"twentieth" poems
Dear Addiction, could you please stop knocking on my door?
I already have your ***** syringes scattered about my floor.
You keep on telling me that I want more
But I’m not very sure.
When you pierce my skin everything stills
Even though I hate it it feels so much better than the pills
I don’t want to do anything you have taken my will
Not only that, you’ve taken everything, including all of my dollar bills
I know that feeling of dry mouth too well.
They tell me that I can stop but honestly, I can’t tell
Right now it seems like the only way out of this is a bullet shell
I don’t know why I crave you when you bring me so much hell
When you crawl your way back into my veins
Those first hits of pleasure make me go insane
I start to remember why I got on this crazy train
But then I remember just how badly you’ve ****** up my brain
I wish I could get your illness out of my head.
They tell me that I am one twentieth of a gram from ending up dead
Yet no matter how many warnings are said
You seem to be the only reason to get out of bed.
I have lied for you.
I have ****** for you.
I have done for many awful things for you.
And I will most likely die because of you.
Dear Addiction, why do you make this so tough?
They say that abusive relationships aren’t made out of love
And I know the way you treat me is rough
But I cannot help what I love.
They say that all you do is harm.
Yet when my happiness comes into me through a needle in my arm
And my brain tells me that I should be alarmed
All I can do is crave your harm.
Your harm makes me feel like I am whole.
But it also seems to drag me further into the hole.
It seems that you have taken my soul
Getting you out of my life is a faraway goal.
Dear Addiction, you’ve hit me with a huge smack.
You’ve shown me how easy it is for life to get out of whack
I probably should have stopped before your first attack
But you had seen to put my life back on track.
Dear Addiction, you fill up my hunger.
But at the same time I’m starting to feel more and more like a jumper
I hate you more than I’ve hated any other
You are my most hated lover.
Dear Addiction,
I’m giving you an eviction.
I never even gave you any permission
To take away my ambitions.
Dear Addiction, I want to send you away.
But you are still knocking at the door where I stay
You always do know how to get your way.
Time to go back to my decay.
Dear Addiction
Stop ******* knocking. I’m coming!
Apr 27, 2016
Apr 27, 2016 at 8:13 PM UTC
Dear Talia,
I don't want to be a tortured artist.
I don't want to be depressed and I don't want to be anxious.
Competitive sadness and disorders treated like accessories disgust me.
The world glamorizes mental illness, and I don't understand why. There is nothing romantic about being mentally ill just like how there's nothing glamorous about a broken wrist or a torn medial collateral ligament. There's nothing romantic about constantly being afraid that the world will fold in itself and **** you with it. There's nothing romantic about feeling like you could break down and cry at any moment.
This is the first piece I've written while being medicated.
I want it to be Christmas already.
The world dreams itself a halo, but can only attain horns. The halo is an illusion and the horns are an idea.
I'm due to take another Lorazepam. Would I look cool to the kids who idolize dysfunction and misinterpret pain as style, if I were to take one of these, with water and a distant glance, in front of them? Geez, to have their approval would to have everything and nothing at all.
I'm not sure why I've written as much about this as I have.
You.
It is 2:48 am and all I can think about, in this moment, is you.
I can't wait to spend Christmas with you. I can't wait to wear bad Christmas sweaters, and be the couple everyone hates, as we sing Christmas carols and spread holiday cheer.
I wrote this poem a few minutes ago. Sometime around 2:30 am. I'm not sure. I'm exhausted:
I sat on the edge of my bed, and on the edge of my life,
medicated to the point of pointlessness. Soft.
It was the nineteenth, not the twentieth,
and I wished I saw the fireworks with her fifteen days earlier.
My gasps tore the shingles off of the house.
And they hung suspended above the hole in the roof.
And God stared down into my room, as the shingles swirled skyward.
"I see you," I said, "but I don't believe in you."
I left home and ran until I was a dream that had passed itself.
I hope that was okay.
I love you.
