"rodin" poems
(for Christopher Isherwood)
Seated after breakfast
In this white-tiled cabin
Arabs call the House where
Everybody goes,
Even melancholics
Raise a cheer to Mrs.
Nature for the primal
Pleasure She bestows.
*** is but a dream to
Seventy-and-over,
But a joy proposed un-
-til we start to shave:
Mouth-delight depends on
Virtue in the cook, but
This She guarantees from
Cradle unto grave.
Lifted off the *****
Infants from their mothers
Hear their first impartial
Words of worldly praise:
Hence, to start the morning
With a satisfactory
Dump is a good omen
All our adult days.
Revelation came to
Luther in a privy
(Crosswords have been solved there)
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his Thinker,
Cogitating deeply,
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool.
All the arts derive from
This ur-act of making,
Private to the artist:
Makers' lives are spent
Striving in their chosen
Medium to produce a
De-narcissus-ized en-
During excrement.
Freud did not invent the
Constipated miser:
Banks have letter boxes
Built in their façade
Marked For Night Deposits,
Stocks are firm or liquid,
Currencies of nations
Either soft or hard.
Global Mother, keep our
Bowels of compassion
Open through our lifetime,
Purge our minds as well:
Grant us a king ending,
Not a second childhood,
Petulant, weak-sphinctered,
In a cheap hotel.
Keep us in our station:
When we get pound-notish,
When we seem about to
Take up Higher Thought,
Send us some deflating
Image like the pained ex-
-pression on a Major
Prophet taken short.
(Orthodoxy ought to
Bless our modern plumbing:
Swift and St. Augustine
Lived in centuries
When a stench of sewage
Made a strong debating
Point for Manichees.)
Mind and Body run on
Different timetables:
Not until our morning
Visit here can we
Leave the dead concerns of
Yesterday behind us,
Face with all our courage
What is now to be.
13.9k
"The Kiss*" in marble
of Rodin's work
embraces art with passion.
Ovid wrote of kisses
back when "amor"
was in fashion.
To capture
such a moment
in marble or in verse,
is beautiful
but can't refine
the taste
when lips immerse.
In meditation,
I close my eyes
on kisses
I remember.
of hot August nights
in sultry heat
or amid a fireplace
in December...*
Nov 16, 2017
Nov 16, 2017 at 7:04 AM UTC
Rodin: My love, I am on my knees facing your beautiful body. My mouth is drinking your fire. I ***** us in stone. We are indissoluble.
Camille: I am heaven and hell. I am goddess and fire. You are my chauvinistic art-boy concubine.
Rodin: My dear Camille, can you not see my love for you is rooted in passion not stone or clay or bronze? Can you not feel my tongue lapping at your feet?
Camille: Foolish man. My feet are broken. I walk over you on stumps.
Camille leaves for England. Rodin follows.
Camille: You are boring.
Rodin: My love, can you not see that I am in a depressed mood. Can you not see that your capriciousness plagues me?
Camille: I love another.
Rodin: How can you say these things to me? I give you my heart. I give you my soul. I give you my artistic genius!
Camille: You’re right. You are a genius.
Rodin: Shall I write us up a contract?
Camille: As long as you don’t touch me.
Camille and Rodin return to Paris separately.
Rodin: It has been written. I will mentor you, write you in newspapers, place you in museums, and find you buyers.
Camille: You will not love another? You will spurn all but my art?
Rodin: I will. And you will marry me in return.
Camille: …
Rodin: Is there something wrong, my love?
Camille: Can you not see I am being facetious?
Rodin: My dear, you are my flora and gaiety. You are my chisel and stone. You are my breath and lungs.
Camille: Learn how to breathe without me.
Camille exits. Rodin crumples at the feet of Eternelle Idole.
Rodin: What have I done wrong?
Camille re-enters, her hands caked in clay.
Camille: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Rodin: Shall I get the handcuffs?
Camille: No. The lion’s cage.
Strong tides and wet fuchsias. Camille enters the cage forever.
Mar 20, 2016
Mar 20, 2016 at 12:40 PM UTC
Rodin was mocked
Darwin was underestimated
Beethoven was considered hopeless as a composer
But they passed through every hurdle
through their hard work and struggle
They suffered in their doom
because they knew
that one day they will bloom
Feb 14, 2014
Feb 14, 2014 at 11:39 AM UTC
I caption this
'The Kiss'
A greeting
lips that meet
anticipating
tongues that touch
arms around you holding tight
such is the kiss,
not a marble statue
not Rodin's
just a man's
imagination.
Jan 2, 2014
Jan 2, 2014 at 1:42 AM UTC
from the vantage point
of the triangle of desire,
all i see are the delicate hands of Rodin,
which now have become your chiseled face.
as the world sleeps at night
i wet my pillow with tears.
tears from the joy
of knowing the intense ways
in which i love you,
deep within my subterranean mind.
love
knows no possession ....
yet i covet you,
all of you,
even the concept of you.
why did you come into my life
like a whirlwind
only to then vanish like a mirage?
