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5408. RickNelson - 1/26/2005 6:14:55 PM Banknote: By Robert Pinsky, at Poetry Daily
Note:This link is good today only, after today it will be readily available in their archives.
This is the last stanza of the poem I linked, written by Robert Pinsky.
"Gulfs arched, wilderness paved. In the system
Of privilege and deprivation, the employed, the avid:
Fraught in the works, turning the gear of custom."
5409. RickNelson - 2/11/2005 8:00:00 PM The Family Garden
I tilled tears
as any good garden,
given golden sun,
watering and weeding.
Starting with curling entwined fingers
which as a sweet toned trumpet
play melodious love.
All who recall with tenderness,
the tease and laughter
of virgin love making
can unfurl that memory
as petals face a morning sun.
Those exciting days, having each other,
being in each others arms, loving.
How euphoric the expectation of being held,
entwining limbs and sensuous love.
These wonderful days
stretch out as sinuous and languid happiness.
As flowers fade and leaves fall,
a day of change plays a hand,
and the given setting is painted over.
Like artists, dissatisfied with some part,
Retouching; overlap imposes concurrent change.
Why implore you to verify grievance?
Rather take your knowing heart,
see how we all share inclusive
passions and heartbreaks,
We grieve, we love. So it is,
that heartfelt passion,
itself buried under years of events.
Equate it to the garden,
there is always a chance to grow something new.
Can the tender mercy of love,
children and their resilience,
family bonds and hope
revive me from rattling tears?
The years clearly show it can.
There is room for more dreaming,
reoccurring languid days, like
fresh morning walks in a garden.
Rick Nelson, Feb.,10th 2005
5410. resonance - 2/12/2005 9:26:18 PM She's getting dressed up.
Two hours in the bathroom.
Time slows to a crawl.
Midafternoon sun
hangs motionless behind clouds.
The furnace blows air.
Time spent on big hair
is much, much, more important
than Playstation games.
Suddenly she's done!
And it's time to get going!
Yowl, yowl, yowl, yowl, yowl.
It's very hard work
being a domestic man.
Please pray for my soul. 5411. woden - 2/12/2005 9:32:37 PM A man and his Playstation
Becoming one with the sofa
Killing mutant frogs and rats.
I enter the bathroom
One option closes off
sudden interest in getting ready.
A man in his pajamas
asks me
what's taking so long.
5412. woden - 2/12/2005 9:49:50 PM Last minute checking
craning neck in the mirror
Looking at my butt. 5413. woden - 2/12/2005 9:50:09 PM That wasn't me!!! 5414. woden - 2/12/2005 9:50:30 PM Jackass. 5415. arkymalarky - 2/12/2005 9:58:14 PM Ooooh, dueling poetry--and just in time for Valentine's Day!
5416. RickNelson - 2/16/2005 5:53:19 PM Praying.
That damn mirror
reflection of what I want to see
give me elastic skin
stretch it, weild it, fend for it
damn body just doesn't get it,
damn body. 5417. NuPlanetOne - 2/17/2005 3:00:38 AM Greetings fellow scribblers. Rick I really like your garden poem, ‘always a chance to grow something new.’ I love the hope and promise in it. Very nice. My poem that follows comes as another former priest meets his doom, simple as my talents are, would I wish such a monster the intellect to grasp its meaning. Ciao. 5418. NuPlanetOne - 2/17/2005 3:01:17 AM \
Altar Boy
And if it happens that at ten years old
You are made to realize that lust, cold
Blooded perversion, like a filthy demon
Thrust into the heart of your soul, trust
And love which was your known reality
If you were forced to see the evil, visit
In surrealistic horror the awful moments
Of abuse, then you learn the length of
A merciless ticking second where the
Strength to endure the next moment are
Two wide eyes not seeing or understanding
And the shock and indescribable fear that
Illuminate everything from that instant in time
Becomes your alter-existence. To feel
How unsafe life is and attempt simple joys
But now aware always that the demon
Exists, that toys and games and birthday flames
Do not belong to you. Because you know…
You have seen it, you are aware that someone
Is looking in. You stand aside. Thinking
Wondering about stuff. Alien. Hopelessly
Guilty. Trying to understand what you did
How you would hide, how you hid, how a kid
Could hold a secret.
5419. Ulgine Barrows - 2/24/2005 9:37:12 AM You weren't there. Stop. 5420. NuPlanetOne - 2/24/2005 5:28:39 PM /
/
...who wasn't where? And stop what? 5421. uzmakk - 2/27/2005 2:52:25 PM *If this sentence doesn't make sentse please ask me to clarify.
5422. uzmakk - 2/27/2005 3:09:28 PM or
scentse 5423. uzmakk - 2/27/2005 3:44:14 PM I see that the Romantic poets were mentioned upthread. I read the following yesterday:
For the Romantic poets in general, innocence was "valuable for what it might become," as Peter Coveney aptly puts it. With the Victorians, however, the emphasis shifted "toward the state of innocence itself, not as a resilient expression of man's potential integrity, but as something statically juxtaposed to experience, and not so much static as actually in retreat."
--Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven
I post it in hope that it may resonate in someone's head and give him pleasure. 5424. resonance - 3/17/2005 8:16:17 AM The whole I know of beauty knows no words;
a sweeping curve of line which slips and sines
the dead geometries of cadent verse
and rises through the cracks of cobbled lines.
These words are carved on beauty's broken tombs;
memes left for us to read and eulogize
and conjure with the rituals of our minds
to resurrect a thing that never dies.
We reach to hold it close and breathe in life;
it breathes us back instead and sets us free
to think that we can master beauty's bounds
and lock it with a Solomonic key.
The paradox of beauty; words are lies.
We know it when we make it with our eyes.
5425. alistairconnor - 3/17/2005 9:50:05 AM I think you're on to something there. 5426. RickNelson - 3/23/2005 5:43:22 PM resonance,
That's excellent.
Uz,
Those Victorian sensibilities! 5427. resonance - 3/26/2005 9:35:19 AM artifice
I have spent each single waking day
hammering this ore for gleaming chrome,
driving words like nails into the screen,
pushing thrusts of thought into the clay.
It has been my solitary art
making things that never were alive
sit up and play,
first fumbling and twitching into motion
then smoothly blurring into polished form,
the dancer and the dance as one,
for I thought I knew what I had made,
pretending they were walking flesh and bone
crafting them to fit the things I say
and not once guessing that is all they mean.
I have assembled choirs of broken stone
to hear them blend in flawless harmony
so I might own their song for my own voice
and with it fashion wisdom where none was
to light a torch and with it lead the way.
Their sound was a harsh and burning thing,
and I mistook it for reality,
not seeing that I saw just what I sought
because such was all that I could find,
nothing else but the product
of base lead and shackled thought.
Lies are the shape of human wisdom.
They are the things we need to say.
They are the artifice of answers.
They are temples in which blind men pray
for vision, not knowing they already see.
And for years I have fashioned them for light
in the shadow of my own mind.
It is the subtlest of artifice
of all the things that my mind has made
a dumb machine which feeds back on its stock
and twists it with precise stupidity -
a mind itself, my mind,
brilliant with pointless detail
of gears which turn upon their axes
but do not move from them,
of light, but not the light.
That I shall no longer seek to make,
but perhaps find instead.
Let Daedalus lie silent with the dead.
The bones of better men sleep in his shade.
I will find another way
not to make my light
but to light be made.
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