Poetry and Poetastry

[MJRH]

poetry is the underwear of the soul

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My Favorite John Ashbery poem, "Lost Sonnet" (From the New Yorker):

They grow up too fast
these days. Unassumingness
becomes unwieldy, the woods
a place to walk from briskly.
You say your cunning comportment
is artless? Well then so am I
for containing you, champ.
Your tracks are alive with new interest.

The trail always sees what’s up ahead,
which is resistance. No tooth
or star contradicts what is made
and hard to screw up. Wash the guest’s
feet, the aviator. Jack was his name
and we were like brothers, though we never knew each other.

[Cagean]

Freeway

Deadlocked on the freeway
the free way of the world
The American Dream
simmering on the horizon
sports-hero off ramp barriers
entrepreneur overachiever detours
onward
downward
push and pull
first gear Danse Macabre
spiritual weight
bumper to bumper to bumper
billboard gods
drive thru wealth
a thousand lanes wide and anxious
running low
living low
undertow
high-rise worth
bubbling in the asphalt
everyone an economy class fugitive
sedans scrambling
to see ahead
to stand tall
on shoulders that swell
day in
day out
by the sedan

[MJRH]

ee cummings

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

[Philipppp]

Dreaming of My Deceased Wife on the Night of the 20th Day of the First Month
-Su Shi

Ten boundless years now separate the living and the dead,
I have not often thought of her, but neither can I forget.
Her lonely grave is a thousand li distant, I can't say where my wife lies cold.
We could not recognise each other even if we met again,
My face is all but covered with dust, my temples glazed with frost.
In deepest night, a sudden dream returns me to my homeland,
She sits before a little window, and sorts her dress and make-up.
We look at each other without a word, a thousand tears now flow.
I must accept that every year I'll think of that heart breaking place,
Where the moon shines brightly in the night, and bare pines guard the tomb.

[Stijn]

Patti Smith, from Auguries of Innocence

The Love-Crafter

I saw you who was myself
slightly stooped whistling mouth
with leather sack and breeches brown
striding the naked countryside

with summer bones long and dry
into the breadth of our glad day
mid afternoon the longer night
as you tread bareheaded bright

I saw you a wraith bemoan
stir the fires of the ancient ones
scarred with sticks pome and haw
as the nectar for their script

I saw you walk the length of fields
far as the finger of Providence
far as the mounds we call hills
ranges cut from the heart of slate

I saw you dip into your sack
scattering seeds where they may
as the woodsman hews his way
through oak ash and variant pines

for writing desks that shall reflect
a sheaf of lines that speak of trees
all sober hopes required within
all drunkenness as sacred swims

I saw the book upon the shelf
I saw you who was myself
I saw the empty sack at last
I saw the branch your shadow cast

[mortalveneer]

alliterati


archaic and absolutely awry,
an assertion abruptly appears,
artful, awkwardly anxious,
an admittedly arbitrary achievement
arguably arresting articulation,
an arrival already aggravating.

a pendant pleasure proceeds,
ponderous and peripatetic,
a pointedly playful promulgation
passing past pleasures
poised precipitously,
poignantly perishing presently.

does despairing, drunkenly declining
into decadently desultory debauchery,
disrupt dispirited drudgery?
a doggedly driven desperation
displaying deeper dementia
drifts darkly downwards,
dying, dropping dolefully.

[MJRH]

[MJRH]

in keeping with the title of the thread

O!—rarest lines, which transcend bounds of mortal poem and prose, attaining to eternity:



— Shakespeare's Star Wars

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The Killer's Soliloquy by Matthew Wong

Give me your daughter's irises, so I can dip them
In the kitchen's blood as a requiem for my remorse.
Save me the trouble of counting
Imaginary stars in a prison cell.
The forecast for tomorrow all across
This planet is saturnine, so tell me, doctor,
How do I cope with another book of sorrows
Placed on my front porch?
The rent is due in a couple days
And I can't stand having my shadow evicted.
The sky is full of options. Do I really need
To depend upon a coin to know one's fate?

[profondo nero]

[profondo nero]

Manuscript page from Robert Lowell’s translation of Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage.”

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poem of mine in the literary journal of a local university -

[KarissmaYve]

Monday, March 25th

I hurt for my mothers ovaries. I hurt for the womb in which I've descended.
Tears fill my eyes as I search for vessels to pour my love into,
but nothing seems large enough so they over fill and most of me ends up on the floor.
The world seems grayer than I remember, though meaningless and empty I still am filled with a myriad of musings.

A curiosity cabinet that is constructed precisely with very fine cherry tree wood covered in a sappy lacquer,
a curiosity cabinet that is neither hers nor mine but ours.
Containing a long lineage of pain, suffering and lost dreams…
Today, she placed a specimen removed from her womb into the cabinet. There was a delicately scribbled label, "cancer" it read.
I can feel my breast begin to swell and the pain she's felt fills them. Cancer,
I have known a few cancerous people.
Those whom latch onto you,
mimicking the composition that took years to shape.
A pseudo attempt to become,
but the main objective is to take.
This other concept was foreign to me.
It was March 25th, the day that Cancer entered into the curiosity cabinet…
and all the mothers of my mothers mothers began to weep.

[KarissmaYve]

and this,



Rilke from Book of Hours