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IN SEARCH OF THE PRESENT

I begin with two words that all men have uttered since the dawn of humanity: thank you. The word gratitude has equivalents in every language and in each tongue the range of meanings is abundant. In the Romance languages this breadth spans the spiritual and the physical, from the divine grace conceded to men to save them from error and death, to the ****** grace of the dancing girl or the feline leaping through the undergrowth. Grace means pardon, forgiveness, favour, benefice, inspiration; it is a form of address, a pleasing style of speaking or painting, a gesture expressing politeness, and, in short, an act that reveals spiritual goodness. Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift. The person who receives it, the favoured one, is grateful for it; if he is not base, he expresses gratitude. That is what I am doing at this very moment with these weightless words. I hope my emotion compensates their weightlessness. If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement. And also an indefinable mixture of fear, respect and surprise at finding myself here before you, in this place which is the home of both Swedish learning and world literature.

Languages are vast realities that transcend those political and historical entities we call nations. The European languages we speak in the Americas illustrate this. The special position of our literatures when compared to those of England, Spain, Portugal and France depends precisely on this fundamental fact: they are literatures written in transplanted tongues. Languages are born and grow from the native soil, nourished by a common history. The European languages were rooted out from their native soil and their own tradition, and then planted in an unknown and unnamed world: they took root in the new lands and, as they grew within the societies of America, they were transformed. They are the same plant yet also a different plant. Our literatures did not passively accept the changing fortunes of the transplanted languages: they participated in the process and even accelerated it. They very soon ceased to be mere transatlantic reflections: at times they have been the negation of the literatures of Europe; more often, they have been a reply.

In spite of these oscillations the link has never been broken. My classics are those of my language and I consider myself to be a descendant of Lope and Quevedo, as any Spanish writer would ... yet I am not a Spaniard. I think that most writers of Spanish America, as well as those from the United States, Brazil and Canada, would say the same as regards the English, Portuguese and French traditions. To understand more clearly the special position of writers in the Americas, we should think of the dialogue maintained by Japanese, Chinese or Arabic writers with the different literatures of Europe. It is a dialogue that cuts across multiple languages and civilizations. Our dialogue, on the other hand, takes place within the same language. We are Europeans yet we are not Europeans. What are we then? It is difficult to define what we are, but our works speak for us.

In the field of literature, the great novelty of the present century has been the appearance of the American literatures. The first to appear was that of the English-speaking part and then, in the second half of the 20th Century, that of Latin America in its two great branches: Spanish America and Brazil. Although they are very different, these three literatures have one common feature: the conflict, which is more ideological than literary, between the cosmopolitan and nativist tendencies, between Europeanism and Americanism. What is the legacy of this dispute? The polemics have disappeared; what remain are the works. Apart from this general resemblance, the differences between the three literatures are multiple and profound. One of them belongs more to history than to literature: the development of Anglo-American literature coincides with the rise of the United States as a world power whereas the rise of our literature coincides with the political and social misfortunes and upheavals of our nations. This proves once more the limitations of social and historical determinism: the decline of empires and social disturbances sometimes coincide with moments of artistic and literary splendour. Li-Po and Tu Fu witnessed the fall of the Tang dynasty; Velázquez painted for Felipe IV; Seneca and Lucan were contemporaries and also victims of Nero. Other differences are of a literary nature and apply more to particular works than to the character of each literature. But can we say that literatures have a character? Do they possess a set of shared features that distinguish them from other literatures? I doubt it. A literature is not defined by some fanciful, intangible character; it is a society of unique works united by relations of opposition and affinity.

The first basic difference between Latin-American and Anglo-American literature lies in the diversity of their origins. Both begin as projections of Europe. The projection of an island in the case of North America; that of a peninsula in our case. Two regions that are geographically, historically and culturally eccentric. The origins of North America are in England and the Reformation; ours are in Spain, Portugal and the Counter-Reformation. For the case of Spanish America I should briefly mention what distinguishes Spain from other European countries, giving it a particularly original historical identity. Spain is no less eccentric than England but its eccentricity is of a different kind. The eccentricity of the English is insular and is characterized by isolation: an eccentricity that excludes. Hispanic eccentricity is peninsular and consists of the coexistence of different civilizations and different pasts: an inclusive eccentricity. In what would later be Catholic Spain, the Visigoths professed the heresy of Arianism, and we could also speak about the centuries of ******* by Arabic civilization, the influence of Jewish thought, the Reconquest, and other characteristic features.

Hispanic eccentricity is reproduced and multiplied in America, especially in those countries such as Mexico and Peru, where ancient and splendid civilizations had existed. In Mexico, the Spaniards encountered history as well as geography. That history is still alive: it is a present rather than a past. The temples and gods of pre-Columbian Mexico are a pile of ruins, but the spirit that breathed life into that world has not disappeared; it speaks to us in the hermetic language of myth, legend, forms of social coexistence, popular art, customs. Being a Mexican writer means listening to the voice of that present, that presence. Listening to it, speaking with it, deciphering it: expressing it ... After this brief digression we may be able to perceive the peculiar relation that simultaneously binds us to and separates us from the European tradition.

This consciousness of being separate is a constant feature of our spiritual history. Separation is sometimes experienced as a wound that marks an internal division, an anguished awareness that invites self-examination; at other times it appears as a challenge, a spur that incites us to action, to go forth and encounter others and the outside world. It is true that the feeling of separation is universal and not peculiar to Spanish Americans. It is born at the very moment of our birth: as we are wrenched from the Whole we fall into an alien land. This experience becomes a wound that never heals. It is the unfathomable depth of every man; all our ventures and exploits, all our acts and dreams, are bridges designed to overcome the separation and reunite us with the world and our fellow-beings. Each man's life and the collective history of mankind can thus be seen as attempts to reconstruct the original situation. An unfinished and endless cure for our divided condition. But it is not my intention to provide yet another description of this feeling. I am simply stressing the fact that for us this existential condition expresses itself in historical terms. It thus becomes an awareness of our history. How and when does this feeling appear and how is it transformed into consciousness? The reply to this double-edged question can be given in the form of a theory or a personal testimony. I prefer the latter: there are many theories and none is entirely convincing.

The feeling of separation is bound up with the oldest and vaguest of my memories: the first cry, the first scare. Like every child I built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes. Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sinbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.

When was the spell broken? Gradually rather than suddenly. It is hard to accept being betrayed by a friend, deceived by the woman we love, or that the idea of freedom is the mask of a tyrant. What we call "finding out" is a slow and tricky process because we ourselves are the accomplices of our errors and deceptions. Nevertheless, I can remember fairly clearly an incident that was the first sign, although it was quickly forgotten. I must have been about six when one of my cousins who was a little older showed me a North American magazine with a photograph of soldiers marching along a huge avenue, probably in New York. "They've returned from the war" she said. This handful of words disturbed me, as if they foreshadowed the end of the world or the Second Coming of Christ. I vaguely knew that somewhere far away a war had ended a few years earlier and that the soldiers were marching to celebrate their victory. For me, that war had taken place in another time, not here and now. The photo refuted me. I felt literally dislodged from the present.

