signification. Time was suspended, and the usual supports of plot and narrative removed. Even the implied poet faded away, and there were then only objects, enigmatically introduced but somehow made right and necessary by verse skill. Music indeed was the condition to which poetry aspired, and Verlaine, Jimenez and Valéry were among many who concentrated efforts to that end.

So appeared a dichotomy between the inner and outer lives. In actuality, poets led humdrum existences, but what they described was rich and often illicit: the festering beauties of courtesans and dance-hall entertainers; far away countries and their native peoples; a world-weariness that came with drugs, isolation, alcohol and bought ***. Much was mixed up in this movement — decadence, aestheticism, romanticism, and the occult — but its isms had a rational purpose, which is still pertinent. In what way are these poets different from our own sixties generation? Or from the young today: clubbing, experimenting with relationships and drugs, backpacking to distant parts? And was the mixing of sensory perceptions so very novel or irrational? Synaesthesia was used by the Greek poets, and indeed has a properly documented basis in brain physiology.

What of the intellectual bases, which are not commonly presented as matters that should engage the contemporary mind, still less the writing poet? Symbolism was built on nebulous and somewhat dubious notions: it inspired beautiful and historically important work: it is now dead: that might be the blunt summary. But Symbolist poetry was not empty of content, indeed expressed matters of great interest to continental philosophers, then and now. The contents of consciousness were the concern of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and he developed a terminology later employed by Heidegger (1889-1976), the Existentialists and hermeneutics. Current theories on metaphor and brain functioning extend these concepts, and offer a rapprochement between impersonal science and irrational literary theory.

So why has the Symbolism legacy dwindled into its current narrow concepts? Denied influence in the everyday world, poets turned inward, to private thoughts, associations and the unconscious. Like good Marxist intellectuals they policed the area they arrogated to themselves, and sought to correct and purify the language that would evoke its powers. Syntax was rearranged by Mallarmé. Rhythm, rhyme and stanza patterning were loosened or rejected. Words were purged of past associations (Modernism), of non-visual associations (Imagism), of histories of usage (Futurism), of social restraint (Dadaism) and of practical purpose (Surrealism). By a sort of belated Romanticism, poetry was returned to the exploration of the inner lands of the irrational. Even Postmodernism, with its bric-a-brac of received media images and current vulgarisms, ensures that gaps are left for the emerging unconscious to engage our interest

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IMAGIST POETRY
imagist poetry

Even by twentieth-century standards, Imagism was soon over. In 1912 Ezra Pound published the Complete Poetical Works of its founder, T.E. Hulme (five short poems) and by 1917 the movement, then overseen by Amy Lowell, had run its course. {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} The output in all amounted to a few score poems, and none of these captured the public's heart. Why the importance?

First there are the personalities involved — notably Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams {6} {7} {8} {9} — who became famous later. If ever the (continuing) importance to poets of networking, of being involved in movements from their inception, is attested, it is in these early days of post-Victorian revolt.

Then there are the manifestos of the movement, which became the cornerstones of Modernism, responsible for a much taught in universities until recently, and for the difficulties poets still find themselves in. The Imagists stressed clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail. Their aims, briefly set out, were that:

1. Content should be presented directly, through specific images where possible.
2. Every word should be functional, with nothing included that was not essential to the effect intended.
3. Rhythm should be composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome.

Also understood — if not spelled out, or perhaps fully recognized at the time — was the hope that poems could intensify a sense of objective reality through the immediacy of images.

Imagism itself gave rise to fairly negligible lines like:

You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch…  (Storm by H.D.)

Nonetheless, the reliance on images provided poets with these types of freedom:

1. Poems could dispense with classical rhetoric, emotion being generated much more directly through what Eliot called an objective correlate: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." {10}

2. By being shorn of context or supporting argument, images could appear with fresh interest and power.

3. Thoughts could be treated as images, i.e. as non-discursive elements that added emotional colouring without issues of truth or relevance intruding too mu
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PROSE BASED POETRY
prose based poetry

When free verse lacks rhythmic patterning, appearing as a lineated prose stripped of unnecessary ornament and rhetoric, it becomes the staple of much contemporary work. The focus is on what the words are being used to say, and their authenticity. The language is not heightened, and the poem differs from prose only by being more self-aware, innovative and/or cogent in its exposition.

Nonetheless, what looks normal at first becomes challenging on closer reading — thwarting expectations, and turning back on itself to make us think more deeply about the seemingly innocuous words used. And from there we are compelled to look at the world with sharper eyes, unprotected by commonplace phrases or easy assumptions. Often an awkward and fighting poetry, therefore, not indulging in ceremony or outmoded traditions.
What is Prose?