© 2022
Feb 27, 2022
Feb 27, 2022 at 10:02 AM UTC
To Kathleen-
Nor I can give, nor you can take; endures
The simple truth of me that is yours.
Is not the music mingled with the form
When all the heavens break in blind black storm?
Are we not veiled as Gods, and cruel as they,
Smiting our brilliance on the shuddering clay?
Silence and darkness cover us, confirm
Our splendour to its unappointed term:
For all the men homunculi that dance
Around us shudder at our brilliance.
These puppets perish in the good grand glare,
Our sworded sunlight in the boundless air !
These bats need cloisters; these tame birds a cage;
How should they know the Masters of the Age?
Or understand when the archangels cry
Adoring us Ellên kat' asterh ei?
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*concerning the last lines... all we can do with the Cartesian Libra is add adjectives to it, which is contrary to what the existentialists did by simply modifying a furthered abstraction of the compounds 'i think' and 'i am', via the inverted comma(s), otherwise known as dittoing, sic, prior said, or re-, true to the oddity; a king will continue to question his position / being a king by not thinking about it, hence his uninhibited delusions, hereditary, very much genetic; and hence someone who precursors his being with much concern for thinking, the inhibited delusion, self-serving - both are adjective expansions of the Cartesian Libra, just added qualities, given both are facts requiring a slab of marble to look like Rodin's kiss - or approximate, with therefore being the chisel, and so dependent the end product, indeed a slab of marble at first, but not necessarily Rodin's kiss at the end - perhaps a Notre Dame gargoyle...*
i am what i think,
that's what i came up with after
reading some of the bio sketches -
even though the truth is that
i am what i own -
thinking is the part that comes last,
if i own a bed and a roof over my head,
i end up i thinking about being
homeless - but sometimes you do find
the ones that are inclined
to be what they think, the extremes
we call them - supreme anti-materialists,
it's not satisfying to own a house
or a phone, more is required,
something tinged with transcendental
counters - they "own" a home
but rather not live in it, already the
looming fairy of heaven tells them
of an unnatural life expectancy -
some might say thinking a form of
uninhibited delusion sketches,
like i'd be a venture capitalists taking
a weekend away in Hawaii while
some ridiculousness of poverty in India
was to blame for my jet streams and
carbon footprints - they keep the
inhibited delusional in cages without
a chance to sketch - because the uninhibited
delusional have all the freedoms
that Versailles could allow - or...
uninhibited delusions of non-thought,
inherited, hereditary,
versus inhibited delusions of thought,
mutated, self-invented...
this could very well be a "magic" square
with two further variations, i.e.
uninhibited delusions of thought (psychopathy)
inhibited delusions of non-thought (coma?
Jun 19, 2016
Jun 19, 2016 at 10:11 AM UTC
I will find my way back to you on Montmartre’s cobblestone streets.
Imagine Hemingway right next to us, rambling on about his moveable feast.
Like free-spirited birds, I will race you to the top of Sacré-Cœur.
Before you can catch your breath,
I promise the view would steal it once more.
I want to see every inch of the Louvre, we would probably get lost for days;
But we are smiling like fools, I bet it would put Mona Lisa to shame.
We can stroll along the Seine, and haggle with bouquinistes near Notre Dame.
I will find an artist to paint you,
But first show me how a monsieur should love a madam.
I utter a prayer at Sainte-Chapelle, as I immortalize you in stained glass.
Maybe as we wander aimlessly along Champs-Elysées, Degas would teach us how to dance.
I will tell you all my secrets, the way kings and queens did once.
Even Rodin would call it treason not to cast these two lost souls in bronze.
We can have a picnic at the Tuileries, and you can bring me flowers from Monet's backyard.
I will make a wish before they wilt; Don’t we all hope for the best before we die?
And right here in the in-betweens, we have love to keep us alive,
As foolish and innocent as the way Picasso painted like a child.
Seasons are changing, and soon we will say goodbye.
The Tour Eiffel glistened in all its glory as darkness fell on the city of lights.
Paris, it has been an honor to love and be loved by you.
In a few years or maybe in a heartbeat—
I will come home to you soon.
Oct 19, 2018
Oct 19, 2018 at 3:28 AM UTC
Standing on the intersection of
a Monet, a van Gogh, and a Picasso
Nice piece of real estate!