From that moment time began to fracture more and more. And there was a plurality of spaces. The experience repeated itself more and more frequently. Any piece of news, a harmless phrase, the headline in a newspaper: everything proved the outside world's existence and my own unreality. I felt that the world was splitting and that I did not inhabit the present. My present was disintegrating: real time was somewhere else. My time, the time of the garden, the fig tree, the games with friends, the drowsiness among the plants at three in the afternoon under the sun, a fig torn open (black and red like a live coal but one that is sweet and fresh): this was a fictitious time. In spite of what my senses told me, the time from over there, belonging to the others, was the real one, the time of the real present. I accepted the inevitable: I became an adult. That was how my expulsion from the present began.

It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality. For us, as Spanish Americans, the real present was not in our own countries: it was the time lived by others, by the English, the French and the Germans. It was the time of New York, Paris, London. We had to go and look for it and bring it back home. These years were also the years of my discovery of literature. I began writing poems. I did not know what made me write them: I was moved by an inner need that is difficult to define. Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.

What is modernity? First of all it is an ambiguous term: there are as many types of modernity as there are societies. Each has its own. The word's meaning is uncertain and arbitrary, like the name of the period that precedes it, the Middle Ages. If we are modern when compared to medieval times, are we perhaps the Middle Ages of a future modernity? Is a name that changes with time a real name? Modernity is a word in search of its meaning. Is it an idea, a mirage or a moment of history? Are we the children of modernity or its creators? Nobody knows for sure. It doesn't matter much: we follow it, we pursue it. For me at that time modernity was fused with the present or rather produced it: the present was its last supreme flower. My case is neither unique nor exceptional: from the Symbolist period, all modern poets have chased after that magnetic and elusive figure that fascinates them. Baudelaire was the first. He was also the first to touch her and discover that she is nothing but time that crumbles in one's hands. I am not going to relate my adventures in pursuit of modernity: they are not very different from those of other 20th-Century poets. Modernity has been a universal passion. Since 1850 she has been our goddess and our demoness. In recent years, there has been an attempt to exorcise her and there has been much talk of "postmodernism". But what is postmodernism if not an even more modern modernity?

For us, as Latin Americans, the search for poetic modernity runs historically parallel to the repeated attempts to modernize our countries. This tendency begins at the end of the 18th Century and includes Spain herself. The United States was born into modernity and by 1830 was already, as de Tocqueville observed, the womb of the future; we were born at a moment when Spain and Portugal were moving away from modernity. This is why there was frequent talk of "Europeanizing" our countries: the modern was outside and had to be imported. In Mexican history this process begins just before the War of Independence. Later it became a great ideological and political debate that passionately divided Mexican society during the 19th Century. One event was to call into question not the legitimacy of the reform movement but the way in which it had been implemented: the Mexican Revolution. Unlike its 20th-Century counterparts, the Mexican Revolution was not really the expression of a vaguely utopian ideology but rather the explosion of a reality that had been historically and psychologically repressed. It was not the work of a group of ideologists intent on introducing principles derived from a political theory; it was a popular uprising that unmasked what was hidden. For this very reason it was more of a revelation than a revolution. Mexico was searching for the present outside only to find it within, buried but alive. The search for modernity led
Edna Sweetlove Sep 2015
Pastor Grovell writes as follows.....

I am often asked to interpret the Ten Commandments as they seem sometimes a bit out of date and irrelevant (and hard to understand by some of the more ********
folks). So here goes with the update we use in our own godly congregation. These are my revised and corrected commandments.  The originals are in the beloved King James version but where that is unclear I quote a more modern version too to assist those of you who are more or less illiterate. In the bible, the commandments are unaccompaned by the punishments you will get if you disobey them so I have updated that too, according to STRICT biblical scholarship.

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1st Commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me". This seems quite unequivocal to me but of course it was written BEFORE Jesus came to save us so here is the new version:

PG's NEW NUMBER 1: WORSHIP ONLY GOD (INCLUDING JESUS WHO IS PART OF GOD ANYWAY) & DO IT FREQUENTLY OR GOD WILL CRUSH YOU!

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2nd Commandment: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

That seems a bit wordy to me and there is a bit of overlap with Number 1! In any case, it's a bit out of date as not many people worship idols, giant earthworms or fish these days. Perhaps a modern update would include not worshipping the TV set!

PG's NEW NUMBER 2: DO NOT WORSHIP THE TV SET OR ANYTHING SIMILAR OR GOD WILL BE VERY ANNOYED INDEED AND WILL PUNISH YOU AND ALL YOUR DESCENDANTS & THEIR DESCENDANTS TOO SO WATCH OUT ALL YOU HEATHEN COUCH POTATOES!

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3rd Commandment: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain." Again a bit long-winded, and the vain bit will confuse some people.

PG's NEW NUMBER 3: DO NOT BLASPHEME OR GOD WILL CRUSH YOU IN AN INCREDIBLY PAINFUL WAY & SLOWLY AS WELL!

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4th Commandment: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work; But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it."

This is a difficult one to observe nowadays, what with Sunday opening at the shopping mall. The solution seems to be that non-Christians, Jews and Muslims can work to serve us whilst we go shopping. It shows why God created heathens and other infidels so they can sell godly people bibles, hymnals and religious artefacts on the Sabbath, even though they will probably go to Hell themselves as a result. And the bit about animals not working on Sundays seems pointless today so we'll skip that section.

PG's NEW NUMBER 4: WORK HARD FOR SIX DAYS A WEEK INCLUDING SATURDAYS AND THEN HAVE A NICE REST ON SUNDAYS BUT GET IN A LOT OF PRAYING ON SUNDAY OR YOU WILL BE PUNISHED IMMENSELY BY GOD!

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5th Commandment: "Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."

Seems clear enough; particular the 2nd bit which people forget. This is particularly important as people live much longer nowadays and often old folks have to be put into a home which can be expensive, but God wants us to do it. Also, do not skimp on the private facilities - do you really want your old wizened parents to share a bathroom with other incontinents? No I don't think you do. Also, one must remember that a lot of people are ******* and don't have the vaguest idea who their father was. Often the mother has no idea either, filthy ****.

PG's NEW NUMBER 5: RESPECT YOUR PARENTS NO MATTER HOW MUCH IT COSTS OR GOD WILL SHORTEN YOUR OWN LIFE AS A PUNISHMENT & YOU WILL SUFFER A LOT! IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHO YOUR PARENTS ARE, YOU ARE A ******* AND WILL GO TO HELL.

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6th Commandment: "Thou shalt not ****." This one is a real problem for so many of us! What should we do if a mugger comes and tries to rob us? What should we do if someone threatens to **** and **** our womenfolk? What if heathens attack our nation? What about the inalienable American right to bear arms and **** unarmed protesters? What about the British right to rule over inferior races and shoot rebels? I think God was insufficiently insightful here, so my version is quite a radical improvement.

PG's NEW NUMBER 6: DO NOT **** PEOPLE UNLESS IT IS NECESSARY OR IF THEY ARE BURGLING *******!

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7th Commandment: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."This is OK as far as it goes but it is totally inadequate to deal with the amount of ***-SIN which is about the place in the modern world, so I have expanded this to deal with the problem. Also remember that King James was a rampant and blatant sodomite and pervert and so maybe had this one censored in his version of the GOOD BOOK to cover his own back, so to speak.