If we say that contemporary free verse is often built from what was once regarded as mere prose, then we shall have to distinguish prose from poetry, which is not so easy now. Prose was once the lesser vehicle, the medium of everyday thought and conversation, what we used to express facts, opinions, humour, arguments, feelings and the like. And while the better writers developed individual styles, and styles varied according to their purpose and social occasion, prose of some sort could be written by anyone. Beauty was not a requirement, and prose articles could be rephrased without great loss in meaning or effectiveness.

Poetry, though, had grander aims. William Lyon Phelps on Thomas Hardy's work: {1}

"The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention — I find even the drawings in "Wessex Poems" so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books — I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm."

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OPEN FORMS IN POETRY
open forms in poetry

Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the poems follow what the words and phrase suggest during the composition
Onoma Jan 2014
Kiss the earth slowly...lay a hand upon it...
nudge it, set it assail as if it were water.
Feel the body become a wisp of smoke--
disinheriting, yet curling about its fire.
Titillating the vastest contention of air,
and or ether...I do believe this sketch is
elementally complete...that's it folks.


Konstantinos Mark
vircapio gale Jul 2012
the perfect poem

would start by acknowledging its imperfection
and yet would bind the heart to listen
in any mood
any clime, any mind...

it would forgive contingent interruptions
in its contribution to evolution

and to grandly synthesize the facts,
it would pierce its central theme in one or so lines,
a one-stroke ******
embedded somewhere safe, an apex valley
of words and symbols to communicate
rather than excommunicate
or bemuse...

an accord of human
commonality,  invitation to wonder
or to leave off reading for later|

to wake or soothe to sleep,
it would be a poem you could wear into battle
or soft-intone to soothe a dying loved-one's breath.
the perfect poem would promise laughter
after every tear, catharsis guaranteed.
it would be godly and irreverent,
honest and veiled.
erudite, but conversational: a soul-mate in the etymons.
chalk-full of sultriness,
elementally seducing
with allure of verbal petrichor,
released from a long-awaited desert cloud,
dripping at the center aching...
and all wants fulfilled
(but for the other yearnings it instilled).

even a cursory perusing-over yields
a boundless sphere of cheer!
(you may not find it here, or anywhere)
an epic of haiku in casual/dress wear...
therapeutic, silent or aloud,
empathy in every line, attentive to the reader's work.
a collaborative lore
entwining evermore and more,
tolerant of others, wiser for their scorn --
it would shift its meaning, each read through:
twelve interpretations would do;
in fact it would take up residence in you,
it would help with shopping, too,
save the queen, start a culture all its own
a witness to atrocity and fame,
a judge of victors, the criminally insane,
an analgesic to the lame.
both densely, and loosely writ
it would be spontaneous, yet crafted by a practiced art.
it would rhyme, as if the muses commanded it to rhyme
contrived at the dawn of time
to be contrivance free...
for your particular ears, for your soul, right now
an ever-present origin of meaningfulness sent
like similes for your life only --
it would foster to create within itself
expression's manifold and measure,
in line with styles all in vogue
the global culture's wold,
hermeneutic gold.
it would be made of wood, and snow
of sun and space, the universe in tow.
it would spiral, dance and sing beneath its sounds
teach a novel lesson, for novel ears,
    each and every time
it would be memorized, and hung
glazed with caligraphic meditation
in a cloister boarding only **** monks,
it would bear no clumps.
it would smoothe out all the lumps,
it would offer more than i can say...
the perfect poem wouldn't even mind being thrown away;
it would come again some day.
in fact, on second thought, it may come a different way--
created in the fae-lines of the eyes,
the ears and mind: the double prance
of in and out and everywhere resize
the meaning-giving dance.
sinngebung: meaning giving
etymon: A word or morpheme from which compounds and derivatives are formed.
petrichor: the name for the smell of rain on dry ground
wold: a usually upland area of open country
hermeneutics: the study of the methodological principles of interpretation
This body is to narrow to start the concrete picturesque poetry

As a marvelous bright sparkling spring into the pitch black marvel stone
My poems are shallow water running out of time climbing backwards

Shanti dances, Shakti watches, I ride the glossy magenta mountain byke Elementally through the potentially ***** city, gulping two little
              flying                            spoons          ­            wwhhpp          mhm                                  ­    
                       of
Brilliant        IO Ag
                   Helth guarantieed on the nulth spelling positive not
Obtrusive politely declined           skipped          suggestive
Visually objective little pencil box down bellow
                                             friend    _ this is blank !

