"intellectualism" poems
I commit myself to the homicide
of my thought-flowers.
I indulge in the **** -
Killing my darlings
for the sake of art and sanity.
What a paradox.
I have bloodied my hands
with it even so.
No more love-lite poetry!
No more adolescent chinks of the
pseudo-heart!
No more infantile fork-stabs
at the plate of kid-intellectualism!
No more Wikipedia pages
on thoughts
that can swallow computers
whole!
I'm killing my darlings
for the sake of art,
for the sake of sanity -
what a paradox.
Blood is flowing.
I'm a murderer of ideas tonight -
today I will write
about many of life's very few truths.
Like trees.
Like soil.
These are the only constants in mathematics.
These are the identities.
In my garden, I reach out
to crush an
almost-crimson hibiscus.
Petals squelching with skin and nectar -
no perfume.
The hibiscus roils, unliving.
Red pulpy mess;
heart out of chest.
Aug 15, 2015
Aug 15, 2015 at 5:09 PM UTC
Inertia the process of doing nothing
Contradiction the art of jumping intellectual rope
Intellectualism the active engagement in educated debate
Spinning the result of which is dizziness
Dizziness a state of uncertainty
Debating the conversational to and fro
Art is conversation nothing more
Conversation a non productive but necessary social engagement
Formal education
Relative information specificity
Consider the ****** lilies
Consideration Debate Intelligence Conversation Inertia
Mar 8, 2012
Mar 8, 2012 at 8:03 AM UTC
Hiding behind text messages
we believe immunizes the heart
is a forced loneliness
a perpetual confinement
in a dark room, with low music
which only breeds madness
In such famine, the body desires touch
the soul craves fellowship
the mind requires intellectualism
laughs between true friends
and shared tears
of kindred spirits
Once we can no longer bear starvation
comes the gluttonous feast
As wretched hogs at a trough
any form of attention is consumed
to fill the growing chasm of
worthlessness
Blinded by false admiration on backlit screens
the body, the soul, and the mind savors
cheap flattery of dark temptations
Vulgarity drools thick as blood from blackened lips
The sweet tinge of grief
that bitter hit of hatred
spirals descent into the dark void
that forever hides the light
May 1, 2015
May 1, 2015 at 4:22 PM UTC
they're gone
to the south and to the north and then later some east
all packed up
intellectualism and sleep goes great with their whiskey and racket
rolling away
for the thrill
Feb 11, 2010
Feb 11, 2010 at 5:29 PM UTC
when everything everywhere
whispered in irresistible languages
*hey you there
stop resisting*
i began to surrender
was flowing free
stretching
wings flapping
toward the unknowable
inside
experimented with ditching
body as identification
name as identification
personal history as identification
faded off
mad word searching
explaining justifying
reiterating too much information
i loosened my squeeze grip
on intellectualism
tell-me-how-to-be spiritual books
whatever the famous someone
said once then got bronzed over
i surrendered to universal unity
where i lavishly decorated
my living changing dream
with my own snap choices
i was flowing with fresh
synergetic synthesis
returned outside to pedestrian streets
where angelics mixed in
wore transparent disguises
i began to flow
forgiveness out and in
skipped a light fandango
splashing puddles was
answer to inclement weather
i set wooden faces
to smiling after
i switched my own
i rolled on through
perceived stop signs
of the everlasting no
incinerated all my karma with
nownownow
wonwonwon
made myself
stock still
experienced
yes yes
relaxed awareness
breathed
emptiness
opened all my hands
Feb 1, 2016
Feb 1, 2016 at 2:16 PM UTC
*Gone are the days of yore
When intellectualism was a preserve
Of the privileged and distinguished in society
A family ‘heirloom’ passed on to succeeding generations*
*Over the years the human mind
Has morphed into a think tank of awe and bamboozlement
An object for advancement…and destruction almost in equal measure
A portal to self-destruction
*Political pundits passionately discourse in the corridors
Of power over an issue as mundane as food taxes
Am ****** if this aint a move to subjugate the populace
Whilst reveling in the guise of representing the best interests of the electorate*
*It’s a slap in the face of reason and logic
A soiling and tainting of mother earth’s unconditional benevolence
Extended to her humble earthlings as bountiful harvest
But a means of self-aggrandizement it is for the politicians and their loyalists
Apparently this is *political correctness
Jul 5, 2013
Jul 5, 2013 at 5:40 AM UTC
It’s funny how
The universities are still in business
Of producing graduates
That speak funny English
And hardly make invention
And the stock market falls
Down street tumbles
That lets people buy
And make profit
Like grandpa used to say,