PG's NEW NUMBER 7: DO NOT COMMIT ANY ***-SINS INCLUDING UNMARRIED FORNICATION, EXCESSIVE FRENCH KISSING, HEAVY PETTING, ******* (MUTUAL AND/OR SOLITARY), ADULTERY, *******, BUGGERY, ******, HOMOSEXUAL ACTS OF ALL TYPES INCLUDING LESBIANISM OF ANY SORT, *******-READING OR THINKING FILTHY ***-THOUGHTS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES OR YOU WILL BURN IN HELLFIRE FOR EVER AND EVER WITH THE MOST AWFUL AGONIES, AND ALSO MINIMIZE ALL LEGAL MARITAL *** TO OCCASIONS WHEN YOU WISH TO PROPAGATE AND KEEP IT BRIEF & IN THE DARK EVEN THEN!

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8th Commandment: "Thou shalt not steal." This one seems OK to me, with a bit of modernization.

PG's NEW NUMBER 8: YOU MUST NOT STEAL OR MUG OR ROB OR BURGLARIZE OR YOU WILL BE PUNISHED UTTERLY & VERY EXTENSIVELY BY GOD IN ALL HIS MIGHTY POWER!

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9th Commandment: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour." This is a bit too narrow as I think non-neighbours and maybe even foreigners should be included as well. Also there needs to be a reminder of the dreadful punishment liars and falsifiers face.

PG's NEW NUMBER 9: DO NOT ACCUSE ANYONE AT ALL FALSELY AND DON'T TELL ANY LIES EITHER OR GOD WILL PUNISH YOU REALLY APPALLINGLY & YOU WILL SHRIEK IN AGONY FOR EVER!

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10th Commandment: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ***, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's." This one really is totally out-of-date and inadequate. It should apply to everyone and not just neighbours. Also, how many people can afford servants or keep oxen? And the "***" bit is open to obscene ***-SIN misinterpretation and blasphemous sneering by wicked ***-SINNERS. So this needs a complete re-write to bring it into the 21st century and to guide godly people into the way of righteousness. And some of the modern translations of the Bible are even worse, e.g. "Do not desire another man's house; do not desire his wife, his slaves, his cattle, his donkeys, or anything else that he owns." How about if you wish to sell your own house and move to a nicer one - what is wrong with that? How about if you wish to sell your low-grade animals and buy better ones? What is this ******* obsession with donkeys and ***** - sheep can be equally tempting to s degenerate ******* ***-SINNER. So I go for a nice simple revision which covers most eventualities:

PG's NEW NUMBER 10: DON'T BE JEALOUS OF OTHER PEOPLE'S BETTER FORTUNE, MAYBE THEY DESERVE IT & YOU ARE INFERIOR; STICK WITH WHAT YOU HAVE NO MATTER HOW GROTTY IT IS OR GOD WILL PUNISH YOU MORE THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE! AND KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THE LIVESTOCK OR YOU WILL SUFFER APPALLINGLY IN DEEPEST HELL WITH RED HOT POKERS UP YOUR ****** FOR ETERNITY.

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So there you have it: Pastor Peter Grovell's recommendations for a life without sin. But remember to pray every single day to Jesus and under no circumstances confuse the wooden images of Jesus which the Catholics use with the real living invisible Jesus. If you fail to do what God wants, he will be left with no option but to condemn you to eternal Hellfire.

And a final point: God did not hand down to Moses any instructions about alcohol. Did He say, "Thou shalt not have a pint of beer!" NO! Did He say, "Thou shalt not have a bottle of wine!" NO! Did He even rule out a shot or two of gin, whisky, ***, brandy or any other alcoholic refreshments? NO He did not! He even transformed water into wine on several occasions, which shows he liked a glass or two down his local Jewish "pub". So there is no harm in drinking alcohol but only if it does not lead you to do ***-SIN, ******, ****, THEFT, BUGGERY, ***-COVETING or IDOL-WORSHIP!