Absolutely! Absoulutely! A ****** stream of no perservatives no ***

Objecting flowery flunder opiates                           Words grow from
Barriers between insufficient gestures                  from human
Jazzy left ear leaving laments of sounds incapability to stay
Endlessly entwined and glued together as your soul loves
Tender tactile cats touch on your desperate desert sju++
                  Ave Gratias Plena Ava Gardner Avon Avion
  My throat is not of a managment made suits suiting suitcases
I'm Tired Of Fraternities Or True Females  Always  Ends  Well
To be or not to be...
What is it that is so captivating of a tree
The plants that stand in Noble stance
To have no eyes
But to see more than the eyes can see
To uphold a roof that all dwell under
Filtering the abominations in the sky
What would we be without air...
We must take time to slow down and care
The buffet for our lungs to sing what must be sung and to feed the flame of the Mighty bright heat of a fire that perspires to warm my flesh
An invention of the gods to make  variant dishes more edible that aren't so fresh
The  guiding light in dark cold nights
To lead me to the water that baptizes my organs to keep me floating in a mental elemental paradise
Oh how wise to recognise and appreciate the fate of the gifts in this elemental paradise
The soul glides through it's endeavors
The ether it's home
Come back to me and melt with the crone
Journey of Days May 2017
we look the same
common, seeking to find what we have in common
feeling that I should try to see you as friend
we share so much
but is that real
feel there is so much difference
now seek to know there is a difference
lest we sink into relativism
the gulf between our minds so wide
not just generational logic
it is more
tension of belief
it is in the weave
the texture and makeup of thoughts
warp and weft manufactured by stranger forces than we can imagine
and now try to un-imagine
so that we are all normalised into the tapestry
we find ourselves placed
our fibres are made of different stuff
elementally
broken down into constituent parts
we are alien to each other
dare to agree with you
and the masks barely hide the truth
allegory lost

@journeyofdays
are we really the same? is there a common truth to humanity?