Yours,
Joshua Haines
Jul 20, 2014
Jul 20, 2014 at 2:56 AM UTC
Shema (“Listen”)
by Primo Levi
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You who live secure
in your comfortable homes,
who return each evening to find
warm food and a hearty welcome ...
Consider: is this a “man”
who slogs through mud,
who has never known peace,
who fights for scraps of bread,
who lives at another man's whim,
who at his "yes" or "no" lies dead.
Consider: is this a “woman”
shorn bald and bereft of a name
because she lacks the strength to remember,
her eyes as void and her womb as frigid
as a winter frog's?
Consider that such horrors have indeed been!
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them in your hearts
when you lounge in your beds
and again when you rise,
when you venture outside.
Rehearse them to your children,
or may your houses softly crumble
and disease render you equally as humble
so that even your offspring avert their eyes.
Primo Michele Levi (1919-1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. It has been described as one of the best books by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His unique work The Periodic Table was shortlisted as one of the greatest scientific books ever written, by the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Levi's autobiographical book about his liberation from Auschwitz, The Truce, became a movie with the same name in 1997. Keywords: Holocaust, poem, Italian, translation, man, mud, woman, bald, nameless, houses, homes, bread, eyes, womb, empty, void, frigid, lifeless, horror, horrors, hearts, write, etch, engrave, inscribe, children, offspring, disease, avert, reject
Mar 14, 2020
Mar 14, 2020 at 4:58 AM UTC
"What kind of a person are you," I heard them say to me.
I'm a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.
I'm a person for the surface of the earth.
Low places, caves and wells
Frighten me. Mountain peaks
And tall buildings scare me.
I'm not like an inserted fork,
Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.
I'm not flat and sly
Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little taste
And a little fragrance.
Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.
s Now I stand at the side of the street
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.
I'm not a car, I'm a person,
A man-god, a god-man
Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.
3.2k
Nine months after I was born, the Twentieth Century began to collapse.
East Berlin,graffiti-mural concrete, a jutted enigma scratched
on ordinance maps, the sort found
landscaping westernized Primary School walls.
Where within, labored in real time, the television told my parents
(and everyone else given to social conservation in 1989) that a wall falling down
would bring an end to the gap between the working and the working poor.
Freedom waited for many on the other side.
But of course, History draws up different plans.
Never content to just go out with a bash, or to
fleetingly drift by leaving
in its absence an underwhelmed lull
The bloodiest century yet
left the new world entrenched
in an odyssey of hatreds
handed down from the past
right about the time human suffering became a bit dull
and the peaceful countries were too busy
tripling their money instead.
What does History really teach us and what are the real benefits
of being free, or freer than you were before?
Human ambition, which burns it way out of any oasis of calm,
which calls children out of sleeping in the night
Always seeks out the exhaustible
An inveterate Black sheep leading astray
the ever susceptible ****** lamb
Delusion’s strange bedfellows are the worthiest adversaries
to run away from, to reserve contrition for.
Unlike the inevitability of uprooted animal migration
during a monsoon swell
Can a people with an invested addiction
to the pursuit of happiness
Ever truly be prepared
for the inevitability of rapid change?
Jun 16, 2013
Jun 16, 2013 at 6:00 PM UTC
no one would love me for these scars and scratches and tears on my skin. worry, stress and fear embed themselves under my epidermis and i struggle to live a normal life by wearing my favorite sweaters on most days outside to hide the marks. most of them don't realize or see it. that is good. only at night when it turns itchy and yells to be touched again, to be scratched again, to be bled again, and a fresh wound opens up. i have lived with this for almost seventeen years. and it only surfaced in its prominence at the dawn of my twentieth year. it must be a sign for a premature, impending doom. it keeps me up at night and even my brain wishes to stop my entire system but what can it do? it can only speak and think for so long. it keeps me tired in the day and my suicidal heart pounds in beats of "NO" in my chest, blood rushing faster when i scratch once more. the heart can't even stop itself from feeling the itch, the pain, the anger, the remorse, the pity.
i don't know when this will go, just as i don't know how it came to me.
i just want rest. i just want peace. with others and myself. peace within myself.