Pastor Peter Grovell D.D., C.S.M.F.,
Founder, Ultra-Strict Reformed Church of Jesus.
jerard gartlin Feb 2010
i failed to mention
the frail dimensions
of my pale existence
no details specific
just the vaguest senses
of a plagued decision
that locks my life in prison
for an extended sentence
but when you inch in to visit
i get intricate visions
with our limbs all twisted
in romantic antics
& the only thing between
you, true love, & me
besides bedspreads & sheets
is my dead self esteem
Nat Lipstadt Mar 2019
a quote of Bernard-Henri Lévy

~~~

the divers’ recovery, diverse,
shipwrecked salvage from different locations,
auctioned to the highest bidder,
tho the excised excerpts are exceptional,
none come to do the bidding,
for the provenance of words
belongs to all, and to none

~~
“so oft we trifle words,
expel them from the country of our body,
without passport and earnestness,
as if they were the cheapest of footnote filler,
day tourists, to be treated as leavings,
refuse for daily discardation,
barely noting their fast comings and faster disappearance,
but leaving not, a mark of distinction”

“the addicted pleasure words granted to we privileged few,
like every enslaved soul to the mind, which I am, I am,
evening dreams, midnight thinkings, sunrise seeings,
how can I infect and thus protect the young to the liberty
to love the crafted content of our human essence to better
comprehend that a moment caught on tape of our shared
words is a holiday, a celebration for the ages...and every molecule,
becomes a human tuning fork in concert, in pitch identical, in blood tainted with the simplicity of we are all the same, only words, this will transmit”

“murmur me, with soft downy charms,
these words discovered
recoursed and intended well to
pointedly offset and contradict
their very own tumultuous discovery uncovering,
tear tongue me
with calming, lapping word  wages,
hymns harmonious and fine homilies,
a call, a request,
a bequest
to sedate my shrill life

“some cells, microscopic, preserved digitally,
aged to imperfection, thrash my eyes,
making me speak in tongues I do not recognize,
but fluently possess, no wonder there,
the memory place fairly empty,
room aplenty for passerby's and the imagery
                                                         ­­ of the vaguest of dearly departed

skin is not the only mot shed,
                                                sloughing of woeful words

“speak them slow and distinct,
for they arrive slow to you,
a trickling of refugees for your sheltering,
harbor them as full companions,
protected by natural law,
provision them well,
prepared and ever ready for a quick departure,
moor these words at the embarcadero,
for the next restless leg of endlessness,
which they themselves will inform you
will last longer than eternity,
long after there are no humans to speak them”
excerpts from a few old poems, after reading an interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/bernard-henri-levy-on-the-rights-of-women-and-of-the-accused
March 27, 2019 4:48 am
Alan S Bailey Apr 2015
I'm a magician,*

Everywhere, every day I do magic, the magic that no one sees,
It is quite silent-the kind you can't hear, the forest for the trees.
Changing, rearranging the whole world "as good as new,"
Flash of fire lightning and rain and a sea was parted too!
Frightened figures hold each other, the earth it shakes,
The vaguest of lost lovers, the energy each marriage takes.
I'm  a person on a mission, I'm a magician, pulling rabbits
Out of hats, telling people run for cover from the "vampire"
Bats. I'm a stranger on a mission as a faith magician what
Could it be? I'm here to preach to you about a God
You can not see! So now that I've told you all that
He's real he is all that you will ever know or feel.
Saint Audrey Mar 2017
Under the mantle of this world
The thickness of the storm clouds
Perpetual, thorough
Meeting the foam crest of the waves
Dark enough to hide intentions

Walking along the tired rocky shore
A stretch common, tasteless to all but the vaguest sense
Some spray, felt deep along the sides of the tongue
The sobering corpse, I found
Still clawing at the stones

I can feel the tears well in my eyes
There is nothing I can do
Empathetic thoughts blow through my mind
Cold strains of tainted breath
His voice is cold air, so dissimilar
And with every trace of dogma
Such overused platitudes
Yet I hold fast to that stringent emotion  

He knows me
He knows what I used to be, and what brought me to who I am
I watch him

He tries to pry, bone exposed at the fingertips
Why did this come to me
Remorse
Filled with pity, I bend down
I comfort him

The host burst
And now I feel it
Moving though the back of my skull
It's tendrils become rooted
The eyes see though my own
And it swallows what It will

The desperate remains inside me scream at it
But it's just rotten flesh

And there's nothing left for me
Now and forever
Yeah
jesi Gaston Mar 2015
“I've realized,” I write, “the Groucho Marx of the mind is chaos personified. The Groucho Marx of *my mind *was chaos, I revise and already think I should revise again – “you never know where you'll end up,” I think, of me and of Groucho. Either way, Groucho Marx came to me in a thought when I was thinking about a poem I will not finish, that would have been about him. “We were just four jews looking for a laugh,” Groucho says at least twice – once when he was alive and once now as I invoke him – the heavy glasses, the synonymous greasepaint lip, the cigar – lit, with smoke that surrounds and engulfs me, threads tangibly through the air, through my eyes, and through the insides of my sinus densely, like mossy Eldritch Horrors and old movies somehow without stopping my vision. He has a mouth but it doesn't move, he is not alive – instead he is a ghost, instead he is dead but standing there, with me, in space lighted from within – space that's white like the smoke – thickly. Among all this, a ghost in a black suit. At least, I think the suit is black, or bluing black. It is tinged with 50 years of rotting celluloid, and paired with a white button up underneath – no tie.
         Growing up all five of them were poor, very poor – so poor they were Jewish-in-New-York-in-the-early-1900s poor. Forced outside of the world, into their world from birth, while their mother, Big Duck, put them up to instruments and got them begging early – vaudeville was their daddy after all (“after all” being a refrain in the poem I'll never finish, repeated like a mantra – after all! after all! after all! after all!– in that text, and used like a drug – afterall – and always driving deathward to an end that never came and can't, after all is written down) – with the jokes they told and sang and played, on their piano, harp, and banjo, all the time – and here is how she learnt how well Chico could play the piano, and how well Harpo could play the harp. And how poorly little Groucho played the banjo. The shame she felt, the shame she must have felt – but here my poem consumes them, because I am already sure that childhood is wrought with fear of birth order, sure as I am that middle children lack something, and maybe have something for that lack, but It's me, not Groucho, that takes over, saying Groucho was the obvious middle child, and of course lacked Big Duck's approval – Big Duck hated the banjo strumming and myriad puns he threw, I say – puns being a part of the poem, the poem which would have (but never) ended on Groucho ducking soup. I wanted it all as a joke and still do, but who will disappoint? Who could? There are options – Groucho, myself, the poem, etc. all working poorly. It is hard to imagine the lack that would culminate in a poet – maybe this gap is wider than a middle child – writing three brothers into a brawl, cartoonish in the streets. May be even harder to imagine the discontent and fear at work inside a child of five – birthing chaos. Maybe I misspoke – I can't know,  I'm not a child of five.
                  Groucho is dead, is still standing in front of me expectantly, not moving. Right in front of me when again I hear his voice – reanimate and filtered through a phonograph – weakly rising above it's own eroded texture – “I was misquoted, I was misquoted... Quote me as saying, 'I was misquoted.'” I wanted his life entropically spinning this place, spinning throughout this place, a ghost – to live forever is to die forever in every gaunt lie, misquote after misquote re-shaping our dead selves until grotesqueries we never intended are held comfortably under our name. Groucho, aimless, escapes because he pre-empts – he uses his whole self to decimate his cultural body, to save the self he's sacrificed. Groucho means to become a void, or Groucho becomes a void more correctly – Groucho means nothing, can only mean nothing, because he's focused his words – his self – around his lack – the words' lack. Because the words always lack, and Groucho is all words. I see him take out the greasepaint container, which is in a shoe-polish-looking canister, and then I lose Groucho again to facts – he was the outsider using words to one up them. I see his wit like a weapon. His being in Hollywood was a stress on Hollywood's peace of mind. I see him tearing balsa wood from up under the street and chucking it into styrofoam towers, which crumble. I see the SUVs that swerved to pass him run into walls, deflating the cars and the walls while the drivers run screaming with ketchup pulsing from the real wounds in their necks. This is where my poem was – more or less. My poem had Groucho gleeful – “Groucho skips, Groucho skips, Groucho skips,” it said, “down the streets throwing rocks at cars...” – the melodies of my naive poem's schoolboy nihilisms never broke enough – “In Groucho's perfect world every day would be spent disrupting traffic, smashing bugs and ******* everywhere,” it said because it was too young to understand, because it had no void, and could offer no revolt from meaning – revolution being radical agency expressed through violence against every order, hatred for every structure including itself – in Groucho's perfect world really there is no language and no one knows what happens after all.