struggling to see that hope for humanity with the violence experienced in the name of religion - that which is core to making us the "higher order being" in this gift of life
Julian Mar 2020
In the most precise terms accessible to the vast repository of considered lexicon, this passage describes the finifugal destiny of infectious myopia that, when dredged through the rabble and bugaboo of sensationalism that outmodes the modular gravity of vogue chicaneries belonging to the catchpole of the watchtowers that sink into a hibernal abyss by the crafty subversive elegance of the magnetic pull predicated on the prolific disposition of the serenity of nature to overpower the lust for civilization and thereby provide the calm equipoise of the confident desert,even when famished, to overtake those inclined to urbane bustle with the eventual drought of a ****** kitsch world inured to pollution reverting because of an exaggerated hubris embalmed by a composite nurture into the freedom of a leveled compass of moral dignity found in nature, ultimately astounds itself because of peremptory pulchritude. This prophesies a tip-toed dance with extravagance that ultimately humbles even upright civilizations with the magnetism of the elementally pristine to bequeath a licentious freedom of extravagation that philanders on maidan territory--beyond the ******* of the reprisal of peevish cavils of recalcitrant cognomens and the despotic inclinations of civilized but brutish incursion upon the warped reversion of priorities that enthrones serenity above bustle of latitude over the prerogative to jostle the crowded quagmire of inventive but abortive spectacles of tributary happenstances of the newfangled ochlocracy--because the immediate convenience of civilization is destined to crumple by clockwork flaws inherent in machination what nature can carve effortlessly through inseminated rejuvenation.
    It is not because of the rantipole revelry of the noisy cacophony that we are starkly indifferent to the hum of the melliferous agency that leads to ecocentric governance, it is rather because the conflagrations of the crowded humdingers of our times have lapsed into the crevasse of unbounded lewdness of wretched ambsace that purports alienation more fundamental than civilization and thereby provokes a cutthroat collapse predicated on the creamy pettifoggery of saccharine sentiment that creates the rot of urbanity and goads participation in the renewal of the bionomic imperative to cherish the serenity and peace and freedom granted by nature that always conquers nurture by axiomatic consequence because to prepone filigrees of cosmopolitan bravery is contrary to the crass nature of the demur of deferred gravitas accorded not just by ceremony but by rehearsed gallantry that outlasts the sardonic reprisals of flayed anticipation.
      To the reader less lettered than enamored, I intend to remark as a pivotal linchpin of my rudimentary model of the universe that the epigenetic configuration of disorder inherent to the entelechy of physically mandated entropy is an overriding force that, through permutations of our sanitized history ,we discover as the direct autarky of the innate to trounce the willful volition of the artificial because the precedence of nature undermines the imperatives of a filipendulous swing of nurture to destroy itself because the clockwork upbraided thorns of society are more evident and incumbent than the circular irony of the circuitous wiredrawn windlass of feral proclivity to overwhelm the devices of one tragically supererogatory species that undercuts its own virility by sterilizing the future with the noisy cacophony of the epiphenomenal excess of profligate carnality accorded by Original Sin and later expounded and exploited into a titanic hubris that might eventually sink the prerogatives of the metropolis and favor the malingering peace of the remote frontier. I wonder often why aliens congregate in insular proximity to Native American tribes and propinquity to their shibboleths rather than abide by an enigmatic skullduggery to infiltrate lucrative metropolitan tracts and, with delicate entryism, seek to propitiate the inane aspects of population with the delicate poise of interposition and, when I ponder this deeply lugubrious question, I realize it is probably because the aliens themselves are byproducts of an overpolluted society famished eventually by its own adolescent excesses that eventually redound in the fulminations of subsequent dearth and therefore it cherishes the arid propinquity between the natural balance of nature with the composite symmetry of the evolved soluble valence of recycled treasuries of provincial benedictions rather than a global ploy of takeover and turnover because they fear the ultimate destiny of the thronging clangor and obviously prefer the surreptitious entrenchment in tribal allegiance rather than pushful attempts to proselytize an imperious solidarity geared for heroic redhibitions of human defect for ulterior conquest that vouchsafes a degree of ineradicable dominion. Ironically, in the fitful throes of sickness I have convalesced into a singular desultory equipoise with the serenity of pause rather than the drygulch of overmilked tactless celerity that taxes the limitations of even the petty simplicity of the most rudimentary concepts and, through deliberative subroutines, I conquer the articles of subaudition that lurk in remote corridors waiting for the marauding curiosity of unique proclivity to traverse a bypass of directional contingency and summit the immeasurable lengths of the incalculable by measured and sly blettonisms of profound wealth but dramatic appraisal of the rudimentary vineyard for both a pronounced variegation of hypostasized supersolid vagrancies and a selectively culled culinary harvest of slow piggybacks upon even the simplest countenance of endeavor rather than the unkempt rigid sustenance of the formal inculcation and the liberated bailiwick of how an unsung sorrow can elevate the fanfare of the loudest enchantments above the pother of kitsch debauchery.
  On a more relevant note, instinct is often the realm of finicky depredation and libidinous tabanids to oleaginous gimcracks exerted primarily by the geotaxis of regnant pedigree but fathomed more by imperative glorified brawn rather than a self-aware truculence of unalloyed volition exerted by the primitive kinship to violent boorish self-advancement that debases us because of the lurid savagery inherent to many evolved chicaneries ,that remains hidden to even the most glorified ommateum distorted by the glare of distant tantalization, distorts the invictive goals of the ergasia of intrepid lollops of the enantiodromia of entropy. And, because ambition convolutes and flanges the instinctual into importunate articulations that bypass necessity by gouging consequence into redoubled countenance--upon which we all abide to some degree in the maintenance of labile stature that often gets dredged by external impediments to pushful accomplishment to grace--is the stagecraft by histrionic leverage that is a direct byproduct of the ulterior composite of circumstance and precarious fluctuations of character. Essentially, genius manifests when the gluttony of metaphorical siderism that is sejungible from the seismic jostle of the ordinary outweighs the restraint of the ******* to immediacy to traipse above bamboozled tripwires and surmount the restive jealousy of common noemas of subtle verbigerations to heave from a recessive slumber of foothot dreams into the alchemy of inconspicuous levity beyond the admittedly aggrandized and glazed angular momentum of rhetoric to simmer with radiant efflorescence to pay homage to sedimentary notions rather than truckle to the imperial ambitions of predictable leaps to the great fanfare of the proper sabbatical from celerity for the conventicle of the extraordinary plane of the supersensible entelechy of all creation.