Oct 5, 2016
Oct 5, 2016 at 7:57 AM UTC
Trying to spread the word?
Reach as many as possible?
Get your point across?
The twentieth century
Has provided the means
With
Telecommunications
Telstar
Telegraph (really the 19thc)
Telegram
Telephone
Television
Telethons
And coming soon,
Teleporting.
And yet,
With all our tele-technology,
If you really want world-wide attention,
Tell-a-friend
A secret.
Aug 18, 2015
Aug 18, 2015 at 8:05 AM UTC
i hate it when you have a hangnail but it is mostly a piece
of skin that is really steadfast about not detaching
from your finger. it’s like the piece of skin has
separation anxiety and you can’t get it
to leave ever
all you want is for the piece of skin to move out.
today is your twentieth birthday and you are thinking
about your mortality a whole bunch and how you have provided
the piece of skin with a comfortable home and now
you want it to move on and make a big life
for itself so when you’re old and more carrot-like
you will have the piece of skin to take care of you
until you are ready to make the big trip to hamilton
known as dying alone and feeling okay about it
because hamilton is a nice place to die alone
hamilton is a port city in the canadian province of ontario
you dream of hamilton and you are already a little bit more
carrot-like on this day, your twentieth birthday. we want the
piece of skin to get its **** together so we can all be happy
for you one day when the amount of carrot-like
characteristics you grow into becomes immeasurable
and creamy. the piece of skin smiles and says
it does not like your conservative-minded nonsense
the piece of skin feels as though it has a right to
prosperity and a new season of hey arnold
and its own episode of mtv cribs.
you say the piece of skin is too liberal and you
get out a pair of scissors and cut of your finger
the finger with the piece of skin that was too clingy
is now resting peacefully on the hardwood floor
of your apartment in a pool of blood that you are
proud to say is something you made on your own.
the piece of skin quotes hemingway as it dies
the reference goes over your head and the reader’s head too
Dec 30, 2011
Dec 30, 2011 at 1:56 PM UTC
By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no color--no more than
the sand was a color and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and there were times
we forgot to wind up your
alarm clock and some nights
we took our gin warm and neat
from old jelly glasses while
the sun blew out of sight
like a red picture hat and
one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that I looked almost like
a puritan lady and what
I remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine.
2.6k
*it takes twenty one days
to build a new habit*
and you came back to me
on the twentieth day
Mar 25, 2015
Mar 25, 2015 at 11:48 AM UTC
An honest man who worked real hard,
And did his best throughout his life,
To clothe and feed his proud family,
His four children and his wife.
Born in the early twentieth century,
He knew that times were often tough,
But he always did whatever it took,
To ensure his family had enough.
A gentle man who spoke with kindness,
And ungraciousness was never heard,
Who still believed in God and family,
And knew the value of a man’s word.
Some would say he was old fashioned,
He rarely drank and did not smoke,
But he was always there to lend an ear,
And always the first to offer a joke.
A kinder, gentler, more honest man,
Could never be found anywhere,
And I know as sure as there’s a Heaven,
That you will find my Grandpa there.
03-17-11.
Jan 12, 2012
Jan 12, 2012 at 2:02 AM UTC
The twentieth year is well nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast;
Ah, would that this might be the last!
My Mary!
Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow--
'Twas my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!
Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disus'd, and shine no more,
My Mary!
For though thou gladly wouldst fulfil
The same kind office for me still,
Thy sight now seconds not thy will,
My Mary!
But well thou play'dst the housewife's part,
And all thy threads with magic art
Have wound themselves about this heart,
My Mary!
Thy indistinct expressions seem
Like language utter'd in a dream;
Yet me they charm, whate'er the theme,
My Mary!
Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,
Are still more lovely in my sight
Than golden beams of orient light,
My Mary!
For, could I view nor them nor thee,
What sight worth seeing could I see?
The sun would rise in vain for me,
My Mary!
Partakers of thy sad decline,
Thy hands their little force resign;
Yet gently press'd, press gently mine,
My Mary!
Such feebleness of limbs thou prov'st,
That now at ev'ry step thou mov'st
Upheld by two; yet still thou lov'st,
My Mary!
And still to love, though press'd with ill,
In wintry age to feel no chill,
My Mary!
But ah! by constant heed I know,
How oft the sadness that I show
Transforms thy smiles to looks of woe,
My Mary!
And should my future lot be cast
With much resemblance of the past,
Thy worn-out heart will break at last,
My Mary!
2k
on ruby jacobs walk, a
small girl
asked us for money for ice cream.
she eyed our cones
yours, lemon
mine, strawberry
with a child’s hunger
glinting and opportunistic
as she held out her palm for coins.
i was not yet accustomed to the shapes and sizes,
to a dime being smaller than a nickel,
and in any case wanted to preserve them for souvenirs
so we shook our heads and walked away.
a year later, writing this poem,
i learned that ruby jacobs was a local restauranteur
who, as a boy,
illegally sold ice creams
for a nickel on the boardwalk.
a nickel is the larger coin
the size of a ten pence piece.
i know that now.
the wide atlantic rose from a sloping manicured lawn
star-spangled,
like everything here,
the airborne flag
above a wide pavilion
a fanatic wedding cake topper
against the blood-blue sky.
i slipped
out of my shoes and let
the white sand burn my feet,
and jaggedly fill the spaces between my toes.
the atlantic held open its arms
though we weren’t, as we imagined,
looking east
looking home
but south to new jersey, across the bay.
the gnarled boardwalk was a
song of the twentieth century
a roll-call of mass-market capitalism
here in the city that didn’t invent the concept
but certainly perfected it:
hot dogs
amusements
ice creams (we’ve covered that)
fridge magnets
baseball caps
i bought an espresso cup with a picture of the president
and the caption:
‘huuuuge!’
i stopped to take a photograph
of a space-age building from the fifties
which turned out to be
a public toilet.
later
from the sunbaked d train,
brooklyn spread out beneath us
the houses garnished with flags,
then the city coughed us up on seventh avenue
and night fell five hours early.
Jul 20, 2019
Jul 20, 2019 at 7:51 AM UTC
it was a dry mojave afternoon,
with crows cursing shrilly
the streetlamps bearing broken bulbs
and the striped cat sleeping in the sun.
the wind drew frantic breaths,
exhaling dead leaves over the hill
and sending the blackbirds
spiraling into the sky.
a lizard stirred, somniferous almond eyes
gazing lethargically over his rock
and at the old man on the porch
leaning back- impossibly uncomfortable in his rickety wooden chair.
his name was Jackson.
gnarled gray hair mixed with gnarled gray beard
appropriately framing a pinched, ornery visage
and tattered clothes adorned his whisper of a body.
it was his sixty-fourth year here in the desert-
on the fifty-second he'd lost his wife
on the fifty-eighth he'd gained a kitten
named him Waldrop and let him **** the mice and lizards.
'sixty four years is a long time,'
a thought murmured in the back of his head
eyelids peeling back to give a cursory glance to Waldrop
who was stalking the reptile watching him.
he remembered his twentieth birthday
when Edna had first said she loved him
and he remembered that glorious July morning
where she said she was his forever.
he remembered the pain of labor
down in the factory,
and the camaderie with his fellows
chewing tobacco and cursing the bosses.
he remembered the time spent weeping,
but remembered more the time spent laughing
in places miles and miles away
that now seemed imaginary.
exhaustion echoed through tired bones
and he wondered who would feed the cat,
drooping eyes closing one last time
to await the warmth of sunset.