            Lingering is the thought that Groucho means something – lingering is the vaguest, most insistent and warlike imprint of a metaphor on Groucho's face, ineffably moving me to continue but Groucho is no friend, and Groucho is not with me, because the Groucho of the mind is not Groucho, Groucho hates the mind, and Groucho negates all possible Groucho's so the imprint is not Groucho's. The ghost is a misquote, the poem is a misquote, the letters are a misquote, I am a misquote – and this is a misquote too. His cigar (growing bigger) is puffing out that white cloud smoke but still I can see him – the smoke just goes into the space around us, the space that redacts and recreates itself every time I consider it – a copy of an 18th copy, with only Groucho remaining in all iterations, like the borders of a decomposed jpeg quietly losing logic. Groucho the lie, Groucho the memory – a man shaped around the falsity of metaphor and language – floats, as subject, through my memory – punctum with no point, void. Here he is – naked, a stark black silhouette I'd never claim. He's staring, but he's not staring at me because I'm not there. What's left is overstated nothing – the ghost of a man who negated logic, left in the mind of a poet who has long since given up on the man, and soon will give up on the poem.”
There is nothing left here. I am alone, I am dizzy – overcome with boredom.  I want to say, “Groucho is not here, was not, cannot be here” – I know instead I need to end on a mute point.
formatting is wonk for this one anywhere except libreoffice. It's always prose but there it's prose with cool spacing (which is to say it fills exactly a page in 12 point times new roman font single-spaced)
Barton D Smock May 2014
the hostile witness
left her dorm room
to the daughter
I always wanted.

my son secretly existed
to burn live music.

the baby had nothing between its ears.

my wife saw the light
that was god
that to her
was bait.
Natty Morrison Apr 2013
I
When you write down the word
"love," in a poem,
You say bigot words
like you are bigger than words.
Here comes the chest puff.

II
How is any body
or anything we make
like Frankenstein, bigger than words
Brothers say "permanent" like they say
"forever.”
That pervert stutter , let out with lust; they
taste their own wet
lipstick if it's Lutheran.  
Face paint for Hindu.  Making up rules
Because thems the rules.  

III.
After the second war
Frank Lloyd Wright built
houses for the young
men in uniform, well pressed by the years
we hardly mention
all of the flesh he has carved from the world.
Inconsequential, once they were dead
He is not remembering right
away, A live delay 
Remembers watching dad
On thanksgiving with the turkey and his knife
And thinks of stuffed gravy
When he has those dreams about drowning in the stomach guts.

IV
Infinity is a math, a faith
based on faith in numbers
to be counted, up and on
this is the fail safe city
and I can’t count past 100 without
losing count, every time
like god, I mean dad, I mean  

Space is the final front in the god game
you can sling it for pieces
And let them see light themselves
Make it new hell
An empty everywhere.
Not even, not odd.
The Repeating Integer heart.

V.
If you make it you broke it
already,when it mattered;
now it floats.
It’s a witch It’s a witch
Someone tell her she’s water
There's a pile of disowned sons
and daughters who watch Slavery **** on their laptops
every night in another pile.
Off the record, recording it, on the record
it skips where I need it
Living in filth.  Living here, in our own Dump.
Family dump and Feed hall.
The Dump is the one
Who lives on, and is our legacy,

A house that would be a house for just anyone
is a **** with a ******* for a father
And a father figure for lover type.
All the things we think we put time into
Are not containers and we don’t skew time
We barely keep track.  

VI
If you can be vague,
I can be vaguest, I guess
I could be some sort of zeitgeist and live
at that bus stop with the clock
in the corner. The one by the guy
with half his ****
out and that clock, metronome too quiet
to rock.  
This clock
which is just a clock, which is just a tool. Which means it was made for one
thing We made it.
my only sign that I am not from,
but of the time.  Which means I
where we did not
stop to look back for another
bus or Eurdydice soaking
into Hades' airway
because of Love.  She died
toes wrapped round a viper
who said nothing. Words
are the viper, not vague but
the death.  

VII
When you read aloud
and say
Love - without implied eyes
that roll, like dead do in the graves
you make everyone down there wish
for a bigger box
or viper.

When you start a line
without busting
out it starts like the middle of a stop
Not stopping, stopped.
Mateuš Conrad Jul 2016
the greatest lesson i learned concerning life was what Ezra Pound refuted... it came from Tao - and on that 86 bus heading to school i have learned it like an arithmetic rubric - my only lesson came from Tao, all my lessons came from Tao - from a Buddhist revision... the lesson? the only way to aid the world is to let the world forget you, and you in turn forgetting the world be. for that what speaks to the entombed heart, the heart of hearts when the mountain crumbles into rubble, and you're left picking your fancy until the diamond is found among seashells, before you the sea of time gnarling with gnashing of shattered teeth - shoo shoo shoo as if tiresome of the green-bottom flies who's spawn is readied overly... the *******... i can't call them anything respectable in African sensibility... the ******* at the back of the bus and the white harlots too... me in the middle sitting reading a book... Stendhal romanticised me, but Tao taught me reality... i know it wasn't the original Tibetan slit eye, it was Japanese... the only way to help the world is for the world to forget you and you forget the world... which i relearned reading Heidegger, who suggested i should be transparent in engaging with the world through concern (being there, or dasein), even a Heidegger apologetic in me turned into Ronin - Asiatic apathy is courtesy, European apathy is simply impoliteness - the latter has too many ****** expressions - i summarise my life with the anonymous Taoist monk who said these words... anti-celebrity culture, they burn like fire in my mind - they burn like fire in my mind - they are my mind - but i had to show him the European verbiage and the ferns of European thought to prove him right, and i did. Heidegger's concern became the ***** Berufung, soon the concern fizzled and was masked by wife and children - but better a Heidegger apology than a Christian one - what meditation can a crown of myrrh provide while being crucified? none! the Rastafarians keep singing about Babylon... the tree wise men came from that region... so the fourth magician... the four horsemen of the apocalypse? Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar, Jesus  it's still a profanity of the tetragrammaton - four horsemen, four canonical gospels... and that ***** that's Gematria - the undermining of all serious study - you can keep those Rabbis in the museum with Grecian  marbles to collect dust, as i mention Tolstoy and that passage from war & peace: pierre bezukhov - the freemason friend (chapter 13) - l'empereur Napoléon  (666) - l'empereur Alexandre - la nation russe - comte Pierre Bésouhoff - sub z for s (Chiral Gemini) - + de und le - le russe bésuhof = 671 - omitting e (incorrectly) - l'Russe Bésuhof - BINGO! - the orthographic gag - most Anglo never heard of such graphic, having never made auxiliary use of it - but i stick to the lesson in Tao - the world does not recognise me as acting in its fate, and will not remember me as even the hushed - i rather not remember it in whatever guise it might provide for me - the first lesson in Tao, is the last lesson in Tao - Stendhal might have taught me romanticism of the ideal heart of woman - but that one maxim of Tao taught me how to not hunger for women, as if i were the Paraclete - perhaps what Christianity wished for was a placebo of the Paraclete - given that so many already believed the other figure being extinguished in the wake of the 20th century - but in talk of religion, such is the limited vocabulary, and such the impossible task ahead, in that grand masquerade of identifying all with one, and one with all:
as an atom:
                                       omni
                          
                  omni           mono         omni

                                       omni                                  or

(around me everything, i must concentrate on myself)

                                                        ­      nihil

                                         nihil             omni          nihil

                                            ­                  nihil  

(around me nothing, therefore i must encompass it all)

whatever the answer, i sought, and found mine,
it was in Tao, and nowhere else.*

there's never a talk of transparency
in politics - politics isn't
about transparency - it's about
the vaguest and the foggiest -
you all should know this by now -
but ado with George Orwell's double-think,
or simply doppelgläuben -
you believe to disbelieve - that's what the
doppelgläuben does - if religion be the ******
of the masses, then engaging the masses with
politics is engaging them with
hell-raisers - diluted alcohol from 40 to 15%.
no wonder they're ******-off being prescribed
status quo placebos;
politics was never about transparency, all those
near the pigsty troughs know the motto:
you scratch my back, i scratch yours.
the electorate think this applies to them
also true between their daily squabbles, but it doesn't.
doppelgläuben: you believe to disbelieve;
and of course we want objectivity, we want
cages after all... Darwinism is perfect for
an objective expression, which is why poetry
is sidelined as Loser St. -
we all want perfect abs and the opportunity to
sell yogurt rather than Mongolian Yurts
in swimwear shorts... but how long will this
Siberian talk of rationality serve the mammalian heart?
how long will objectivity given Darwinism seem
sensible to keep? are we at the butchers' or
reflecting on life? raw meat, maggoty meat, well done?
we all know that the majority of us are losers,
but drilling this in will never allow us to
speak objectively... well, it will... like in Munich,
an 18 year old lashing out from what he heard
his father being called: Scheiße Auslander -
this is the rational benefit of objectivity so keenly expressed
in argument - which is why so many people have
turned to poetry, but they don't yet see that
the ****** was worn for much too long -
and given democracy, they get lost in the whirlwind
of so many people feeling the same.
hence? Tao lesson no. 1 - aid the world by the world
forgetting you... and you in turn forgetting the world
so the world can be best aided, and you kept free
without minding the c.c.t.v.
Alexandra Oct 2012
in the vaguest sense
you are a forest fire chewing
the trees in its path
then turning and wondering
where the greenery went
Alex Apples Jun 2013
Narcissists
All of us
That crawl the saturated cyberspaces
Howling like shriveled
Infants doomed to die
In the womb, unheard

Be my friend
Follow me
Like me
Quote me
Share me

Favorite my poems
Repeat my tweets
Rank my posts high
Comment on even
The vaguest written word

Subscribe to my channels
Connect to my feeds
Stumble upon
My tumbled thoughts
And filtered photographs

Do you know who I am?
No really. I'm not angry.
Just...do you?
Because I am afraid
I'm afraid you never will.

I scream until my lungs
Collapse upon themselves
But still the shrieking noises
Around me, voices
Surmount my shouts.

I demand your attent
I deserve your loyalty
For no earned reason
Other than
I exist
I am Me.

And who are you exactly?
Ari Dec 2011
One sunny aftr’noon I chose
To stroll upon the sound
When suddenly I glimpsed ahead
And saw, me, on the ground

This vaguest doppelganger mimick’d
Ev’ry move I made
It spun upon the sand and whirl’d
As I turn’d away

Than standing still, I crook’d my head
And look’d behind in shock
I saw my mimic laying there
As wrought and real as rock

But as the sun began to sink
And moon commenc’d to rise
My companion stretch’d as on
A rack, before my very eyes

I slep’t upon the beach that night
Awaiting its return
And awoke to feel the sand against
My face begin to burn

Still half asleep, I stumbled to
The bay to wash my eyes
And while splashing water on my head
I view’d to my surprise

My shadow spread across the sand
And glinting smoothen’d stone
Now in days of solitude
I know I’m not alone
Hannah Johnson Apr 2011
I almost didn’t believe you understood the concept of “depression” until I remembered that day.


today.

I sit on our broken couch

picking at my cuticles

trying not to let you see me cry

secretly angry

that you think you understand.

I bite my tongue because biting my knuckles is too close to cutting.


then.

I have the vaguest memories

of a house where windows never opened

nobody left

nobody visited

the carpet littered with books and toys

tv the only light

metaphorical or otherwise

getting out of bed at 2PM

cooking pancakes

I threw away underneath the sink full of ***** dishes

they were still gooey in the middle

but you didn’t notice

and went back to bed.

I thought you were sick.

I was the one who didn’t understand.


now.

we joke about the heroine you never did

only because you don’t like needles

and all the cutting I do

because I do

and I think we somehow

feel equally guilty.
He tunes the bonds which hang on the mirror of the sea
Revealing deep meanings in the vaguest air
She likes to speak of him to me
When her day catches fire
And loses flair

She tells me of the good things he makes her feel
When he tunes the bonds up and down
Yet she wonders what is real
And if that mirror
Makes her world go round

Perfect joy she says he has shown her now
Seems that her cup runneth over
Yet as serenity takes a bow
Those deep meanings
Fail to hold her

She likes to speak of him to me on her cloudy days
I look through her eyes and see the truth
She tunes the bonds in her own way
And when her day catches fire
He becomes her excuse
Copyright *Neva Flores @2010
www.changefulstormpoetry.blogspot.com
www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/Changefulstorm
Oscar Mann Oct 2015
and cockerels

One word is often enough
To make a crowd go wild
Like “Fire”
Or “Bomb”
Or even a vague “Danger”
Sometimes it takes two
“Behind you”
Or “Get out”
Or perhaps a simple “My god!”

Like hens and cockerels
We are often running scared
And running away
From the smallest whisper
The vaguest rumour
And the slightest possibility
Until it is clear that the fear
Was a product of imagination

Then we’ll act as if nothing happened
A collective silence
After a collective madness
And we’ll look down
And mix in the crowd
Hide the fact that we’re aware
That our scare was worthy
Of hens and cockerels
Inspired by Camille Saint-Saëns’ Le Carnaval des Animaux #2 – Poules et coqs (Hens and cockerels) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEd7Ovt4cWE
Molly Pendleton Jun 2011
I cannot miss your touch
I was oblivious, and never really felt it
I didn’t know you’d be gone so soon

I cannot miss your voice
What I thought at the time was listening, wasn’t good enough to memorize it
I didn’t know you’d be gone so soon

I cannot miss your scent
I never braved the proximity it would’ve taken to know your musky whiff
I didn’t know you’d be gone so soon

I cannot miss your taste
I was too ***** to ever go after you, or your flavor
I didn’t know you’d be gone so soon

I cannot miss the sight of you
Though I saw you, I didn’t learn your appearance well enough
I didn’t know you’d be gone so soon

Now that you are gone
I hate that I was so cowardly; so craven
And don’t have the vaguest remembrance of what you really were
Written on 8/5/11 about something that occurred on 8/9/10.
Devin Weaver Aug 2016
The dream is one of life’s great ironies
A word overfilled with the vaguest hopes
A word impalpable, of fantasies
And yet, the tangible within its scope
When nightmares leave us restless and afraid
Mother soothes her child with “it’s just a dream”
But when bold men dreamt of what they then made
Matrons held those thoughts with profound esteem
Each is urged to trace whimsy’s beaconed path
For boys and girls can be all they desire
Heed not reality, nor aftermath
Set reverie, each night, newly afire

I found this same paradox to apply
When I dreamt of you, my deluging love
Saw heaven in the depths of your brown eyes
But sleep’s hellish guile pained my heart thereof
You smiled at me and walked amid soft light
Under a glowing willow tree, we met
For hours, as friends who were once lovers might
We merged with warm embrace our silhouettes
I cried for joy to hold what seemed so real
Lost in you, I forgot of earthly time
And to have foregone breath might bear appeal
For, in that false world, you were truly mine

This sweet conceit is such a cruel scheme
For, when I wake, it’s always just a dream
mc ish Jun 2018
