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Hal Loyd Denton Nov 2011
Beloved Country

To former days I can’t attest did a like occurrence happen before the fall of ancient Rome if so it is not
Recorded what is recorded is the words of Adam’s who spoke about the natural order of things including
The nations he said it is now our solemn duty to manage the decline of this great nation that has been
Birthed did this solitary figure that walked in the dark valley start from that premise or was it another
Form of truth the truth that was blatantly obvious was he like the prophet of old that was told to do
Things before the eyes of Israel each command from God was a man living out an example a living object
Lesson your actions are not without consequence your folly is the tolling of the bell of death this figure
Crisscrossed this nation it held the straining haunting memory of Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac but more
Tragic was it a man or not human at all a spirit an angel one thing to have him brush past you were
Drawn to study him intently there was an announcement brimming a pronounced knowing that was
Born upon brooding wings he wasn’t a chameleon but at times he was identifiable with our history as
The time in a suit the dust in his hair his whole being spoke simply twin towers 911 the word from he
Who keeps the nations in peace and safety said this never would have happened if America still prayed
And sought his inexhaustible favor the figure was heard to repeat over and over again Abilene a white
Headed five star General not much when you just say Ike but he was the one that was waiting in the
Wings ready to march onto the world stage in his hands the winds of war were tamed we entered a
Great time of prosperity we took the statement in God We Trust to the depth of our hearts and he
Responded as he always does to that kind of faith broke the grip of tyrants who threatened the world
We were benevolent even saved and rebuilt the lands destroyed by imbeciles who thought they could
Butcher innocent people and a righteous God would look the other way in their deaths justice shouted
The favored words of victory you don’t have to be strong just trust and I will fight your battles then the
Figure is seen in the Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius it’s also a
Nickel bag of marijuana Nam and a ****** revolution sets the country on a course that you wonder can it
Recover it was pinball on the big scale every thinker and crack *** was listened to you played the game
One brain trust put it that this all started centuries ago they said by looking back we can see how we got
Where we are and where were going they say our crisis today is from the foundation laid by the age of
Reason here are the writing of two essential groups the rationalists and the empiricists. In the 1600’s and 1700’s, strains of humanisistic, man-centered thought came together and flourished, producing a widespread change in assumptions about reality. A group of thinkers known as the Continental Rationalists, composed of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, assumed on faith the mind’s ability to function correctly, independent of any external guidelines for thought and independent of God’s revelations about his creation. The mind could build a sound, unshakable system of thought; they felt, by deductive reasoning from simple premises, reinforced by truths retained from the biblical worldview from which they could borrow for the sake of convenience.

Then another group of philosophers known as the British Empiricists took things a step further toward modernism. This group, composed of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, denied the existence of the “innate ideas” held by the rationalists. All that man can know, they proposed, must originate in experience. All “abstract ideas” such as God or truth must derive from some sense impression in order to be intellectually valid.
You approach man in his mind you will find no guards to turn you back no resistance but the truly wise
That are built on this foundation it renders all that is false lifeless and harmless it says “See to it that no
One takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition
And the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ Colossians 2:8 false teaching respects not
Borders or fairness only the power of ruthless lies that seem light as feathers what harm can they do
Put the rest of the picture together feathers on a bird of prey will spread death and terror you walk
Unaware in a violent land you will soon be a victim without remedy and then the man that holds the
Highest office in the land says officially we are no longer a Christian nation but we are opening our arms
To all beliefs and systems of thought if that had been our history you wouldn’t know the world you and I
Live in first we would never had the blessing that enabled us to bless and build the weaker nations
Up where they could stand and make strides against ignorance and poverty I was at the store an old
Gentlemen was setting on a bench and he was shaking from a terrible ailment why didn’t I rush over and
Discuss Plato’s man cave I know in the right situation it has validity only to a point no I dropped my eyes
As my heart broke because of his situation he is my brother not one of a government but of a human
Fact I care because a real God a deity of love flows through my entire physical and spiritual life I don’t
Analyze create the perfect orderly answer I cry out in my lack of understanding please gentle one go
To him be his unshakable rock steady him on the inside the outside passes away that what our figure
Of this story knows we have such riches not in temporal realms but in those that will never falter they
Will only increase in coming days as glory is revealed my figure in this story shows we are being
Destroyed by forgetting who we are where we came from Abraham Lincoln said if we ever come to ruin
It will come from within I doubt if he ever dreamed it would come from the highest elected officials
Again this is all a bad dream if you make a personal and family altar he never has denied the cry of a
Humble and contrite heart this nation is yours not Washington’s fight for it on your knees or stand with
Tears in your eyes like the French when the devil incarnate ****** Pranced about in Paris tears of regret
Or tears that will usher in triumph
I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