True intellectualism died
In the year 1929
With the rise in acumen inflation
It was then that
This Federal Reserve of Ignorance
The true villain of this quandary
Traces its genesis
Hope that explains succinct
This universal impotence
Jun 18, 2012
Jun 18, 2012 at 9:17 AM UTC
What happened to the dandies
Those gentlemen of the grandest Culture
Destroyers of dreaded boundaries
Mockers of meaningless morality
Inquisitors of a profound lack of imagination
Guardians of good taste
Messengers of modernity
What happened to those 19th century hipsters
Who so gracefully dissected Society
And whose wit and wisdom
Shook the foundations
Of mainstream hypocrisy
Of inept intellectualism
And lamentable lies
We are in dire need of retrieving
The lost art of being a dandy
To shake the foundations once more
And to revoke the righteous rage
Of the cultural creed
To set society aflame
With wit and wisdom
Oct 13, 2015
Oct 13, 2015 at 10:01 AM UTC
Longing for the land of my lineage
I am dying here, in Beggar Country
Here, where fools act the wise
Pseudo Intellectualism steadily on the rise
Where the disease celebritism has took hold
Forced out the tried and true for the shiny yet old
Where the idiom
The more things that change, the more remains the same
Is unquestionably fact
I long for Ireland
I long to go back
Give me land that's green
And rolling countryside
Give me tide to rival hell's fury
And people that mean well, amid gales so dreary
I miss fog
Like that kicked up by the mire
Give me land that's hungry
Give me people that's tired
Aug 23, 2021
Aug 23, 2021 at 1:53 AM UTC
i'm just bored of having to feel what other people
feel, limiting the realism of things,
a woman with a child's severed head in moscow is
sensationalism to them, but when they get a mild
reality, Kashmir chilly on the palette, they make
cheap Monty Python jokes to scare the facts away...
the so-called satire that requires canned laughter;
was given a library of 25 philosophy books,
not one of them by an englishman,
went as far back as the greeks,
i guess the version of english egalitarian
was not worth a communism,
somehow the two synonyms became
antonyms... 25 volumes of philosophy,
not one english philosopher...
the english intellectualise: i.e.:
regurgitate facts....
the english do not philosophise,
i.e. instead they cite facts... they're intellectuals by rite
of citation, the citation of facts,
they can't philosophise i.e. not cite (facts)...
they intellectualise, they cite and recite
facts with a dogmatism that fears a demolition
and no rekindling of interest...
to philosophise is to avoid citation:
to work from nothing,
the english cannot philosophise because
they intellectualise and by intellectualism
they cite and recite facts like an ave maria
pi = 3.14... Galileo's spectacles...
etc. the english cannot philosophise, they're
just intellectuals, they cite and recite facts,
they cannot engage from non-citation or non-recitation
of a fact, like a greek might ignore a stone
and fool himself claiming it's nothing,
the english cannot allow a confiscation of
a subject and treat it as nothing,
it would not make sense as to why charles i
was the precursor of the french aristocratic en masse
meeting with the guillotine if darwinism wasn't
discovered on the islands of Galapagos...
although i beg to differ with a thought on Gauguin
and the islands of Tahiti: make a turtle yawn
and you'll jinx yourself a blessing to live to be one hundred years old.
Feb 29, 2016
Feb 29, 2016 at 10:49 PM UTC
the first and the single greatest
discouragement from writing
always begins when people
ask you about money,
not necessarily that they want
money, but that they see
art as frivulous, something
to do on the side... and sure enough
most of art is done that way...
on the side... but then such art, what it
becomes, is an expression of chance
opportunism... i mean...
surely there's enough people in
the world that can allow one
man to write a few ******** poems
out, it's not like they're conscripting
young men to join salvation army
in syria or anything as ridiculous as that;
but in all honesty i don't know what
it's all about - first they tell you
to not get in trouble, then they tell
you art belongs in a high school art room,
then they put artists on peddlestools
when all they produce are massive blobs
of colour in a random way, or
make a messy bedroom an art work,
or pickle a shark in a plastic aquarium,
open spaces, strings of metal, ropes
around rodin's kiss... all kinds of airy fairy
bits 'n' bobs... then mediocre seasonal
greetings poetry: rhyme christmas with
business with busy bees with jabberwocky
or something like that -
but indeed the foremost discouragement
people place on you is to get your worried
about money, concerned enough that
you begin to wonder - are they really
chasing their own tail and insert that
serpent-eating-itself into you?
