POEMS F THE MNTH

February 2012

 

THERE ARE NO NEW POEMS THIS MONTH - BUT SEE MY NEW GALLERY OF METAMORPHOTOS

The terror of error
The error of terror
The terror of seeing
The error of being

 

 

Most days I write down at least one poem or idea:
a complaint somewhere between a runny nose and diarrhœa.

 

 

Friends
are those who ask you
how you are
only when they really
want to know.

 

 

Experiences

are comparable but scarcely communicable -
which is why we hear so little about
digging up corpses.
My corpses lie heavy, won't start to rot
until I become corpse through the magic of Death.
So I have to dig into them, through them,
deeper and deeper, scanning their faint
but plausible faces, as I shovel and shove them aside
to reach the rock underneath
where there is nothing to hide.

 

 

THREE POEMS FROM MY BLOG

After
birth by misadventure
the primly rosy path of progress
to magisterial, unimaginable entropy.

Meanwhile, as our toe-nails grow,
the Atlantic Ocean slowly widens.

Clothed, we are only clothes.

 

'Life is a gift'
like an exploding parcel.
The problem is
how to defuse it.

 

"The Fall of Man" -
Was it when
Adam and Eve
mentioned property-rights
and gave God the first
of many horrible frights
and he had to tell them to leave ?

 

 

DATES, FATES AND STATES

On the seventieth anniversary
of my untimely birth I reflect on
those poor "White Trash",
ghetto "Negroes", homeless Hispanics,
Filipina slaves, and others of the
Necessary Underclass
who died in squalor, pain and misery
on the eleventh of September
in the two thousand and first year
of the Common or "Christian Era"
(or Papal Caliphate)
- and whose deaths were hardly noticed by
a heartless, mechanistic nation-state.

13th September MMXI (Hijri 1432)

 

 

gloss on
GROWING IN SPIRIT
by Constantin Cavafy

If you really want to 'grow in spirit'
you will have to go beyond
obedience and deference.
Your strong moral structure, transcending
mere normality, will transgress
both law and custom.
Sensuality can be more teacher
than diversion.
You may need sometimes to be destructive -
for half the ancient edifice will have to be pulled down.
Thus you will attain a measure of integrity.

 

 

TRAUENLIED

Metal in mists of blood, mankind,
tree-stumps and stubble burnt,
time maggoty out of thoughtless mind,
shameless attrition in outraged eyes -
even the worms are poisoned,
and aliens - or pornography,
or history or Darwin - are to blame.

How futile are the prophecies!

 

 

SCARECROW ON THE GOLDEN HORN

I have been born and borne too many times already.
I would like to think
that my last mother also felt this
when she tried to rid her womb of me, but only thrice...

Alas for her - she could not rid me from her heart!

I don't 'believe in' re-incarnation,
or in anything - because I have lived too many
tiring lives, and not sufficiently apart,
known far too poorly
too many people, and too little (and too much),
and felt too much, too long,
died too often and impermanently -
for eternity's an idiot artifice.

'A toad can die of light!'
Perhaps my little coming death will be the last.

In the essence and the end,
Dharma is no more than function in trite
institutions of corruption,
and Yog is just the yoke of everyone's involvement

in horrors yet to come, and passing, and long past.

this poem is a homage to William Butler Yeats, specifically, SAILING TO BYZANTIUM.

 

ON GLANCING THROUGH E.M. CIORAN'S
SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY

Art seems incapable of doubt - thus worthless.
Decay is the fulness.

So grief is replaced by idea, by word,
by insipid obsessions like function
and progress, rebirth,
or Just Being Useful:
directing our void over Earth.

False absolutes wearing gold braid
stride on in parade to the graveyard
of slick definitions and concepts:
'O Rose, thou art sick!'
Dust to dust,
we lie, we sneer, we cajole,
we topple like towers into prayer,
rise up, immure ourselves in castles of disgust.

Answers are so often questions inverted
(and so much is interchangeable:
evil and goodness, theft and property,
water and rust, purity and bile)
but questions delay the decay for a while.

Behold! twin sisters of Jesus, of Buddha;
miasma of failure.
The sick rose feeds the worm,
and its golden seeds encased in avian shit
sprout from the aggressive
myth-mouth of misery,
heart-stopping untruth of wealth.

Love is the worship of the street;
honesty is half-regained by stealth.
We are long since obsolete.

