"But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." - W. B. Yeats
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Poetry and Poetastry
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on a Rilke kick lately...
You Who Never Arrived
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...
-----
Du im Voraus
verlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene,
nicht weiß ich, welche Töne dir lieb sind.
Nicht mehr versuch ich, dich, wenn das Kommende wogt,
zu erkennen. Alle die großen
Bildern in mir, im Fernen erfahrene Landschaft,
Städte und Türme und Brücken und un-
vermutete Wendung der Wege
und das Gewaltige jener von Göttern
einst durchwachsenen Länder:
steigt zur Bedeutung in mir
deiner, Entgehende, an.
Ach, die Gärten bist du,
ach, ich sah sie mit solcher
Hoffnung. Ein offenes Fenster
im Landhaus—, und du tratest beinahe
mir nachdenklich heran. Gassen fand ich,—
du warst sie gerade gegangen,
und die spiegel manchmal der Läden der Händler
waren noch schwindlich von dir und gaben erschrocken
mein zu plötzliches Bild.—Wer weiß, ob derselbe
Vogel nicht hinklang durch uns
gestern, einzeln, im Abend?
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Part of Nietzsche's, From High Mountains:Epode
"Am I another? A stranger to myself? Sprung from myself? A wrestler who subdued himself too often? Turned his own strength against himself too often, checked and wounded by his own victory?
Did I seek where the wind bites keenest, learn to live where no one lives, in the desert where only the polar bear lives, unlearn to pray and curse, unlearn man and god, become a ghost flitting across the glaciers?"
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Ravaged People
5
Heads that have gone through something serious as death and who could not save themselves, or else not very well.
Heads of the past, that know the night of life, the Secret, the awful Unnameable on which all being was supported.
Struggling against blurriness, masses that try to reconstitute themselves in vain, struggling against the invading mush.
Heads profoundly hurt, that no longer trust anything, that remember.
One of them seriously smashed in, its eyes fixed and wide like the eyes of a fish, the oculomotor muscles seemingly stuck so that they can only stare straight ahead, facing others, facing the way one faces up to the world.
A gigantic nose, spilling over, pushed over, crooked, twisted, from the base to the top twisted, seems almost in profile.
Above, unchanged by the twisting, which should be painful (like the ring in a tame bull's nostrils) and even truly horrible, the impassive eyes -- a major discord, the signature of his illness -- act as if there were nothing wrong; in this impossible, highly upsetting contradiction, they continue, they hold fast.
The inhabitant of the disordered face is not giving up.
-- Henri MichauxLast edited by Acéphale; 04-14-2012, 12:01 AM.ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα
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My love whose hair is woodfire
Her thoughts heat lightning
Her hourglass waist
An otter in the tiger's jaws my love
Her mouth a rosette bouquet of stars of the highest
magnitude
The footprints of white mice on the white earth her teeth
Her tongue rubbed amber and glass
My love her tongue a sacred host stabbed through
Her tongue a doll whose eyes close and open
Her tongue an incredible stone
A child's hand traced each eyelash
Her eyebrows the edge of a swallow's nest
My love her temples slates on a greenhouse roof
And their misted panes
My love whose shoulders are champagne
And dolphin heads of a fountain under ice
My love her matchthin wrists
Whose fingers are chance and the ace of hearts
Whose fingers are mowed hay
My love with marten and beechnut beneath her arms
Midsummer night
Of privet and the nests of angel fish
Whose arms are seafoam and river locks
And of the mingling of wheat and mill
Whose legs are Roman candles
Moving like clockwork and despair
Marrow of eldertree
My love whose feet are initials
Key rings and java sparrows drinking
My love her neck pearled with barley
My love a golden-throated town
Rendez-vouz in the torrent's very bed
Her breasts of night
Her breasts molehills under the sea
Crucibles of rubies
Spectre of the dewsparkled rose
Whose belly unfurls the fan of every day
Its giant claws
Whose back is a bird's vertical flight
Whose back is quicksilver
Whose back is light
The nape of her neck is crushed stone and damp chalk
And the fall of a glass where we just drank
My love whose hips are skiffs on high
Whose hips are chandeliers and arrow feathers
And the stems of white peacock plumes
Imperceptible in their sway
My love whose buttocks are of sandstone
Of swan's back and amianthus
And of springtime
My love whose sex is swordlily
Is placer and platypus
Algae and sweets of yore
Is mirror
Eyes full of tears
Of violet-panoply and magnetic needle
My love of savannah eyes
Of eyes of water to drink in prison
Eyes of wood always to be chopped
Eyes of water level earth and air and fire
- André Breton L'Union Libre(1931)Are you afraid of women, Doctor?
Of course.
www.becomingmads.com
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A Compromise
The men of principled simplicity
Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt.
The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout:
The myth of depth is an absurdity!
For if there were additional dimensions
Beside the good old pair we'll always cherish,
How could a man live safely without tensions?
How could he live and not expect to perish?
In order peacefully to coexist
Let us strike one dimension off our list.
If they are right, those men of principle,
And life in depth is so inimical,
The third dimension is dispensable.