Water lilies ~ Charrette de boeuf ~ Tete d'homme
Let's start with the lilies:
I'm impressionable and I gaze lovingly into the pool
I see my reflection slowly unfurl in the shimmer of the pink petals
As in a dream ... I float on
The watchmaker sends an instruction: rotate clockwise
Now an ox cart:
I seem to be walking in Poe's imagination
Crows flitting about as the ox champions
His burden on a drafty day
Another instruction from the watchmaker: continue clockwise
And now Tete d'homme ~ cubism:
My world deconstructs
Line by line, shapes and forms
Fracture into the subterranean unconsciousness of my mind
Leading to another instruction: close your eyes
Shift
Your
Perspective
Watchmaker says: open your eyes
Uncentre
Misalign
Unhitch
Watchmaker says: ens causa sui: 'a being that causes itself'
Now I've got Dali giving me niggling doubts about the nature of time
Sartre with a side of Darwin and I'm being and nothingness
Ground yourself Mullin!
Open your eyes ... this is reality
There's Rodin in a battle of good versus evil
Munch and no screams! This is good
Gaugin sharing his garden view
I'm in my happy place again ...
That's better
And here's Cezanne, Degas, Renoir, and Pissarro
Bringing me back into a recognizable reality
My eyes and my mind are in alignment here
But I can feel that watchmaker winding me back up
My iris constricts and my pineal widen
Third eye ain't blind
Hope someone is around to catch me
No worries, I'm sailing with Renoir and
I've found A Muse (Constantin Brancusi)
Ain't life a musing?
Nov 12, 2014
Nov 12, 2014 at 10:34 AM 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 play with the past,
us gawkers
laugh out louders
and marry the fun. Or
purchase t-shirts to remember
The Thinker plopped upon a porcelain throne
Rodin in the bowl
a powerful internal struggle
philosophy flushed for comedic blue cleanser
carved beautifully
The Vitruvian Man in full windmill
Townshend style
over strings in sextuplicate with limbs to match.
Perfection at eight heads high and
these amps go to eleven
The Persistence of Memory in any variation
so long as we don't have to consult our own dreams
Or Dali's
We shake the dust from our
feet and smile, forgetting things like The Thinker
was originally named The Poet
because that's not funny
and we're cleverer (more clever?) cleverer than that
Feb 6, 2013
Feb 6, 2013 at 11:17 AM UTC
Legs hold a torso away from the earth.
And a regular high poem of legs is here.
Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs
Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear
And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors.
You make us
Proud of our legs, old man.
And you left off the head here,
The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles.
1.4k
On my bookshelf
There is a stuatue
Of a monkey
With wire-rim glasses
Reading,
Looking
Like Rodin's Thinker.
I don't know who
The sculptor is,
But he's guilty
Of Identity Theft.
Jan 20, 2015
Jan 20, 2015 at 3:01 PM UTC
full title: ON THE PAINTING OF A MAN
BALANCING A HAT ON THE TIP OF A CIGAR
--from Cafe Le Quartier Libre
i can tell from the way he holds his body that
he's from Paris
as a child he spent his summers playing hide & seek
around the Eiffel Tower
he lost his virginity to a generous German ****
when he was eleven...a woman into Tarot and
palm reading
He smoked his first cigar with her
i can tell, i know
and it can be said that she was his one and only
true love
O people reading these lines
if only you could see him
Rodin would have loved him and would have devoted
decades on busts of him
O, if only you could see the way
he balances that hat on his cigar
still under her spell
~~
..circa 1978..Copyright 1981/2012 Spiros Zafiris
..from Midnight Magic (1981) ISBN:0-9690643-2-2
~~
Nov 7, 2012
Nov 7, 2012 at 4:07 AM UTC
audio me in... tell the b.t. off standards
to change the connection to lie to get to syria...
i wanted to become a butcher too...
not butchering people though...
onomatopeias of resonance of blah... blah...
you know... woollen trill...
i want the target bacon, i want to target bacon
on that **** head-banging with a pony
while blowing a sheen into a rodin marble
for the glisten of a haircut mare...
dark ivory like purple of a grenade of indigo
blotched with blood...
and spanked / spiked by kandinsky...
i told you i woz a barking gimmick, a barking cult-piece of mafia...
you’ve been warned dear bouncer allotment and semi-detached...
hey kieran - had his kidneys transplanted aged 15...
took to having a ****** aged 16 on the south park fence
when two ******* eyed us and the boys came to make cake...
oi boys r’ us you mention st. petersburg anywhere south of the thames?
i thought so...
make that spelling spaghetti for a kebab of dead meat
appealing:
it’s making headlines, people are fed fat but sugar headlines...
when fat headlines... people will be fed sugar...
salt will never compromise the use of steroids for balloon pop protein
for a mere attire of the bow tie undone with laze.
Nov 30, 2015
Nov 30, 2015 at 8:00 PM UTC
as the sun comes rushing in
through the cracks in the window, with a Matisse-like sheen,
a witch ponders over her natural, self-made enemy;
her trees are topsy turvy,
her entrails are unfurling.
as she careens into arms unfolding,
her breath mist was captured by Rodin
Apr 26, 2019
Apr 26, 2019 at 2:45 PM UTC
and to this day
I love you~love
beasty thinker
rodin's poetic
vision warrior
Mar 6, 2015
Mar 6, 2015 at 12:24 PM UTC
Some sculptures
Become more beautiful
by time
by weathering.