             II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

             III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

             IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

             V
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

             VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
I am a thousand hooded Cobra
The king of all poisonous snakes
I can dance beautifully
And I live in India
from times immemorial
I am totally different from
Other cobras in the world
Though my bite is venomous
People continue to worship me
Because I have got
The religious sanctity
I adorn Lord Shiva’s neck
And I am the couch for Lord Vishnu
Many people try to squeeze
My poison out of my teeth
And some rationalists tried to **** me
But they can not **** my race
I will grow at enormous pace
I will continue to **** the people
But they will continue to worship me
The politicians continue to pamper me
Tawanda Mulalu Jul 2015
Musk. Wind

whispers mysteries in the form of it;
it thickens thin air until it turns black,
black enough to

hush. Wind,

being black, absorbs your thoughts,
makes violent curls of them; thickens,
thickens thin air until it

transmogrifies
into pages and pages
stained black with disaster-
as if a hurricane crumpled

those could-have been white aeroplanes, potential
papered to fly, and flung them
into the pit of your mind to
sink
             deeper
and
                            deeper
and
                                          deeper
until
your poems were written and the casualties numbered:
each line a suicide of a thought that could have been,
each syllable ink-stained and bloodied black
by artistic integrity, or madness: the same.

This wind is your hair.
This wind is your territory.
Not mine. Never could I have met you here,
in this place
of your solitary being: where real poets exist.

I am not a hurricane: and I am not your disaster.
I have learnt and re-learnt how useless it is to define you
in terms of myself; how useless it is to define you
at all. A rationalist like me can never truly understand
what it is to be part of your endlessness, the sheer
mountainous immensity that constitutes your thrill.
Yes,
your hair fascinates me as much as any ancient,
spiralling, far-away Andromeda- but the fact
that even now,  I've already tried to limit you
with words
shows the absoluteness, the solidity,
the density
of my misunderstanding of your... your...
And

real poets know that rationalists are fools.
You know

I am a fool.
I write these meagre verses
with unreachably cold computer technologies
thinking
that these words could somehow save us. Yet,
simultaneously,
I am some drunken nuisance knocking
vehemently
at your door, who turns and strolls
away
right before you finally
answer.
I am a fool

going home and seeing clouds
in the darkness. It is my first
time seeing them in the sky. First
time in nearly a month.
The moon illuminates the clouds,
and so do
the towers of highway lights in the middle of two roads.
One road leads forward, the other backwards.
As the car passes the towers,
the two lamps attached to each of their heads glow.
They streak on as the car speeds on homewards.
They leave fading tails like shooting stars, except they do not travel.
They are stagnant mind lights, peripheral memories; unmythical,
artificial.
They are not like you.

When I pass you,
You....
You...

You.

Please,
never believe-
for even a whisper of musk
to yourself;
for even a black hush,
to yourself;
for even one sliver, one strand
of Andromeda hair, falling
towards yourself-
that
Grahamstown
didn't mean anything less than Eternity to me.

It does.

I am not a hurricane. I am not your disaster.
You are far too much of yourself
for me to be even a zephyr
to you.
Those nonsensical similarities between us are irrelevant. You are you and nothing more.

I'm the problem.
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
no! seriously! how many ******* times will we have to go over this format of reciting biblical compliments to each other, chapter 1 verse 1 through to 3 like it's worth 30,000 word essays on hermeneutics... if any rational man could see that somehow 3 words = 30 thousand words... he'd have written a dictionary in 10 languages, and thesauruses combining 3 of them for aesthetic purposes of non-tutored rhetoric: the talk that made drinking a pint less about st. st. st. stuttering, and more about: rub-dub-rub-dub... why in seashell the sea and in cave the echo? psst... don't wake them... the English rationalists will have a monkey scout on the trails of such loose language insensibility... they'll keep the power of the un-tripped domino with Shakespeare... the only country in the world where a dictator exists... and no one wants to own up to the identity of who he is.*