        In profound contemplation, what manifests relatively clearly is that the ruinous hesitation provoked by the incumbent din of uproar leads to the whiplash of warbled subliminal tilts in the axis of the chryselephantine machinations--even of the inquisitive--into the free-for-all of the acerbic displacement of the acquisitive to a scalding shipwreck that defies the cordial gravity of demarches of extenuation and further incites a dislodged frenzy of exacerbated priorities becoming jumbled to such a quizzical extent that the dash for jewels becomes the hegira from either afflicted incarcerations of panic or the conflagration of malignant opportunism. In these uncertain financial times, we henpeck—sometimes with extraordinary dalliance and otherwise with bodged exercises in profane self-sabotage—the surface endeavor by the agitprop that congeals, even in the most strident resourcefulness waged against it, to the folly of fulgurant pride in the fruitful bets against prosperity or the ennobled forbearance of the slumbered toil and toll of the taxation of capitalism upon itself that overhangs every specter or prospect for mammon without the overweening clarity of the disclaimer of labile liability because of lapsed conscientiousness. The spread of wizened ripples of the Jehus that dart with provident alacrity towards the myth of catalyzed proliferation without incidental pollution, endanger themselves by the fumes of their own arrogation of mercantile swoopstakes rather than by the contrary coexistence of debased timidity of the rigid priggishness of reluctance which is by far a greater enemy to the financial ecosystem than the outrecuidance of financial temerity because toxicity through accident leads to windfall by precedent because it is a primary mover rather than a flagitious inertia and therefore we should dwell on the immanent accessible treasury of the composite good for invictive truth. Returning to Isaiah, it is proclaimed that justice will dwell in the desert while the fruits of prosperity lurk both in vineyards of conquest and foreign forests of the unknown fertility of grace..because in a sense the vapid lifeless drawl of the beazed comportment of the husbandry of complacent but arid contentment is fashioned in a manner that relies on provident self-containment rather than the industrious bulldozer of calamity that besets dominions of heralded opportunity even when ripe times are precluded by the zeal of the epicurean demands of harvest that eventually famish rather than appease the diet of profane luxuriousness rather than a balance that leans on the notion of balance itself to predicate sustainability that laments its own dearth but never foments the outrage of volatile fortunes won or lost in the casino of opportunism.
    On a highly irrelevant note, the checkered figments of otosis are the ironic endearment of the expected to their expectancy and yet because of wrinkles of iterative doubts roaming the widely spelunked cavern of redoubled demerits subsuming self-contempt, the dregs of the self-important eventually sour into a cynicism that barks loudly at the locked corridor of pride but eventually trespass into the coherence of the incidental that spark the volitions of a self-gaslighted endeavor that creeps incumbent upon most scrutiny but less salient to the otiose obtuseness of the rankled hamshackle of perseverance in sublunary clarity.
   In the etiology of reiterative and normative catastrophe, the morale that severs the parturition of spunky audacity in favor of complacent staples of buoyant regimented alacrity vitiate the trim slaver of the luxuriant grovel into the alcoves of restive libido into the hegiras that hurdle over the conflations between necessity and want and transmute the furor of fitful windlass into a transcendent indelible ethos of ineradicable and endangered regalia of the swamp that, with bricolages of vigor, resorts to lopsided scrutiny of outcroppings of the profane rather than the self-aware poise of scacchic prevenance of ulterior action to the proper congruence of action to the composite reaction of the synectically impaired. In this vein, we must concede that a foundering vessel is often scuttled by self-infliction but ultimately salvaged by the modesty of resistance to plenipotentiary fictions of noisome crotaline tabanids and the recognition of the ramshackle facts of tentative triage in a wilderness vitiated by the alarming abundance of careworn exercises in hubris and overstated alacrity to the dimples of regress ultimately scars the geopolitics of specter and prospect to the extent that pernicious anomalies dart into prominence without castigation or that tremendous serendipities sink beneath the RADAR of the otherwise sturdy panopticon
   Thus, the polity of interwoven statesmanship by prospectus leads eventually to a culminated crux that is retrofugal more than finifugal and, in the absenteeism to the precedent that eventually provokes the unprecedented, we witness the folly of irrevocable design that, when sufficiently abridged by compendium, leads to a swift clarity that ponders vague traces of the superficially coherent into a suboptimal engrenage with contingent stipulations that often backfire because of the crude boorishness of statesmanship ratcheting into a vertiginous dance with instinctual donnism rather than appointing dignified salience the proctor of uncertain but sizable dubiety acknowledged and commanded into clairvoyant action rather than resigned acatalepsy.
  In the resulting vacuum of moral conundrum, it is not enough to predicate our bedrock on flourishing jackals in the wild nor the often lambasted sematic entrenchment of fixated designs of the impending perfidy inherent to every quagmire of bugaboo or foofaraw livid by smoldering embers of combustible and often deliberate begrudgement because the thriving industry of constative vacillations of pandered controversy are in itself ribald albatrosses of coarse conformity that derelicts the penumbra of consensus because of the firebrands of invictive bulldozing vigor to solve rather than to acknowledge the unsolvable to the extent that gridlock becomes an ayurnamat. This is why we witness a floundered perspective of slugabed deliberation contending with peremptory decisiveness verging on a saturnalia of syntax of cotqueans borrowing odium from plucky viragos because the snailed uncial crackjaw dynamics of the unfettered cyanotype for the dashpots of brittle absolution of the slowpoke substance of elevated debate provoke the ornery miscegenation of a hyped fluidity that stagnates rather than prolongs the integral linchpins of the maieutic capacity rather than the redress of incontinence only valorous by the ommateum of the owners of folly. So if outpaced by the cyprian flourish of cursory rhetoric carping on melodies of transparent rapture personified in an intellectual composite, I retain the art of flayed delamination clavigerous--only because of the heist of smoldered efflorescence—because the centered pivot of demegorics is a travesty of monument men relaying variable scaldabancos against modish artifice itself (often without even realizing the circular irony of such endeavors) because the fervor of snappy sizzle disembrangles the intorted ego from reckoning the drollery of the obtuse only to the mutiny of superlative acuity by surgical strokes to convalesce on dittology to reprove even the deftest articulations because of the prerogatives of the uncharted game that is never the behest of lifeless taxidermies of regelation.
    Ultimately the summit of the calculus of all human endeavor is outfoxed by the rapacity of erratic successive spurts of upheaval which can be forestalled by degrees of institutional prescience formed by cryptodynamic enigmas lurking in the troves of myth but the financial calamities we are witnessing are but the byproduct  of rabid scavengers feasting on restive panic rather than the inevitable degringolade of swollen tribunes steamy with an upbeat verve becoming vitiated by programmed incontinence. So what should we do with this crafty rejoinder to a variety of modern checkered quandaries and the skeumorphs of speculation? We should inquire to the utmost capacity to outlast the overhang of aleatory vicissitude and await optimal conditions stipulated by the constellation of veridical information rather than lean on inclement windlass of instinctive gambles predicated on specious fatalism or the contingent backfire of the ruinous roulette of exotic fanfare that shepherds the purblind into mundane degrees of perdition while the chary parlay their Ten Minas into a bonanza by decisive grit.
Onoma Dec 2023
the periodic table of gods--