The Thinker, by Rodin
For example, I know
For sure that
when the last piece
was hewn
Looked less
impressive than it
does right now.
But you ..
Should I make a picture
of you right now
right there
as you are
lying down
in the grass
your lowerback
The ground
Not touching
then all Thinkers
Would realize
that they today
or earlier
never were as
Beautiful
As you
there, now.
Lying there, in
that Lucky grass
in the grass.
Feb 20, 2013
Feb 20, 2013 at 8:06 PM UTC
Fill in the ___________.
Exercise of the daily emptiness,
according to the rules of the Imperative mode.
RoDin
Jul 9, 2013
Jul 9, 2013 at 9:48 AM UTC
Pure as alabaster,
no servant, no master,
only love abides.
Lost in a kiss,
divination of bliss.
Together, they've stood, against time.
Their creator long gone,
still they live on,
to remind us that true love lasts forever.
Jan 15, 2025
Jan 15, 2025 at 11:15 AM UTC
After all these many carnivore years
You can call it guilt or you can call it fear
I've made up my mind to decide
I'm going vegan this November time
So I broke down hard and read some books
Heard some tapes on what it took
From veggies steamed to veggies raw
From beans of green to yellow squash
As my nightly dreams were all filled with meat
I pushed back hard with collard greens
But still had no clue of what to do
With a turkey substitute
And that is when a friend came in
Who Tofu's the line at turkey time
So I read more books and heard more tapes
On Tofu fried, boiled, broiled, and baked
Opening up my kitchen to fine cuisine
Minus the best part...that being meat
As I promised myself I can make this work
My Tofurkey would be the finest in edible art
I had bought my Tofu by the pound
Lucky for me it is pliable
As I stretched and pulled and pulled and stretched
Until I had something that looked like a head
With my artistic abilities seriously in doubt
I'm pretty sure what I conjured was the head of a cow
So I pulled and stretched and stretched and pulled
No ones going to call me an abstract fool
As I bring to boil the "Rodin" juices in me
And baste at my skills repeatedly
Where I come up with a turkey, giblets and all
And just for good measure I gobble a turkey call
Of course cooking the thing is another road and
I sadly lost Tofurkey 1, 2, and 3 in the explosion
When 4 hit the score I invited my friends
Whose friendship with them will take time to mend
Just because a turkey looks like a turkey, don't mean that it is
I'm now learning all this while I clean up the mess
As forks went to the mouths at the very same time
So did the retching along with the crying
But in a month they'll forget this entire sordid ordeal
When they get the invites for my Christmas holiday meal
With my time in the books and tapes I will spend
Looking forward to Christmas and a delicious soy bean ham
Nov 13, 2016
Nov 13, 2016 at 11:33 AM UTC
FOLLOW MY HEART
'Yes! ' I thought
' I will remember...'
how to get
back to
this place
your laughing face
a bird
writing on the sky
with the calligraphy
of its flight
this passing cloud
shaped like a heart now
breaking up into
Rodin's THE KISS
the laughter of kids
entangled in trees
a slight breeze
saucily lifting the hem
of your skirt
as if examining
the workmanship
of it.
Suddenly the wind's
a tailor?
The sea's voice
whispering far off
'Come & see... come & see! '
like a shy hawker
at a carnival.
One little brown knee
placed delicately
over another little brown knee
your skirt
like surf
crashing over it.
Yes I will
always remember
how to get
back here
follow these
directions
follow
my heart.
Nov 15, 2016
Nov 15, 2016 at 3:54 AM UTC
she lives where the cell phones die without remembering
the tone assigned to a cryptic stream of social Lilliputians
on a list of offenders, and befrienders; all caroling at random
for a stitch of thyme or to barter with banter and allusions.
she sleeps where her bed has fallen in love
with southern exposure; but openly flirts with an eastern sky
boiling over with morningstar and brindle night .
her thread count...
an imaginary number
between sleep and a full moon…
and her pillows have embroidered her silhouette
as she takes slumber to meet the parents of her proclivities
that have ever held sway over all of her charms.
how her forks and knives pay conjugal visits to spoons
To the clank elegance of her signature
explaining the vacancy she hordes without joy.
armed with only a loaded pun
in the barrel of her *** and a thousand safaris
beyond game. where a woman can breathe without pretending
the pink flamingos are Rodin on Ritalin
she can howl in her own language without poppies.
she lives in that house on the hill
that wasn’t there yesterday.
and the paper boys
all want to
be men.
so oleander.
Jul 13, 2018
Jul 13, 2018 at 4:26 AM UTC