for all its worth, history is like science, quiet frankly history is
a science of humanism, so many facts in science, as there
are dates in history -
we educate people for the hamster catch -
drill them Pythagoras to reach a blind spot,
likewise quantum twins:
here too, there too,
Xerxes mad lashing at the sea for disobeying,
some Emperor of Japan not lashing at the sea
and allowing a samurai smooth tsunami stroke
against the neck wipe a million shaven heads
and a beard from the cares of
the few entombed in modern pyramids: harems.
if only Xerxes were transported to Japan
and began lashing against the sea for disobeying,
sent a few army bombers to disperse the wave,
maybe then we'd know why he failed
in his conquest of Greece...
apathy is the worst kind of madness,
it breeds no King Lear... it breeds no fear,
no theatrical splendour...
it just showcases the homeless man
at Covent Garden with the sign: please help...
walking past in fake diamond but nonetheless
esteemed ownership for status...
i'd run naked past... but to prove what?
that brother C.C. owns a t.v.?
prove what, and to whom? the grey mass
that entombs a life we once had
but are left to this perpetual-awe riddle
of up-kept science and ridicule of awe from
the beginning? up-keeping awe in science goes so
far, as Cancer Man said: the minute
they reject my book, i turn into the subverting
agent of their success... they don't
publish my book i un-publish their so called-truth
books, which become nothing more than
cookery books... the people of Siberia
are stern enough to survive without some
mush from upper-east side, some
London elitist with a flavour for Dubai...
to attain the uttermost objectivity of man's concern
is to devolve his highly evolved protection
of the subjectivity of the state, or patriotism,
of the Hegelian protective ownership of goods,
of the Marxian communal dis-ownership of such escapades:
to give birth to a God of jealous inquisitions,
one must give birth to a God of jealous intentions,
as of any time as the one time in mythology,
no greater time would be assured in being equal,
to his being... oh i favour the Cancer Man...
the object remains intact, censored subjectivity has already
been in place with the enforcement of
keeping Shakespeare saintly, erasing all existing memory
of, i admit, unnecessary bureaucracy to merely
draw a halo over a frying-pan of scrambled eggs...
it doesn't matter how right or wrong i am...
people have been given an almost eternal history,
so that they don't believe in an eternity...
but whereas a wolf once attacked a flock of sheep
and could be easily distinguished by adaptability,
the wolf within the sheep, as with the sheep within
a metaphysical suggestion (abstract) is no longer
distinguishable... we evolved to cannibalise each other...
whether intentionally in isolated cases, or poetically
with unintended cases of isolation...
we gave birth to a greater death than that of god...
we gave birth to the death of poetry, by precursor
to a death i mean the birth of the mediocre.
all the avenues are exhausted... all that fanciful
cocktail of clown and mime and acrobat are done...
we turned to comparative existentialism, as we always
did, we always wanted to protect the lamb from the wolf,
the fly from the spider... but when we were given the
bigger picture, the pyramid, the schematic, we became
so scared of our natural power that we created an overwhelming
seemingly over-worldly power of the atom...
we pitied the lamb lost among a pack of hungry wolves...
but then we gave sway to the industrial slaughter of cows
for mere food fights in schooling institutes that cared
more for imagining ourselves without body rather than
without god... god is dead... enter the dietitian.
as one swine plucked the heat from another swine's comfort,
another anorexic prickled her skin against another's
for the other's to only feel nerve and bone than anything
mammalian... we, the lizard people of the severed cranium,
who, through our concreteness to fact:
as in science as one fact changed, so history without mythology
no fact remains with the mythology of hindsight, the what if...
who cares if it happened, why are you trapped in the mythology
of what if? we are truly lizards... to the core that we imagine
the canvas of our fancies (muscles, fat, fibres) so gluttonous
with ****, while leaving cold skeletal phonetics dyslexic,
broken... why then so many people dare to read?
want to? want to escape the horrid comforts of the papier mâché?
fibula... but is that φι- or θι-? you don't know,
before you could teach the coherence of the movement of such
bones, you enveloped them in moulds of images,
which you later called sacred, and knelt before them,
in the worship of former stone engravings, which you engraved
on canvas depicting learned folk who were bitterly ignorant...
then you desecrated graves... giving fake skeletons
property over pointless words, words that could never stretch
to the sentence of: i love you... you left them,
in slogan canned, until started asking: where are the dentists!
where are the dentists! we need dentists!
you we simply slurring a stupid karaoke into a microphone
while your grandmothers ****** your very lives day by day;
but hey! ooh those steroid biceps that would
end up giving you a heart-attack when running
against true athletes of 200 metres at 20 metres dead;
oh believe me... those tourist trips to Auschwitz?
they're fakes... you don't have to go on a tourist trip to
Auschwitz to start realising you're living in hell...
those trips are only real for people who've been there
for real... even those Israeli schoolchildren have no place
there... it's a place designated for Nazis and Poles
who identified themselves as Jews first...
mind if we import the Sphinx to Trafalgar Sq. for
kicks the tourists might admire in between breaks of
watching Netflix?
will19008 May 2019
Mom's birthday, dermatologist's appointment,
and a philosophy test on Descartes, Berkeley, Hume,
Continenetal Rationalists and British Empiricists.
(Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume)
Banyascki has on the ugliest vest I've ever seen in my life.
His hair is getting long, too. At least ⅜ of an inch. Wow. Freak.
Esse is percipi... To be is to be perceived.  Yes.
Notes in my spiral-bound Intro to Philosophy notebook on April 17, 1978, in West Chester, Pa.
The Suntoucher.