i mean, all the italian renaissance masters
didn't bother with adorments and fashion
for proof of being rich - they had a motto,
only one: we're not a bunch dumb peacocks!
how about i paint you a mona lisa
and make myself shine like gold in rags?!
surely enough modern art, on that
massive scale, in galleries across countries
is obsessed with space, perhaps the lack
of space in real life, the almost claustrophobic,
the sheer number of people on the streets,
all it's fighting is technique and detail,
it's trying to be a child again,
it cannot stomach the fact that old techniques
were never passed on, or if they were
they are like a magician's deception -
whatever that means - i just think that
what modern art has become is almost
architectural - how on earth could
you elaborate on a square is beyond me -
unless of course it isn't, in which case
it's forceful intellectualism:
trying to squeeze out some orange juice
from an old & dry orange.
Dec 15, 2015
Dec 15, 2015 at 5:44 AM UTC
We consider impossible possibilities
and read from a dictionary of abstract words
and try to grasp intangible ideas.
its a perplexing and troublesome thing
Altruism, Absurdism, Animism
A constant clamor of chaos
Word words words
Only in context can you understand
But how could I ever be sure?
You hear it, but could you ever know?
Does Idividualism, instrumentalism, Intellectualism
Mean anything to you?
Even if it does
there’s a gap in perceptions
the space between your eyes and mine
is a world apart, never to meet
Expression is futile
we can never make any connections
You reverberate in my ear
and echo out of me
I reverberate in your ear
and echo out of you
Pushing and pulling like the tide
constantly eroding the meaning
But once in a while
when I look at you
and say “I love you.”
You say “I love you too.”
By the twist of your mouth
and the gleam in your eye
I know our definitions
are one, and the same
Though our emotions are lost in translation
and its challenging to put it into words
Your reply causes such sensations
I have no doubt. You meant it.
Mar 21, 2011
Mar 21, 2011 at 5:53 AM UTC
Mao Zedong’s revolution deposed the ancient, 5000 year old rule of Dynastic China.
In doing so he espoused the continuous violent struggle by contradictory forces within society to produce a perpetual disequilibrium of revolt against intellectualism and Confucian principle and practice.
With the global collapse of Communistic systems, the wily genius of the diminutive, Deng Xiaoping, breathed new life into the faltering rule
With a cunning rebranding of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, he maintained the stability of Chinese Communist kleptocracy until relatively recent times.
But the middle class awakening of Tiananmen Square and the recent Hong Kong massed protest, has brought into focus the demands of an increasingly educated, increasingly affluent, Chinese society’s expectation and demand for increased democratic rights and freedom and a more just system of the Rule of Law.
The day of the old, strong arm, autocratic rule is over.
China is emerging, quite naturally, into a world of increased information freedom, where the seeking of each individual’s betterment and independence promises a brighter future of personal dignity, increased self-esteem and an emerging sense of high anticipation.
President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party is now presented with the challenge to moderate in order to survive. To endeavour to embrace and meld the old concepts of Confucian harmony to the vaulting expectations of China’s new world beckoning.
M.
Denmark, Western Australia.
5 October 2014
Oct 17, 2014
Oct 17, 2014 at 3:57 PM UTC
the death
of self, exhaled, borne upon
wafts of
air, and
I, with my self-conscious
prose and pretensions
of intellectualism,
and I, dreaded I -
there is a beauty in
ideology; even wastrelism,
being the muck of the earth and
much reviled by Proper Gentlemen,
has its allure and adherents
those disciples of Dionysus,
bacchanalia becoming banal by
sheer repetition:
***** ***** ***** shotgunned beers, and then-
TEQUIIIILA!!
crowed at the top of their lungs,
memory expunged by
hepatic-processed organic compounds.
of course, these mannerisms are simply
beneath you, disdainfully
catalogued by keen eyes:
no, your form of forgettance
is much more forceful, much less
fanciful and romanticized:
your amnesia is
absolute,
it required nothing less than
total dedication, mortification,
death of self as you
expatiated lusts, loves,
aught but ambitions remain,
and now, you have triumphed:
you stand solitary, skyscrapers
shining for your personal
pleasure, yet you can find,
none.
Jul 3, 2014
Jul 3, 2014 at 9:56 PM UTC
A child with fine features,
blue eyes,
learns from teachers--
deep below our perceptive thought,
our Einstein philosophies,
and artsy intellectualism.