when i'm scared you are my rough place to land,
you boast of critique though i see no wrong.
a simple spot to fall when one can't stand,
you are the home in which i could belong.

a fierce competitor one cannot beat,
she is the fire from which eden was made;
for you, oceans are given a heartbeat,
yet--your doubt overwhelms you im afraid!

but her aggression, formed in vaguest word,
she stomps upon eggshells others ignore.
i can hear the way her love is slurred,
you see her smile-behind the locked door?

in all that i know of heaven, she's there,
arms around the one she loves without care.
idk who let me on this site honestly but heres a mediocre sonnet !!
Molly Jul 2013
I don't like computers .
You must be specific to get them
to work with you.

I prefer people,
the vaguest smile, the subtlest compliment
can make them fall in love with you.

Manipulation is an art
when done very well, like I do,
disastrous when seen. A risky business.

Those boys don't love me,
this computer doesn't know me,
but they obey me.

I suppose I am a sort of God
I could control their fate
on a temporary basis,

some kind of Satan.
Lamia
or a Pope.
betterdays Jun 2014
it is just after dusk,
and the day has gathered
it's coloured petticoats and
fled.

the sleek, white and black
patched cat,
from three doors
down, to the left
has taken up position,
on
the next door neighbor's shed.

she sits,
preening under the
moth dappled spotlight,
as she sings an aria
of love and seduction
* Un'aura amorosa—"
A loving breath"*
perhaps....

all the males
come to listen in,
testosterone,
induced adoration.

even the
little blucat
with only
vaguest memories
of infatuation, tries to heed
her siren call...
pressing
himself against
the glass sliding door
praying
for two miracles
the first being
osmosis
and the second
the reincarnation
of long lost testicles.

but
alas,
alack
god does not heed his
plaintive cries...

and besides the party
next door
is now over....
closed down
by a shower
of rain
sent by garden hose

all cats,  
now wend their
way home to
dinner's cold
and  hearth's warm
or to fight
as alley cats do
in dark corners
of this urban sprawl

awaiting the
midnite reprise
of the
operatic caterwaul
at number
two seventy four.
this will
be
the
third time
this week
Hilda Jul 2014
O God! to Whom I blindly seek Thy face
And search for vaguest token of Thy love,
So thereby hoping Thy mercy to prove
If I should merit faintest shred of grace.
Forgive these cries by one with wild despair
Issued from broken heart and shattered dreams,
Heightened by terror of demonic schemes,
Whose hopes lie dashed by each unanswered prayer.
Yet help me, Thou, from such lies to refrain,
And hear Thy voice again in soughing pine.
Thus sweet release in sharpest thorn of pain,
Give beauty for ashes in love divine.
O Thou hast gently taken her last breath,
Along with Thee triumphant over death.

**~Hilda~
Petrarchan (Italian) Sonnet type.
Written July 18, 2014
© Hilda July 27, 2014
12:10am
Nat Lipstadt May 2016
inspired by TC Tolbert's poem, ""Dear Melissa"*

                                        ~~~

joined skin cells shed and shredded,
two bodies, a compositoy,
an experiment in the temporary,
now, lost under lock and key, at a secure depository,
remote, undisclosed location,
kept unheated in a dark cool place
to preserve their combinatory
slow, half-life decaying oratory

the body is never an accident,
even though we mostly are,
accidental tourists, two collision-prone comets,
lark, rambling rambunctious adventurers,
on a half-day tour only,
leaving behind commingling blinking dust vapor trails,
 emissions of a tour bus journey rerouted
                                                            while under orbit sail

some cells, microscopic, preserved digitally,
aged to imperfection, thrash my eyes,
making me speak in tongues I do not recognize,
but fluently possess, no wonder there,
the memory place fairly empty,
room aplenty for passerby's and the imagery
                                                         ­ of the vaguest of dearly departed

skin is not the only mot shed,
                                                       sloughing of woeful words, shelled

                    
                                     ~~~


Dear Melissa
TC Tolbert

a curve billed thrasher
is cleaning its beak on the ground—
we are closer now than ever—sitting
in shadow—I never want to scare
anyone—not really—I have a friend
who loves people who come out
suddenly—in the dark—
                                          pleasure
is the same distance as pain from here—
that’s my skin on your sweater—both hands
stripped now—I know I am someone
to you I am entirely—practicing
Spanish on the computer—gesturing to
the neighbor instead of speaking—
                                          to sharpen
the body is never an accident— someone
I know I am not—letters are inseparable
from loss—moving what can be still
moved—one is sweeping the mouth—
what ever isn’t skin—take it off—
“Melissa is the name of the young woman I once was and while it’s true that she never left me, I often wonder if I left her. This poem is one way of saying thank you, Melissa, for being a body my death could die into.”
—TC Tolbert


TC Tolbert is the author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press, 2014). S/he teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Oregon State University-Cascades and lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Caroline May 2013
your silky skin is peeking from
the hole at the bottom of your jeans
you give me the vaguest stare
i have no choice but to stare back
until i can see the stars in your eyes
and how they connect into constellations
that tell stories about where you've come from
i read them all day long

i watch as you drift off
hiding from your thoughts that tell you
that you're inadequate
and see your every breath become slower
the rhythm of them makes my heart swell
it is its own kind of art
something unexplainable to behold
i sit in awe as i realize
what you mean to me
Jack Turner Oct 2013
The last few nights of sleep have not been nearly as restful as hoped they could be
Seeing as those strange dreams linking you and me have been a recurring theme.
No, it hasn't been a repeat of that first odd dream where I
Sought to avoid you - something I am unable to do despite my best efforts.

No, of late it has been one where I am sitting at a bar and through the door walk in
A number of men who I've encountered in my life, some I've known well, and
One by one as they come in, they come up and sit down or stand next to me.
Clearly they are talking to me and trying to impart words of wisdom
Won by hard years of growth and experience gained by walking through this world,
Words by which they hope to save me untold years of toil, of pain, frustration, and yet,
When I wake each time, I only have the vaguest impression, no recollection
Of any of those poignant words which those men might have said.
And that surreal feel of the need to discern meaning from these meetings
Comes as I realize that one of the men coming to talk to me in the bar, in my dream,
Was your father.

He is not there in anger, he is anything but imposing, he is merely speaking,
And as stated before I have only the faintest reflection of what he said
Upon awakening.
That he is your father, coupled with these troubling instances of you
Popping up in my life in the most odd and beyond coincidental of circumstances
Leaves me desperate for any glimmer of clarification.
There's some message that's clearly here to see
But to my eyes that slips and escapes me
Unable to fathom the reason that these phantoms of you
Keep haunting me even into my sleep, into my dreams,
When all I want is to be free of you
As you are obviously free of the chains and snares of me.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2017
so merlin... sorry... gandalf comes along
and says: leave your books! the real world awaits!
out there! beyond the door!
     ******* wizards, all they want to do is
send me on holiday...
  what the **** would i do in tunisia if
not think about islamic carthage?
       nope, i rather spend my time as a tapeworm
bound to an organism known as a personal
library; sorry, that's what farmers always said
when harvesting crops: i see what william
blake saw in a grain of sand...
       potential for glass... i know there isn't
any adventure in the world, there's only tourism...
and tourists really do only see the ****** parts of
capital cities... venice as generic as amsterdam...
tourists: just a load of bothersome flies.
    
i say take an adventure into someone else's psyche,
you're bound to some weird and wonderful
things in there...
  
roman numerals, right? so ugly... or rather: so difficult,
when life was... and when people needed
to state something beautiful...
like this mathematic teacher i once had who
simply said:
                     try calculus with roman numerals...
sure, try (e)x squared...
                      as in: why did we even keep them?
numerals i mean, they're not numbers as such,
they're numerals because we keep them to entrench
spelling, or that's how i see it,