is elementally overturned.

as their accretions leave the

columns of the Parthenon

betwixt.

so the semantics of myth &

legend can copulate in peace.

with tinctures of chaos spasmodically

preconceiving release~
Rachel Salafia Feb 2014
The Star
and
his lover

crossed
elementally
indelibly
exiled

burning and
melting in
turn

fleeing flakes
pursuant fire

the Sun
listens
the snow
whispers,
*“I’m falling
for you.”
wordvango Jun 2015
reject roles romance
act as if we know
boundaries to be defeated
paint scenery with bold
appearances
yellow blue
red green combined
plasticine imaging into
new rainbows horizons
elementally
happy
Memorial days of when my mind was clear as rain. Back then I did not feel so
Elementally insane.  I used to whip up a poem in minutes and smile like a
Neuromental trigger happy woman.  Then, as years went by I noticed the
Tell tale signs of aging and slowing.   Stress settled in as life changed and  
A virus spread through the land.  I swallowed my fears and continued to  
Love, live and laugh but something had changed.  Me... My mental health...

MEDITATE ON THE GOOD THINGS IN LIFE, IT WILL HELP YOU STAY FOCUSED :)

Healthy is the man and woman who digs her own garden or grave, I say  
Enlist in the power of heavenly beings and do your very best. Life is
A series of battles, lift your sword on high and don't let the devil win.
Learn to live with what you have and find strength and comfort in the  
Truth.  Mental health is pliable, it can break it can heal, it can change.  
Help is there if you ask for it. You are not alone, so share your story...

TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR MENTAL HEALTH, YOU ONLY HAVE ONE MIND !!!
Kalyan Das Aug 2018
It was just another winter morning.
She had an unhurried breakfast
and walked into the traffic.

She spun and fell
when the first car hit.
The car that followed
could not stop fast enough
for her not to be squelched.
A mess of flesh and blood,
she became elementally
what she'd recently
longed to be.

Incomprehension was the
larger reaction
until they found on her reading desk
a musty copy of
The Brothers Karamazov,
pagemarked where the conversation
between Ivan and Alyosha begins.
Jayne E Nov 2019
sleepless feeds my mind slipping
elusive rest seeds as unrest unfolds
unsure footed & fraught head tripping
spiralling down wantings rabbit hole
super helix on hyper speeded axis
these thoughts find nowhere to go

I miss you in this cold night dark
I need your warm side here to lull me
the pain the pine has me fretting stark
craving to sleep beside you peace fully
I toss I turn yearning & burning

willing myself into fragments of light
and the 3am wind to lift me and carry
so I may elementally flee on the night
to my sweet loves bed with no tarry
every star is blown dark without you near

my hearts caged rhythm beats your name
as night chases dawn down to her knees
ruined by your love and it's white hot flame
a night larks song calls out across the seas
my waking fingers reach to not find you here