Dec 10, 2013
Dec 10, 2013 at 5:15 PM UTC
A long time after bedtime
When it's very late
When even dogs dream
And there's deep sleep
Breathing through the house
When the doors are locked
And the curtains drawn
And the shops are dark
And the last train's gone
And there's no more traffic in the street
Because everyone's asleep
Then....
The window cleaner comes
To the main shop fronts
And polishes the glass
In the street-lit dark
And a big truck rumbles past
On it's way to the dump
Loaded with the last
Of the day's trash
On the twentieth floor
Of the office tower
There's a lighted window
And high up there
Another night cleaner's
Vacuuming the floor
Working nights on her own
While her children sleep at home
And down in the dome of the observatory
The astronomer who's waited all day for the dark
Is watching the good black sky at last
For stars and moons
And spikes of light
Through her telescope
In the middle of the night
While everybody sleeps
At the bakery
The bakers in their floury clothes
Mix dough in machines
For tomorrow's loaves of bread
And out by the gate
Rows of parked vans sit
For their drivers to come
And take newly baked
Bread to the shops
For the time when the
Bread eaters wake
Across the town at the hospital
Where the nurses watch in the dim-lit wards
Someone very old shuts their eyes
And dies
Breathes their very last breath
On their very last night
Yet not very far away on another floor
After months of waiting
A new baby's born
And the mother and father
Hold the baby and smile
And the baby looks up
And the world's just begun
But still, everybody sleeps
Now through the silent station
Past the empty shops
And the office towers
Past the sleeping streets
And the hospital
A train with no windows
Goes rattling by
And inside the train the sorters sift
Urgent letters and packets on the late night shift
So tomorrow's mail will arrive in time
At the towns and villages down the line
And the mother
With the wakeful child in her arms
Walking up and down
And up and down
And up and down
The room
Hears the train as it passes by
And the cats in the yard
And the night owl's flight
And hums hushabye hushabye
We should sleep now
You and I
It's late and time to close your eyes
It's the middle of the night.
Apr 27, 2020
Apr 27, 2020 at 9:27 PM UTC
So, long ago
we had the Renaissance Period,
and then there was
the Baroque Period,
and then there was
the Classical Period,
and then there was
the Romantic Period,
and then we got to
the Twentieth Century,
and we called it modern
and we called it contemporary
but we can't use
those words anymore,
so I say
we call it
the Weird-Ass Period,
where every artist,
musician, playwright,
composer, poet,
and so on,
were doing weird-shit.
I love this period.
So, in the sixties or so
we had the killing
of music
by John Cage
in his silent piece,
and the death
of painting
in the blank canvas,
and there must have been
a blank piece of paper
that was a poem,
and then
we had the rebirth
of art
in the work
of the minimalists,
and of course,
don't forget
the conceptual artist
who had himself shot,
so now,
we are well into
the Twenty-First Century,
so it must be
the Post Weird-Ass Period,
but maybe
we should call it
the Bizarro Period,
or something like that.
Oct 4, 2012
Oct 4, 2012 at 4:55 AM UTC
Sixty years ago, you could have loved me
- a sailor, - a trophy wife, - an 'okay, fiancé' in a sarcastic legacy
A turn of the century turns you around and turns you into a (skate! jam! live in a van!) type of person that I am vastly uninterested in but just tryin' to be sad about somethin'
- I am sad about your big feet, your cuffed trousers, all the places I didn't want to run into you at and not letting that stop me from carting my coffin to Kansas City art museums
(Your love poems to me must be dried in caked-on mud from tires pulling away)
Did you know you're an accident?
- The whole crowd laughs, someone get me a microphone!
(Someone! Get me anything your mouth has touched!)
- I'll bury a vial of your organic germs in my hometown backyard to find later, when you're dead as your dangling doorknobs and disguised by giggling gargoyles (you are welcome, by the way)
Ultimate hide 'n' seek warrants a worthless existence and a holy trinity of the same name(s)
(The dog is under the bed)
(You are locked out on the back porch)
(I am fetal position in a parked car)
- Can we put this on the Christmas card?