The surface was Artic cold it froze up her soul. Its remarkable. How can the sun be this cold?

Things are not always the way they seem.

To torment a woman with false hope is to basically leave her stuck in a dream..

I pity those who use love to raise their self esteem.

I told my wife to never depend on me for she can conquer it all...

and I'll never depend on her for she is not the reason for this ART.

She understands this for we are both rationalists.....



She is being reaped and sow at the same time.


For we represent TIME. I play the sun and she plays the moon.

Together we form the sky.
Israel Baker Jul 2017
With the few words left within me there is something I fear I must write. Beauty is everything, art is justified. It was a hard battle, but art has won. Dionysus takes the cup: Apollo, in a blaze of wonder and irony, has fallen, for this space is for dreamers, not for rationalists. Reason shall come shortly, but soon there will be no need for reason, I can assure you. First I must scorn in the face of every critic, whose airy words tried to stamp the artifice down the whimpering and broken throat of the victor, which is the artist; I must point and laugh at the woman that shrivels at the sight of moral beauty, and the man that seeks entertainment, rather than enlightenment, for you are all fools and cuckolds to your well-loved rationalism.

AND THUS WAS HIS REASONING

Beauty and truth both lay dormant in every soul that has walked the Earth. Every aesthetic piece gives breath to its own truth. Truth, because it is admired, admired, because it is truth. Expression, the holiest form of satisfaction, is then simply the application of the beautiful thing, which is art. In this realm nothing is proven, but everything is felt. This is art. This is truth. This is beauty. This is rebellion. This is nothing. This is everything. This is art.
KV Srikanth Apr 2021
Equality its quality
Time gives us sanity
Straddling as friend and enemy
Brings in its duality

Real or a concept
Know or transcend
Philosophers have the answer
Only it seems to matter

Fills many life's
Empties the rest
Static for some
Memories for most

Sets standards
Punchality its first
Defines humans
Communicates to Animals

Timely describes right
Untimely the wrong
Timing explores both
Time simply the watch

Good and Bad time
Essence of life
Time up
Essence of its end

Time doesnt end
It stops its  existence
Only With reference
Plays its role to perfection

Time used as a balm
Non believer in God
Atheists and Rationalists
Non believer in time
Not existant  as its backed by science

Hope and faith
Subdidaries of time
Signifying a change
Not specifying a frame

Time unable to replace
Time replaces time
Existing in every tick
Seconds needle brings with it

Is it good or bad
Brings in routine
Free or busy
Time the answer
Delivers correctly

Time up
End time
Time not ending
End of the line

Timeless in time
Immortality signified
Very few managed
To live after time

Greatest quality
Medicinal beauty
Heals the heart
Thank you to the Clock
Bruce Levine Jul 2018
The Renaissance
The Enlightenment
The Baroque
The Romanesque
The Classical
The Neo-classical
The Romantics
The Avant-Garde
The Dark Ages
The Middle Ages
The Federalists
The Philanthropists
The Modernists
The Cubists
The Minimalists
The Impressionists
The Imperialists
The Rationalists
The Surrealists
The Transcendentalists
The Gilded Age
The Industrial Age
The Golden Age
The Space Age
The Age of Reason
The Age of Mediocrity
G Oct 2020
Is it okay to dwell in dreams
while the world is going under?
Adored are the rationalists
driving us forward
curing and tending
My dreams are community-healers
my mind tells me -
whilst I sleep
KV Srikanth Mar 2022
For the good
For the bad
No one knows
Philosophers say could have been worse
Rationalists use staircase wisdom
To tie the knots
Those in between
Lacking faith of lack of
Hoping to find the answer
That never was
Was the right question asked

— The End —