"referent" poems
Tonight I have no words.
I cannot grandly sweep my pen
In flowing arcs across the page,
Drawing little soft impressions
(little soft depressions)
That show how lovely pain can be.
I cannot play the great Creator
Who rips a vital pulsing mass
from out His chest,
And molds still-beating clay
With a sad old potter’s gentle hands
into a little melancholic harpist
who plucks the heartstrings perfectly.
No, I have no words that fit
Like others have made fit before,
composing language to fit all the inward lines and curves
(I once knew a few of her’s)
that twist and turn and come entwined,
(the twists and turns of long ago)
crying “Lacrimosa!” in some wee hour
as the breeze blows a lacy curtain back.
I am no Aeolian instrument
Sounding a sweet ethereal chord into the night.
I am the vacuous breath left behind in silence
When the musician’s music stops —
A tuneless referent —
An empty exclamation mark
Howling noiselessly in space,
Meaning nothing
And everything, all the same.
!
Sep 4, 2012
Sep 4, 2012 at 3:37 PM UTC
He’s a ***** of in-
tellectual acumen. A real conveyor of post-modern acuity.
What he has to say doesn’t make sense to me.
No one understands his esoteric complexity.
He speaks of Aristotelian “virtues”, Platonic Forms, and other
“practical” participation by the particularities.
Part of all that not even he fully understands.
Juxtaposing Quniean “webs of Knowledge” with Davidson Coherantism
He is challenged by McDowells 2nd nature Bildung.
His conventional English is thus un-sung, while meta-physical abstractions are then hung
Out to dry, in the abstract realm sky. What color is that sky?
“Unfair Question” he cries.
“Tell me about God” I ask, “very well” he replies.
My brain is numb after one question, and a few words.
He continues, “Do the God(s) agree upon what is good?”
Yes is my reply. “If so, do they love what is good?” Again yes.
“Then, is the Good whatever the God(s) love, or do the God(s) love what is Good?”
He must be on drugs.
A little philosophy makes a man an atheist.
A lot makes him a believer,
just not in God. He praises Reason, his room is a shrine.
Within four walls one will not find, no not any sign
Of conviction.
What? All this time thinking, reflecting, meditating, abstracting, observing, weaving grand tapestries of thought and still he does not find a foot hold in reality?
What the hell were you thinking about?
He responds.
A stream of consciousness is all that is,
past is a referent future is a predicate.
I am not the “me” I refer to when I say “my book.”
No sir, I have never spoken to you any knowledge of me.
For that I have none of, but knowledge I am not without.
If it is one thing I know, it is that I know nothing.
I tell him certainly my English teacher would know something to defeat him,
I am soon disenchanted, for he has ammunition for her.
“Ask her”, he says “to ascertain the truth value to this grammatically perfect declarative Sentence.”
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Oct 23, 2011
Oct 23, 2011 at 11:29 PM UTC
strictly speaking,
there exist no
referent
for Yesterdays Aches
or Tomorrows Concerns
in the Real World -
just
quaint tongue dances
and groans
of the throat.
Feb 13, 2019
Feb 13, 2019 at 4:01 PM UTC
"A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance" – Robert Smithson
Not by drawing a glance,
but casting.
Imagine the studio. What
Molten materials, what
Molds needed?
Who models, and will they
Recognize their eyes, or
Is it their object reified –
The signifier or the referent
Denoted in this indexical
Congealing.
Shy, illicit, bold, flirtations, imperial,
The variations and series of directed looks,
Is this the content, or is the captured casting
The direction - just the path of pointing:
A laser beam, redone in spider web, then
done again as differentials of the air?
And what of the early work, the
Imperfections, who filed down the seams?
And would cracks in the mold shift
The glance askew, revealing
A pliers, a heater, a
Reader’s thought?
Dec 6, 2015
Dec 6, 2015 at 5:05 PM UTC