 

 

IN MEMORIAM LUIS BUÑUEL

After you have burned down the ugly,
arrogant hospitals for their disgraceful
defiance of fate, go burn down vainglorious
museums and pompous art-galleries
for their glorification of goods -
and burn down the schools who feed museums
and hospitals and smug universities
- all of the self- and co-serving structures. Destroy
everything that Man (but mostly man-slaves)
erected, for the best of Man is his ruins.
O that we had built nothing, and that
nothing survived but what
we did not make: our caves!

 

 

plagioPALINSESTO :

ÀS VEZES TENHO IDEIAS FELIZES

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen ? presagio desatándose
en lenta destrucción de ángeles -
Engel nicht, Menschen nicht, Ordnungen nicht
(louco, sim louco porque
die findigen Tiere merken es schon
daß wir nicht sehr verlässlich zu Haus sind
in der gedeuteten Welt)

lo sentimos hermoso pero sombra,
la noche sucia, la señal como saludo -
sólo premonición,

Geschlechtsteil des Gelds,
los cuerpos,
la cópula cayéndose a pedazos

den wir, wo wir fühlen, verfüchtigen.

(with acknowledgement to Fernando Pessoa,
Rainer Maria Rilke & Homero Aridjis)

 

...NEC MINUS SOLUM QUAM CUM SOLUS*

"Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong."

- George Gordon Noël, Lord Byron
Childe Harold (canto IV, st. 33)

Since I prefer good prose
to mediocre, syllabus-poetry
I read Kate Atkinson,
not Séamus Heaney.

This puts me in the
Outer Ring of Outcasts:
those who despise
celebrity, its pawns,
love scrubland,
loathe lawns.

And, being an egregious
solitary, preferring dogs,
I know no literati,
no literary agent, no queens or cogs
of the little cocktail-and-performance
poetry- and literary-
festival industry,
don't go out for evenings,
attend no awful readings
consisting mainly of mutterings
and embarrassed pauses
but compose compulsively
a bold and bald variety of poetry
unacceptable to the
anecdotalists who rule
AngloSaxon Poesy
with its ever-present participles
and detailed, dependent clauses.

So I'll get no ingratiating letter
from Austin, Texas - nor even
from the University of Disheartening
Ulster; so I won't
be tempted to venality,
but continue to shoplift food
(and get caught),
living frugally (washing little,
boiling water in a kettle
on the fire)
on militarist-state welfare handouts
as I've done since I was 24.

* Never less lonely than when alone - a much-quoted phrase from Cicero.

 

 

>> Six translations of a poem by Rilke >>

 

 

my favourite
HAIKU

by

David Burleigh

Flowers in the dark:
the absence of colour is
a kind of wonder.

 

 

a note on love

 

 

In Memoriam Kurt Schwitters

 

 

Life is too short

to worry about
life being short.

 

 

DOGS & HEAVEN

 

 

MAXIM of the month

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves
in order to be like everyone else.

- Arthur Schopenhauer

 

SOME PREVIOUS MAXIMS:

 

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden,
where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

- Milan Kundera

 

Honour does not need to be won - it needs only not to be lost.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

 

Man is the deranged animal, the laughing animal, the aggrieved animal,
the complaining animal, the vengeful animal,
the weeping animal, the jeering animal,
the unhappy animal, the destroying animal,
the addictive, the life-denying,
the antibiotic animal.

 

A mind enclosed by language is in prison.
- Simone Weil

Consistency is the curse of understanding.

 

Quietude, which some men cannot abide because it reveals
their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise.
- Charles H. Spurgeon (English Christian preacher, 1834-1892)

 

It seems to me that nearly 99% of poetry is false.
But maybe high-falutin falsehood is the point of poetry ?

 

To want friendship is a great fault.
Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy,
like the joys afforded by art or life.
- Simone Weil

 

I'd rather be Ireland's unknown McGonagall
than that island's latest Nobel laureate.

 

The world is getting to be such a dangerous place,
a man is lucky to get out of it alive.
- W.C. Fields

 

Opprobrium is more trustworthy than praise.

 

To get power over a living creature is to defile.
To possess is to defile.
- Simone Weil

 

The quickest of us walk about
with well-wadded stupidity.
- George Eliot

 

more recent Maxims and Aphorisms can be read on the
weBlog

 

 

try a page at random

click for selections from
PREVIOUS PAGES OF THE MONTH >>

 

 

making coffee

 

poetic work in progress >