© J.C. 02/11/2019. 3.40am..
Ken Pepiton Dec 2021
I heard and thought i saw use of little i
as real a right as any ever,
mess mass after all
Cheeriest, seen icy and cold cold cold
Scenic went on, ah, sin qua non, ai is
mechanical- sylabbic it can fail
to comprehend the sense
said so eloquent, ly lyl
ly
"The resulting cloud
is probably still up there
— more proof that it pays
to shoot for the stars"
https://hellopoetry.com/JohnnyPanic/
From <https://hellopoetry.com/>
- time immeasurable now
- and more
- again

Peter Thiel, I hear
speak from a height so lofty,
he may as well be royalty,
as earlier investor in
now, now being after the investment
in the past, a bet
on better later
if
if
ever can occur in time to soothe
the troubled soul of man,
gardener, and user of the source of life,
earth,
as we know it, the place in ever
where we are free to live as parts,
involutionally evolved beings

--- e-vol
- time immeasurable now


vivia covideonic

Nonsense speech

t
was called gobbeldy ****, as far as I knew

et
lies were, simple *******.

A day when
lone is the state, no, not alone

lone
state, l'one, I, me the one
been in ever since,

Me, the wannabe
loved for being
a lone example
st…ranger
lost in wishes and prayers
for strength to
believe being me was ever
worth
the effort

To effectually think fervently, this

Future from then
is now, you know, the at home viewers,
all nested in us-ity, we
the attenders to the feed, enter-tain mental
if-ity, we dom
dominating the ratings, everybody who counts

counts social normality as that which we lost,
when we lost
the thread that stitched the neighborhood, in town,
as all out near farmers, gathered to work
dawn to dusk, with seasonal adjustments

to use the sun, more efficiently, lightenment wise.

- time immeasurable now

Right. Say we agree,
right may be, elementally,
first thing I could do to fix
a piece of reality,
the matter bits, no the mater
bits, see, the t, does alter sense
we see or take as a handle, a little
hand, reaching toward me, to get
hold
grasp the point, and feel the point

knowing pain in time. lost, time,
shifting
back to prayer, yes ever per
happy-worth of knowing I have

a deal, only lieve being true, this
word
with which all we think we share
timespace, whole go play,
go, play, use the e availed of, up
re tire to the source of e, the e
in mcsquared away all we know
or need to know, about the matter
we were formed from,
curiously.

Say, or imagine, make a mental scene\

time immeasurable now

knlynptn'tis a name, a named thing,
Any named thing is a thing

scenes seen at timespace points past
hence
then
when that famous painter, whose
work is praised, while
many paint better, but few paint more
and I wonder
at the power, once, not so distant

whenwhere we


hey, I may argue
time immeasurable now
with an expert, in all sorts of stories
studied, but
I feel he never lived as one who lives
by cotton being cultivated,
to clothe the naked in warm places,
as is
imperial edict, no naked people,
but of the very lowest caste,
those who clean the grease traps, and
haul away the grease, to sell
to the chemist, who hires

karmic richmen to sift his ashes
time immeasurable now

Fifty false starts, years,
celebrated as new years about
to begin,
when
some knowing finds me seeking
answers, any
answer
sworn to match the oath
on me,
I must never forswear the oath,

ah, and what
if I did? Is the danger I might be killed
for swearing to believe,
an unbelievable arrangement of duty
ever
servant class, never higher class but

as we know
among the hens, there is an order,
and only one **** rules the walk
beyond the cage,
where eggs are laid, but what
do we know
nobody in here, but us chickens.

we weeders of the hardest rows, volunteers
by god, you best be

thinkin' like a freeman, if you everwas one,

beguiled by the shining thing
urging merging, with a passion

new,
some way,
she sees me now,
is new, she sees the
reason, for the ban on knowing
this sooner
than now.

this is how, we prosper, knowing
I am bare, and made,
for the warmer climates,
let's go back
south.

Just about then there was a star,
it felt new, there, see, watch
to the next
night, as the world turns, watch, see
there, that is what I once saw and learned
killed almost all life above chthonic subsapient.