Herman Hesseain't no beauty queens in this locality
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A very classic poem of french literature but I think its worth posting, I love Baudelaire and his way to create beauty in something horrible or disgusting, the way he represents life in something dead, I love it.
I hope you can read it in french, if not i've copied an english translation for you
Une Charogne
Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux:
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme
Sur un lit semé de cailloux,
Les jambes en l'air, comme une femme lubrique,
Brûlante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d'une façon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein d'exhalaisons.
Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
Tout ce qu'ensemble elle avait joint;
Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
Comme une fleur s'épanouir.
La puanteur était si forte, que sur l'herbe
Vous crûtes vous évanouir.
Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,
D'où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons.
Tout cela descendait, montait comme une vague
Ou s'élançait en pétillant;
On eût dit que le corps, enflé d'un souffle vague,
Vivait en se multipliant.
Et ce monde rendait une étrange musique,
Comme l'eau courante et le vent,
Ou le grain qu'un vanneur d'un mouvement rythmique
Agite et tourne dans son van.
Les formes s'effaçaient et n'étaient plus qu'un rêve,
Une ébauche lente à venir
Sur la toile oubliée, et que l'artiste achève
Seulement par le souvenir.
Derrière les rochers une chienne inquiète
Nous regardait d'un oeil fâché,
Epiant le moment de reprendre au squelette
Le morceau qu'elle avait lâché.
— Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,
À cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
Vous, mon ange et ma passion!
Oui! telle vous serez, ô la reine des grâces,
Apres les derniers sacrements,
Quand vous irez, sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses,
Moisir parmi les ossements.
Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine
Qui vous mangera de baisers,
Que j'ai gardé la forme et l'essence divine
De mes amours décomposés!
— Charles Baudelaire
A Carcass
My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,
Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.
The sun shone down upon that putrescence,
As if to roast it to a turn,
And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature
The elements she had combined;
And the sky was watching that superb cadaver
Blossom like a flower.
So frightful was the stench that you believed
You'd faint away upon the grass.
The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,
From which came forth black battalions
Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid
All along those living tatters.
All this was descending and rising like a wave,
Or poured out with a crackling sound;
One would have said the body, swollen with a vague breath,
Lived by multiplication.
And this world gave forth singular music,
Like running water or the wind,
Or the grain that winnowers with a rhythmic motion
Shake in their winnowing baskets.
The forms disappeared and were no more than a dream,
A sketch that slowly falls
Upon the forgotten canvas, that the artist
Completes from memory alone.
Crouched behind the boulders, an anxious dog
Watched us with angry eye,
Waiting for the moment to take back from the carcass
The morsel he had left.
— And yet you will be like this corruption,
Like this horrible infection,
Star of my eyes, sunlight of my being,
You, my angel and my passion!
Yes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers,
To molder among the bones of the dead.
Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will
Devour you with kisses,
That I have kept the form and the divine essence
Of my decomposed love!
- translation by William Aggeler
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on ect
The Hanging Man
By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.
The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.
A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.
-Sylvia Plath
p.s. not bad Fade. first line aside [which i honestly think you could get rid of], it kind of reads like a corny Raymond Carver.
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ha, corny raymond carver, i kinda dig it. thanks for the comments. i haven't written in so long and the more i am getting into my visual work i feel i'm losing touch with writing, which is the first medium in which i attempted to do something creative. just had to squeeze something out about once a month so i'm not completely gone yet.
i actually wrote a poem once inspired by Raymond Carver's "Fat", posted it in the other thread a long time ago but i'll throw it up here again for posterity -
Fat
For Raymond Carver and Marlon Brando
Let me tell you about those early days,
Kid, when up was the only way, before
The fridge had to be locked up and my
Neighbor called to tell me that I left
My briefs in his washing machine.
It all seems so silly now, imagine
Me in the corner of a jukebox joint,
Brooding over that day’s failures:
She kept looking at my wrists,
The back of my hands, finally
Refusing to hold it in any longer
And said to me, “I’m sorry,
But you’re too thin and lonely
To make it in this town!” That
Was when I started eating. You could
Find me holding court in the burger shack,
Over my two hamburgers, French fries,
A slice of apple pie a la mode, and
When the waitress looked at me,
Not without a hint of concern,
I smiled my vanilla smile and told her,
“Oh, just think, the things we’ll do
And the places
we’ll go!”
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^that made me chuckle, thanks. which brings me back to mentioning, this thread doesn't have to be so serious...
‘Tis said, woman loves not her lover
So much as she loves his love of her;
Then loves she her lover
For love of her lover,
Or love of her love of her lover?
sourceain't no beauty queens in this locality
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.
I am not I
I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.
- Juan Ramón Jiménez
..
sain't
.
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"Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light -- with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood -- the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it -- but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. -- Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.
Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night."
"I need [...] flowers that have grown in fire."
Both by Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, Novalis."He described this initial impetus as like discovering that they both were looking at the same intriguing specific tropical fish, with attempts to understand it leading to a huge ferocious formalism he characterizes as a shark that leapt out of the tank."
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Hollow Men T.S Eliot
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.what is black?
an absence, a presence, a mood, a mantle.
-Martin Margiela
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