She multiplies the rose bushes,
across the Italian culture,
so romantic,
so fair.
breathing only to discover a Shakespearean air,
about herself.
She knows more than most,
sitting just above the state of human consciousness.
Reality is reigned by being just.
If one could know,
if the lion tamed,
of cruel desires,
and citrus teas.
We would object,
justification.
What beauty lay below a rose bush?
Nothing, muck.
Feb 19, 2013
Feb 19, 2013 at 9:09 PM UTC
everyone is just doing the best they can
that thought, when it goes
through my head
it's like it can quiet
all the chaos up there for a minute
i guess that's my mantra
spiritual
in the Eastern sense
let's you say a lot, let's you say
nothing at all
Pseudo-intellectualism, dilettante
I AM NOT VAPID, NOR VACUOUS
i am empty, fill me up
snarling like a ******* beast in heat
****** Rasputin
eat me up
Feb 26, 2015
Feb 26, 2015 at 1:12 PM UTC
We are bound by gluttonous and crimson ties of political psychopathy where elected white-collar gangsters exercise their wrath in order to compel the masses towards a lustful calamity at the price of slothful convenience.
Absolute power is characterised by greed, and it corrupts to an absolute degree of nihilistic rhapsody.
Whatever happened to our prideful intelligence?
Lest we forget: the analysis of intimacy is enviable, as she is forfeited in the name of capital vice.
Apr 5, 2014
Apr 5, 2014 at 10:44 PM UTC
I often ponder life's biggest questions
But what's the point? There's no worth testing
Hopelessness often meets despair
I can't even begin to care
Intellectualism is in my name
Surely I am without a blame
For who lives life
Without a single care
For how
Or where
Or when
Or why
They came about
I once met a man
Who told me son
Life can be lived simply
If you consider it fun
But I responded solely
Only in my head
Life is no fun
Unless checked by reasoning's hand
The life unexamined
Socrates once said,
Is a life not worth living
And he put it to bed
For what man
Who calls himself a man
Can honestly live a day
Without caring where he might lay
On the fated day
He departs upon tomorrow
Jan 3, 2012
Jan 3, 2012 at 10:32 PM UTC
Come Down
by Michael R. Burch
for Harold Bloom and the Ivory Towerists
Come down, O, come down
from your high mountain tower.
How coldly the wind blows,
how late this chill hour ...
and I cannot wait
for a meteor shower
to show you the time
must be now, or not ever.
Come down, O, come down
from the high mountain heather
blown to the lees
as fierce northern gales sever.
Come down, or your heart
will grow cold as the weather
when winter devours
and spring returns never.
NOTE: I dedicated this poem to Harold Bloom after reading his introduction to the Best American Poetry anthology he edited. Bloom seemed intent on claiming poetry as the province of the uber-reader (i.e., himself), but I remember reading poems by Blake, Burns, cummings, Dickinson, Frost, Housman, Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, Whitman, Yeats, et al, and grokking them as a boy, without any “advanced” instruction from anyone. Keywords/Tags: Harold Bloom, literary, critic, criticism, elitist, elitism, ivory, tower, heights, mountain, winter, cold, frigid
Rant: The Elite
by Michael R. Burch
When I heard Harold Bloom unsurprisingly say:
Poetry is necessarily difficult. It is our elitist art ...
I felt a small suspicious thrill. After all, sweetheart,
isn’t this who we are? Aren’t we obviously better,
and certainly fairer and taller, than they are?
Though once I found Ezra Pound
perhaps a smidgen too profound,
perhaps a bit over-fond of Benito
and the advantages of fascism
to be taken ad finem, like high tea
with a pure white spot of intellectualism
and an artificial sweetener, calorie-free.
I know! I know! Politics has nothing to do with art
And it tempts us so to be elite, to stand apart ...
but somehow the word just doesn’t ring true,
echoing effetely away—the distance from me to you.
Of course, politics has nothing to do with art,
but sometimes art has everything to do with becoming elite,
with climbing the cultural ladder, with being able to meet
someone more Exalted than you, who can demonstrate how to ****
so that everyone below claims one’s odor is sweet.
You had to be there! We were falling apart
with gratitude! We saw him! We wept at his feet!
Though someone will always be far, far above you, clouding your air,
gazing down at you with a look of wondering despair.
Mar 30, 2020
Mar 30, 2020 at 12:44 AM UTC
It is the immaculate consternation of my atrocious reputation,
for pulling intellectualism into the gutter.
