"empedocles" poems
A hollow ‘hello’ from Hell! Yes, from Hell.
Where do names come from? This Hell is
a sleepy fishing village and the best
spot that we’ve found on Hollow Head,
a Sleepy Hollows, so to speak.
We are in the ‘Bridegroom’, a little Bed
and Breakfast, run by a Rip Van Winkle
wise enough to know it was Empedocles
who jumped into Mount Etna. Empedocles!
Is my face red! Yet it will glorify
my pronoun to perfection—‘he jumps’. Yes,
both poetry and philosophy ought
to have the same antecedent. They forge
a world that’s capable of consciousness.
The self, per se, remains vestigial—
the voice of the volcano, not its source.
Your pronoun is the antecedent, not
your noun. Problematic resolved. Perhaps
I will go for a walk in Hell, perhaps
I will take the air, take the breezes.
A wonderful day in Hell! Ha-ha!
Apr 18, 2010
Apr 18, 2010 at 4:49 PM UTC
On the night of initiation,
curves of pale luster began to gleam unwrinkled from the darkened divots along the lunar surface
A perspective unseen for so long, it was viewed as a defaulted “wink” on the face of the moon
And therefore, forgotten, unmentioned, until it’s means were sought
From days ‘fore, and long since now dust
Scribing authors, secrete beads of frenzy into ink filled phial
Sending tremors down, into the quill tip
Filling scrolls for permanence in a preemptive defense against continuous unraveling thoughts would befall
this fluency into incoherent clutter
Pioneers of preprint in a provoking tome,
would speak educated reasons why these areas of Moon had been locked under sealed dark punishment
since Empedocles mixed cosmic elements to breed an undeniable proving truth
Exhibiting the myth of danger
alongside
The established absolute and supervening fizzling sunset
proving the existence of love...
—————————————————-
“Since I have given you words from my within
like the ecliptic rising and burning massive,
Our mutual visibility of late is either one-sided
or
short lived
I’ll take a detour around the comforts of romance
And try to talk my way into your pants
By tossing at you, letters squeezed together,
for your minds transcription into the heart of my subliminal write
In hopes you’ll feel a trickling gush
If I get really lucky these words will find you like a volcano erupts a ****
The same way water, beating against years of stone can fall
And crash through a dam with pouring force so insatiable it’s territory is marked in history
Jun 22, 2019
Jun 22, 2019 at 11:09 PM UTC
THE GYRES! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.
What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,
And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?
What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,
A-greater, a more gracious time has gone;
For painted forms or boxes of make-up
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word "Rejoice!'
Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,
What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,
Lovers of horses and of women, shall,
From marble of a broken sepulchre,
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter
The workman, noble and saint, and all things run
On that unfashionable gyre again.
2.6k
You ask no questions; I provide the answers.
Greetings, my friend! We have moved on from Hell.
Today I stand in surf up to my knees.
Imagine: liquid rock, a steaming sea,
the battle of fire with water, land
like iron being forged, the earth refreshed.
We must make this moment a postcard from
infinity. My friend, I need your help.
This message, like our hope for life itself,
must be left unattributed. It must
be left an unresolved antecedent.
Think of Empedocles poised at the mouth
of that volcano, Etna’s edge. He is
about to enter this world’s soul. He is about
to die. We are all thrown into the world.
Empedocles, the poet philosopher,
must hear a voice from far into
the future, a voice from today that will
insure his resurrection, one
to clarify his immortality.
Write something in the sand for him to see.
'There was something more,
something more divine,
more bestial…'
Write that. Leave it unsigned.
'For I have been ere now a boy and a girl,
a bush and a bird and a dumb fish in the sea.'
Write that. Knowledge will come.
Apr 18, 2010
Apr 18, 2010 at 4:52 PM UTC
And I openly pledged my
Heart to the grave and
Suffering land, and often in the
Consecrated night, I promised
To love her faithfully until
Death, unafaraid, with her
Heavy burden of fatality, and
Never to despise a single one
Of her enigmas. Thus did I
Join myself to her with a
Mortal cord.
Apr 13, 2019
Apr 13, 2019 at 6:23 AM UTC
it's not really a shortcut to philosophy when writing
it in a shape of a poem, hardly a reason to trust
there's an orthodox choice of subjects -
unresolved problem, or even having to warrant
that horrid academic style of narration - and even if
not academic then simply in the vein of vanity: 'he's
wrong, he's wrong, oh he's definitely wrong...'
after all poetry can be philosophical,
after all heraclitus wrote sparingly and wore a cloak
of enigmas - as joseph and the multicoloured dreamcoat,
so too heraclitus and the multinigmatic (πολυνιγματικoς)
cloak; then there was parmenides of elea &
empedocles of arcagas who just wrote poetry,
albeit much less self-involving
as modernity would like to believe - and i guess
if qualified as didactic poetry, the instructions were certain
disguised as faults of their own understanding,
thus the instructions are of a higher calibre, in that
they are wrong and the reader must service their
wrongs... say... with something like galileo or newton,
because who the hell would like to constantly read
didactic poetry of specific instruction to be fulfilled
while the poet has to only write it in the comfy abode
of the page?
Dec 20, 2015
Dec 20, 2015 at 7:34 AM UTC