Happy Twentieth, Darling! I Love You Very, Very, Very, Very Much.
Oct 1, 2013
Oct 1, 2013 at 5:02 PM UTC
DEAR PENPAL PEOPLE, this is my revival:p
this time I fluctuate
I breathe annihilation
what got rid of me I got rid of liberation
the hurt carried on the pearl as seen before
makes me moon the past a perfect doom not ignore
more I find reckless but in good tenders
bile arisen comes to a chocolate cake remembers
something for me for once and all
the apart rejoined from the great unregretted fall
said suffer time on the twentieth last of year
a June not ought for my happiness not dear
not a remnant
since then but not worth the resentment
other than a rapid eye above buried graves
let be dreaded for my save
mentioned a one to hurt one to dream
a revival knows the uniqueness that beams
now one to petty one to go
one to memory one to soon
my compass is to be found in dune
-----ravenfeels
Jun 1, 2021
Jun 1, 2021 at 5:22 PM UTC
Eliza! what fools are the Mussulman sect,
Who, to woman, deny the soul’s future existence;
Could they see thee, Eliza! they’d own their defect,
And this doctrine would meet with a general resistance.
Had their Prophet possess’d half an atom of sense,
He ne’er would have woman from Paradise driven;
Instead of his Houris, a flimsy pretence,
With woman alone he had peopled his Heaven.
Yet, still, to increase your calamities more,
Not content with depriving your bodies of spirit,
He allots one poor husband to share amongst four!—
With souls you’d dispense; but, this last, who could bear it?
His religion to please neither party is made;
On husbands ’tis hard, to the wives most uncivil;
Still I can’t contradict, what so oft has been said,
“Though women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil.”
This terrible truth, even Scripture has told,
Ye Benedicks! hear me, and listen with rapture;
If a glimpse of redemption you wish to behold,
Of ST. MATT.—read the second and twentieth chapter.
’Tis surely enough upon earth to be vex’d,
With wives who eternal confusion are spreading;
“But in Heaven” (so runs the Evangelists’ Text)
“We neither have giving in marriage, or wedding.”
From this we suppose, (as indeed well we may,)
That should Saints after death, with their spouses put up more,
And wives, as in life, aim at absolute sway,
All Heaven would ring with the conjugal uproar.
Distraction and Discord would follow in course,
Nor MATTHEW, nor MARK, nor ST. PAUL, can deny it,
The only expedient is general divorce,
To prevent universal disturbance and riot.
But though husband and wife, shall at length be disjoin’d,
Yet woman and man ne’er were meant to dissever,
Our chains once dissolv’d, and our hearts unconfin’d,
We’ll love without bonds, but we’ll love you for ever.
Though souls are denied you by fools and by rakes,
Should you own it yourselves, I would even then doubt you,
Your nature so much of celestial partakes,
The Garden of Eden would wither without you.
1.8k
He he ha ah, ah ah –
no, no, no – no I’m not tipsy…
Who says so ? I can drink and
still walk a straight mile
Yeah, I’m delirious, am I?
I’m delirious that’s
because you’re funny, silly
cos you’ve got three skunks
where your mouth should be
and your nose is a dead tree….
Ha ha he he
hey, anyone reasonable can tell I’m not tipsy;
really
I can drink till grandma comes back
from Heaven and still stay calm and steady
and she screamed the other day:
‘Hey, sonny boy…when you drink
airmail some of the spirit up here to me…
It gets too sane up here in Heaven.’
And what’s that you say?
You too think I’m tipsy? Hee, hee, hah ah **
What’s the matter
You people never seen anyone happy?
Tipsy?...no way, man….I’m just me, yeah
happy and easy-going
I swear the last time I drank was at my wedding
Which was when?