For the transgressions I accumulated in a iniquitous fashion,
were merely the adoration's of rebellion.
The methodical maintenance of a maniacal mind set,
created in the interpretation of a world that fails to define me.
But I digress from my reasoning to articulate an irrefutable way of believing,
that love, is what started it all.
Infringing on the desolation of the psyche that wants to be free,
but inevitably entraps its own self.
A true Gemini fabulous and terrible, in all their splendor,
are a mass of waling contradictions wrapped in an enigma.
So to say that it is slightly genius, without a tinge of insanity,
would surely be an exercise in futility.
There are two sides to a coin, a Yin and Yung,
the things that defines us, is being in constant change.
Intuition is strong, but decision not so great,
if I could do half of both choices,
it's a path I'd gladly take.
No longer is there hiding,
no more walking on the fence,
no longer will I settle or be a part of false pretense.
Mar 13, 2014
Mar 13, 2014 at 2:53 PM UTC
what a shy event,
considering it,
to be supposed
to encompass, "life"..
a few fractures,
and an antithesis
of the river of Heraclitus...
the stillness of
the lake...
whereby Narcissus
was born...
from the philosopher
of the river,
to the demigod of the lake...
to the god of the sea...
grandfather god Poseidon
begot
the father demigod
of Narcissus...
who begot the son
Heraclitus...
what the sea is,
is what the river encapsulates,
which is what
the lake will never be...
the paradigm,
the writing of Heidegger...
spurned me to think,
to think, rather than "to be"...
how much of
cogito ergo sum
is ontologically, "satisfying"?
probably the nil of it...
counter Latin: in german:
denken werden sein?
oh, the shit-list goes on and on...
denken als sein?
reiterate that for me...
in Latin...
thought as the becoming
of being...
in German, first...
denken als die werden von sein...
now in Latin:
cogitatio quod dacens ex esse...
you know that almost all of
my childhood friends ended up
in prison?!
i'm just an oddity...
i infiltrated the theater of
intellectualism...
and i said: bogus, ********
and the supposed lost brimstone!
scent of cooked sulfur that stank
to the high heavens!
free speech, blah blah,
"free" & "thought"...
whatever the **** that means...
an antithesis of a claustrophobia?!
thought?
thought is the equivalent
contraceptive in terms of being...
thought liberates, but also
provides constraints...
thought is a being
that has non-being in its focus...
thought is a "being" that has
non-being as its focal point...
ontologically:
thought is a form of being,
that doesn't necessarily relate to
the existential "arithmetic"
of thought: thus done...
thinking is important,
but it's completely unrelated to being...
the thing itself,
and then... the thing in itself...
and subsequently: the thing for itself...
phenomenon, noumenon,
phenomenon...
since how much of
"thinking" is translated into
"being"?
i guess... not much of it
is ever translated within the confines
of the imagery of a cascade /
a waterfall...
zilch...
not a lot of thought crafts
the impetus to be...
as...
not a lot of being crafts
the impetus to think...
coincidentally a lot of:
out of every instance / insistence:
i.e. existence, happens,
simultaneously to said expression.
sam cooke:
don't know much about history,
don't know much (about) biology,
don't know much about a science book,
don't know much about the french i took,
but i do know that i love you,
and i know that if you love me too,
what a wonderful world this would be...
i could write this candy floss ********
point blank statement with
adverse feelings...
i have a pact of uninhibited
lying...
i could lie... but then lying
requires a prior experience in lies...
and...
i hate the economics of lies...
however much i might cherish
thinking, i seem to have picked
up a pattern whereby:
thinking doesn't translate into being...
so i guess...
as much of thought goes
into being, as it goes into non-being...
and that being said:
what is post-existentialism?
ontology.
Oct 27, 2018
Oct 27, 2018 at 10:33 PM UTC
My vocabulary dwindles,
intellectualism loses it's prime.
I can escape from that.
It becomes less and less of a priority to write.
This dissipating passion is to be considered a blessing.
Why?
Writing is not a priority.
It is a need,
to keep a pen in your bag, and a journal accompanying it;
just in case you may remember your own silenced wisdom.
It is a lust,
to gain experience, to improve,
and to slowly cultivate your essence through the English language.
It is a skill,
that can either be possessed through pragmatism or vision,
through lack of reality or structure.
It is what gives you life,
it is what corrodes everything that you presently stand for.
Never though,
will writing be considered a priority.
Jan 12, 2013
Jan 12, 2013 at 10:33 PM UTC