   0 - 9 exist for fun, for sudokus, giving us absolutely
no clues...
but as ezra pound pointed: the beautiful is hard,
and he borrowed it from someone else,
    what we have reached is too simple,
we're stuck in this limit of microscopes and sub-atomic
particles and then the stars!
     it could just be a way to unlearn these holes
that we fall through, but of course: precipitating into
greater numbers, and even greater obscurity and
a need for herr anonymous...
             but you can't exactly build a Colosseum
using 0 - 9... back then... we had curves!
       real passionate curves! on pillars!
                               we didn't even have 0...
we had oh... omicron and omega...
                      the d'uh part, as part of project
nostalgia...
                             we didn't have 0 - 9 to fry
our brains and live live in the fast lane equipped with
amphetamines... we have I - X...
               and the XI...
                          imagine mathematics so complex
that the selection process to process it along with
language broke but certainly made a few mean
*******... now everyone can do it...
   it's what the greeks didn't comprehend...
                i'd love to see the original script from
pythagoras, oddly enough we don't possess the original
concept of numbers... we hear the arabs had this
and the indus had that, but what the greeks had?
no mention... nothing, just words...
   but imagine why the romans were as strong as
they were...     rex... what's that? revise ten,
ten ten over and over and again?
         to have to deal with I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X -
that's hard, but almost too amazing that they
managed to provide a Colosseum to be the blueprint
and plagiarism for modern stadiums...
   they even have this cliche of calling latin a dead
language... sure, and i'm still using their ******
φoνoς encoding... god i'm so tempted to make that
sigma acute... but the internet doesn't have something:
for once!
                     nos (nose)           noś (indicative verb:
to carry by command, of a self-serving argument) -
     it really turned out to be a real
greek prefix and roman suffix game (nasal)...
      but still the reason why we inherited
the roman rule of thumb, or said number that's one,
we have no firm belief in the greek concept of numbers,
well, apart from the only relevant number
that's 666 in the new testament... but i haven't
come across the greek concept of number...
   for all i know 0 through to 9 is either arabic or
indu -
               or why, for a better reason than none
I, II, III, IV etc. has been kept,
   and becomes imposing on your television
screen when a show ends...
    dated e.g. MMXVII (2017)...
now go back and use those numerals and give
me a theory of gravity... impossible!
    you couldn't have even the vaguest sense
to even begin to want to imagine such an
endeavour...
                    what i will say is that the latin
grapheme æ and that other one œ
are a source for many spelling mistakes,
as well as many uncouplings of the siamese
into diacritical distinctions... should i have
spelling the word endeavour wrong...
  
        and to think this "poem" was prompted by
having finished heidegger's ponderings no. II...
and having to only initiate this
  by having a problem figuring the no. 234 aphorism
in roman numerals (which are called mathematical letters)...
so yes, i imagine beauty as that which wasn't
exactly greek... more roman, as in counting
using a "monotheism" of language being
used for both talk and calculation -
                  to achieve what was achieved, and later
squandered, as of now, which it has been...

that i did laugh at aphorism no. 236 (CCXXXVI)
   already it feels like spelling, i wonder if there was
an orthography concerning numbers back then,
i mean, something without a prior to 236 encoding,
      i'm pretty **** sure the jewish "mystics"
started talking a lot of ******* when they invented
    gematria...
                               it's absolutely horrid
having, say aleph = 1...
                                but then that's just a spontaneous
critique that will eventually fizzle out of my head
and die a sudden death and i won't bother it ever again...

yet you can't say that with roman numerals you
couldn't extract more beauty,
   to state something in a single, and now the more
literal attempt at a concept of monotheism: tongue...
     how the hell did they extract the architecture
and the will to craft an empire like that,
      where encoding sound also included the same language
to encode abstracts, primarily with the basis of
measurement, and scale the skies!
     (it's not even my *** i'm talking about).

but in summary, aphorism 236 made me laugh,
   and that "thing" i invented that's res vanus
to counter Hegel's cogito - me cogitare
                                   is bound to aphorism 234...

in yesterday's newspaper there's a supplement
article about how exercising increases your chance
of a decreased libido...

     also, to unravel the stated "thing", you can simply
look to Kant for a list of faculties of the psyche,
         and how they interpolate / interact...
as anyone with half a can of worms might state:
  me go fishing, me catch shark...
                because to me, modern psychology is
a quasi-science... and philosophy is something you learn
outside of "respectable" institutions like universities,
at your own peril, kinda like rousseau...
   so yeah, kant's great with describing the interaction
of the faculties and how you can expose the "thing";
   i gave up on the res cogitans concept,
                i wanted to word nietzsche's bewilderment
about where thought comes from, and that abyss quote...
    it naturally had to come from that vein,
what would make a buddha laugh: res vanus.
Muse Aug 2016
Tell me how to win your heart
For I haven't got a clue
Let me start by saying

Hello
Is it me you're looking for
For I have seen you in my mind
And I have felt you in my soul
Perhaps the heart is blind
There is only one way to know

May I try to win your heart
Though I haven't got a clue
Let me start by saying

Hello
Is it you I'm searching for
For you have a place in my mind
And I have given you my soul
Perhaps your eyes are blind
So instead my soul will show

As I try to win your heart
I haven't got a clue
Let me start by saying

Hello
It's not me you're looking for
For I have no place in your Sphere
And my soul dwells outside of light
Perhaps I keep my heart too near
But I am afraid to let it go

So I can not win your heart
For I never had the vaguest clue
Perhaps I should have whispered
I love you
Sopor Aeternus was my inspiration in the form of her cover of "Hello" by Lionel Ricchie as I try to work through some heart gunk
Benjamin Reed Sep 2017
i chanced upon you
once before,
in the vaguest of ways.

and then again,
in much the same
fashion.

there was a tenderness in your voice,
a softness to your Soul
that for reasons i have still yet
to understand
You chose to share with Me.

lying next to me,
i remember thinking
your stature so small to mine
and your Being so much more expansive.

your form, spilled across my own,
like an Ocean.
Vast!
and i would think
any man mad,
who would
sail so quickly through
such placid waters.

surely, you would reach the lands
of another Shore
far too quickly.

and so there i laid,
terrified to move.
how could i?
you, who enveloped me
and demanded all of myself,
every flaw openly
laid bare.
you, who smiled at each,
so patiently.
i couldn't disturb you.
not yet.
Dave Robertson May 2021
This ground was thirsty
by god thirsty
been cracking and cursing for months
with only the vaguest hunch of a possible deluge

so these rains were drunk in abandonment
and the angry soil has yielded
soft underfoot, a sole cwtch
to be savoured, felt

the stream, so feeble last week
has remembered its fatness,
wetness, strength
recalling a bearing
thoughts are borne once again
with vigour to the constant sea
Tha Kid Apr 2016
My brain is on autopilot
I need to lay down and pray
My head is causing riots
My thoughts don’t seem to stay

As I reach for my ink pen
I can feel my pain seeping
I’m not in shallow waters
I’m currently in the deep end

Just when I think All I needed was faith
My brain shriveled up
There’s no way to escape
To this world without my mask and cape
All I’m busting are blanks
When I need to be making my way to the bank

Instead I sit back in anguish
Bouta throw me tantrum
My words aren’t the vaguest
But I’m sticking out like a ***
My ink is dried up like leftover ***
Its like having the moon but without the Sun
wordvango Jun 2015
you sent a message to me then disappeared into the vaguest distance
I sat scratching my newly found bald spot because it itched, then
All my hair came down into my eyes, thought I might need a trim
but my head glistened shimmering in the moonlight standing
looking over a hill for you, to appear. My shoulders covered
with fragments of black hair once there, on my skull cap
now laying all over my keyboard, making a nice tapestry
of black on black, ASCII

— The End —