Comet, some times they are pulled apart
so they leave a trail of craters someday
ai will notice, then,
there were survivors, sapient sapient, mortal
survivors who were south of
that snow ball,
from dreamtime
to time of internet usurped for peace of mind,
easy, easy, rest and learn a new thing

that is a ***** snowball remnant of
some several years at light speed,
often days, at attention taking thought speed,
instant
we discover our system of so rare a set of random
chances working together, not to gether
yes
to gather the stuff, to make what we see,
that took some imagination,

who would imagine salt? Or, me, or any thought

ort-sphere sized bubble planetesimal clumps
of
what ever mustablown to bits, that hit
gravitational equilubrium
ha, yes, if we may stretch the wonder there

the ort-sphere in outer darkness, accessible
at thought sped gravi-totality wave,

you got it. feel the shiver, now
call bs on the butterfly hurricanes, ok.

You are the smallest differ'nce maker, to me.

I thought of my wife, but
she is not my muse.
I thought of you, and you know
you are not my muse.
Who?
Whist-le
Use of the musical muscle, leaves me
aching to be rich,
and anonymous, in i-postilion to plain anonymous/

left hand, anonymous ruler of the letters used
most often to re-call forces, at the glance
a fit finger left-handed forces, may useful to right
read
the things the left brain, wishes to hold,
so laced up
so pro, onward on track in groove rifling winds
and polished lands, on  down range, aims
have changed, some notice now, that wisdom has
changed the worth of certain seeds sown
for profit, whither rains fell mainly,
as in Kansas or Serengeti,
or the steppes and pampas
grassy deserts- dust bowls, watered in circles
so, so, subtle, far, far more so
than any beast, eh, sub-sapient thing, used to till
the dust and rock,
grinding great icy teeth, over half a planet at once,

time and again, the chance of a hit,
happened as if the shell of outer Ice
is there

to make the air on the bit of ever we live on
breathable, by the time, the mitochondrial virus
finds an amoebias trip spring green twig

aha, are we breathing now? Can we lower O abit

OK, FIX IT TO CARBON, DOES THAT WORK?

no, shouting, we don't know, but we do know,
we shall know, does this work.
by way pre-Jur-an-assic time. Way pre oath
.
In the future, for, as you are aware, you do live
and read and have your being, long after
the final qwerty stroke, seals the yoke,
and the ox begins to walk,
bound to the thread, thought
linking all that is to all that ever is
round and round a mill stone spindle,
waste not, the labor
of laxity, seen as best, for me
who wishes this rope to finish winding
so I my pull
with all my might
twisting the spring, for another shot.

Up river, without a paddle,
this is how we fish for men, in the Stix.

Row row row, no no no
now we run a vintage superseahorse johnson

and go where few, prior to drones

and job experience that leaves a clear impression
of pre-monetization revelation being
need-to-know
secret
ah
hidden from…{wondering softly} who do you hmmm
whom to squeeze for more creative
try
umphshitoops.

so coming out of stealth mode, moments prior
to the closing bell on April 4, 2001,

when the call for Jewish Lightning rose from the
ashes of the Hud loans pre-savings and loan
dive in '85.

Does this corelate with the color of prisons, inside?
We could repaint.

-- and that much time, once more

Auture autisto o artisto did you think, ai, art
I
was autistic, but Newton, and certainly
Cavendish, were not? I may not say
but
what
were such odd ducks as we find leading to now,
a mansion made for me,
the well spring hot and cold in six rooms in my home
and four fonts with flexible courses,
water as needed, science detected dryness, which no
King ever imagined in his wildest bouts of now what
post puberty in a time when his teen boy word
was law,
imagine, prince charming, becoming Archie Bunker
after all
and you looked the other way,

there were fools planning bombs, yes, I know,

I did
have the experience, on occasion,
to blow a rock that may hold minable titanium
to dust. And, once
to watch an ARVN, fishing in a peasants pond,
for a laugh,
with frag grenades. yes.

I saw. As my dopefiend buddy descrived the night
VC frogmen blew the bridge

bv be very
sure, before I am lying and not, merely
prospering in purgatory,
purging stories I may have told, but offered up

do you know, the idea, sacred? can we make some,
out of respect,
for the dead you know, I know, I know, you always

and so, on we went, intent on touching some thread
of might have been that went
elsewhere, when you did not
read this far.

But this happened, and that did not.
Sacrifice, mortals never know the worth in reality.
I guessed.
I guessed you might, know.
Jayne E Feb 2020
dreaming you
sonic ally  of love
the tone comes in
enters stage right
quiets all the din
blooms open in pre dawn light
as summer on heat
exerts her beautific might
elementally present
you feel so right
your breath the air
my skin needs
to breathe
your seed the nourish
my earth it feeds
your touch the flame
that fires my heart
your infinite tiny kisses
quench my drought
to set this love apart
the tone comes in
enters stage right
colours burst in my eyes
I feel you as sound
carried by light

© J.C.
Synesthesia - when the stimulation of one sense, triggers an involuntary experience of another sense.

— The End —