Bet my wife’ll remember the date and year…and place…
and if it happened at all..
and I’m laughing, it seems, oddly
cos you’ve got a donkey head
and your wife looks like a monkey on heat
He he ha ah, ah ah –
no, no, no – no I’m not tipsy
I swear the last time I drank was
when your grandma gave birth to
what was it, her twentieth baby?
Says who, ah? I can drink and
still walk a straight mile
and look at you, you’re looking
like a pink pig with its posterior
all barbecued on a dinner plate
ready for the fork and pepper and sauce;
and hey, I swear the last time I drank was
when you drowned
in the swimming pool;
it was our office function
and you drowned in the hotel pool
and you were struggling and you said:
**** **** Help me!’
and you drowned and died….
I really hate talking to drowning ghosts…
Booo…BOOOOOO….
He he ha ah, ah ah –
No, no, no – no I’m not tipsy
who says so ? I can drink and
still walk a straight mile
Say, can you call me a taxi
and spare, say, a fifty?
Oct 5, 2010
Oct 5, 2010 at 3:37 PM UTC
I'd lie to stay awake,
I would choose the waking notion:
I'd try to speak it straight
for most of a dense impartial resolution.
I'd stay to wake a lie,
by a flaccid disrepair of state of mind,
contorting to sudden sigh
from mostly a yawn time seemed to find.
I'd wake to say a lie,
to whom you found a missing twentieth.
I'd stay to get by
an amusing theme of prose that is not done yet.
Jun 11, 2015
Jun 11, 2015 at 2:58 AM UTC
It had been almost a week now, waiting
Patiently for the generosity
Of some stranger. A sign in front stating
Her case, gazed at with curiosity.
Desperation and hunger setting in,
Her eyes began to wander to store front
Windows across the street, girls not as thin.
Moral conundrums were now not as blunt.
It would be easy, to take a few things;
Nothing extra, only what is needed.
She’d pay it all back once she got her wings,
So she crossed the street, conscious unheeded.
“I have no choice, it’ll just be this once”
She told herself for the twentieth time.
Sep 12, 2013
Sep 12, 2013 at 10:42 AM UTC
this is my twentieth poem about you
i guess you can say i'm really fond of you
we've come a long way since november, or even the first poem i wrote about you
now we kind of talk in class
that's a long way from the one poem i swore i'd never speak to you
you playfully tease me now, but you do that to everyone
you are a little ******* ****
and hey, you even accepted my follow request
i guess that one poem is invalid now, huh?
we've come a long way since the beginning
well, i guess, considering we're still not friends,
we're in that stage where we're just, people
anyway, you're a ******* **** and i hate you
jusssst kidding
**** head.
Feb 25, 2014
Feb 25, 2014 at 11:14 PM UTC
Chance Operations are methods of generating poetry independent of the author’s will. A chance operation can be almost anything from throwing darts and rolling dice, to the ancient Chinese divination method, I-Ching, and even sophisticated computer programs. Most poems created by chance operations use some original text as their source, be it the newspaper, an encyclopedia, or a famous work of literature. The purpose of such a practice is to play against the poet’s intentions and ego, while creating unusual syntax and images. The resulting poems allow the reader to take part in producing meaning from the work.
The roots of using chance operations to generate poetry are generally traced to the Dada movement in Western Europe in the early and mid-twentieth-century, involving writers such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Éluard. The Dadaists were deeply interested in the subconscious, and they believed that the mind would create associations and meaning from any text, including those generated through random selections. In one section of Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto on Feeble & Bitter Love," he offers the following instructions to make a Dadaist poem, here translated from the original French by Barbara Wright:
“Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are--an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the ****** herd.”
The use of chance operations in contemporary poetry has been used most famously by the international avant-garde group Fluxus, poet Jackson Mac Low, and the poet and composer John Cage. A good example of a poem that was written using chance operations is Jackson Mac Low’s “Stein 100: A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair," which also includes Mac Low’s explanation of the methods he used to compose the poem.
Jul 9, 2014
Jul 9, 2014 at 10:02 AM UTC