Untitled (;)

I used to write. Poetry; songs; what I thought were artistic thoughts. Now I refrain. Why have I forsaken myself? To say would be to reveal but not too revealing.

‘Tis different now than ‘twas in the late aughts. Empty space now spilling over with movement; action; direction. Helpful, yes, but hopeful? Pray not.

Do these thoughts still reside though they receive no time? Or is the act gone entirely? The ability to do now static. Frozen in time. In words; in song. A by-gone year but a gone-by talent? Shudder to think.

There! The issue arises! Thinking is the eye of the storm. To live days doing is a gift but to live through thought enriches life. It bears a whole new plane and widens expanses. Suddenly – music; verses – completely surround. ‘Twould be suffocating if not so pleasureful. Pride in a self-made Wonderland.

The key is to remember. The feeling; the blueprint. Keeping that is keeping sanity – is keeping life in all its graces. Keep. Peek. Take the time to look.

Assorted works on a singular topic

Joy Williams “Ill Nature”
There is a little tale about man's fate, and this is the way it is put. A man is being pursued by a raging elephant and takes refuge in a tree at the edge of a fearsome abyss. Two mice, one black and one white, are gnawing at the roots of the tree, and at the bottom of the abyss is a dragon with parted jaws. The man looks above and sees a little honey trickling down the tree, and he begins to lick it up and forgets his perilous situation. But the mice gnaw through the tree and the man falls down and the elephant seizes him and hurls him over to the dragon. Now, that elephant is the image of death, which pursues men, and the tree is this transitory existence, and the mice are the days and the nights, and the honey is the sweetness of the passing world, and the savor of the passing world diverts mankind. So the days and nights are accomplished and death seizes him and the dragon swallows him down into hell and this is the life of man.

William Shakespeare “Macbeth”
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Pascal “Pensées”
Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn…. This is the picture of the condition of man.

Allison Barrows “Preteena”
There was an old man who beat his wife;
She stabbed him with a kitchen knife!
He gazed at the red
And woefully said,
“I’m dead! Oh well, that’s life!”


 Discuss...

"One Art"

by: Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look ! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I have lost my dear Brigid until next week. She left yesterday and won't be returning until Monday night. I'll put on a brave face...

"Midsummer, Tobago"

by: Derek Walcott

Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.
A green river.

A bridge,
scorched yellow palms

from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August.

Days I have held,
days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harbouring arms.

When did I become so mournful for the past? I feel like it started a few years ago after I moved to Boston. Everything I talk about now is "Remember that time..." or "That's the place where..."

It's sad because I can never go back there but it's also sad because I feel like I'm almost ignoring the present. Like why am I looking back on my life so early in my life? I should still be living it not already reminiscing!

Untitled

I was looking for something to post today and came across this quote I’ve held onto for a while:

fuck the poets of the past, my friends.
there are no beautiful suicides
just cold corpses with shit in their pants
& the end of the gifts.

I have no idea who said it but I saw it on a PostSecret way back in the early days. Seeing it today made me think of our dearly departed Lane Pryce. Don told him to come up with “an elegant exit” presumably for his resignation but which Lane took literally.

He was gifted with numbers and certainly didn’t get the respect for A) creating SCDP (in what’s still the best season finale of the show) and B) keeping them afloat after Lucky Strike left. Yet the poem is right… Lane was scared (shitless) of what would happen to him. But whether he did it in the Jaguar, in his office, with Pete’s rifle or down the elevator shaft, death is nothing if not gruesome. They teased it out of us by showing Joan trying to get in his door, then showing Pete’s reaction to looking over the divider, and eventually we all wanted to see. Well, we got our wish.

"We Real Cool"

My college graduation was 5 years ago on Saturday and my allergies have me feeling like death. So, this seemed relevant.

by: Gwendolyn Brooks

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk Late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

It's Fenway's 100th Opening Day!

Probably the second best well known baseball poem (after Casey at the Bat):

Baseball's Sad Lexicon
by: Franklin Pierce Adams

These are the saddest of possible words:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double--
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."


I got to see the plaques of all three of those players in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

"I died for Beauty—but was scarce"

by: Emily Dickinson

I died for Beauty—but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room—

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty," I replied—
"And I—for Truth—Themself are One—
We Brethren, are," He said—

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—
We talked between the Rooms—
Until the Moss had reached our lips—
And covered up—our names—

"Overland to the Islands"

by: Denise Levertov

Let's go—much as that dog goes,
intently haphazard. The
Mexican light on a day that
'smells like autumn in Connecticut'
makes iris ripples on his
black gleaming fur—and that too
is as one would desire—a radiance
consorting with the dance.
___________________ Under his feet
rocks and mud, his imagination, sniffing,
engaged in its perceptions—dancing
edgeways, there's nothing
the dog disdains on his way,
nevertheless he
keeps moving, changing
pace and approach but
not direction—'every step an arrival.'

"After Lorca"

by: Robert Creeley

The church is a business, and the rich
are the business men.
________________________________ When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when a poor man dies, he has a wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when a rich man dies, they
drag out the Sacrament
and a golden Cross, and go doucement, doucement
to the cemetery.

And the poor love it
and think it’s crazy.

An excerpt from "Age"

by: Robert Creeley

I stood so close

to you I could have
reached out and

touched you just
as you turned

over and began to
snore not unattractively,

no, never less than
attractively, my love,

my love—but in this
curiously glowing dark, this

finite emptiness, you, you, you
are crucial