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Dalia |
This sweet Hippocrene pouring forth atop Mount Helicon
reduces and sharpens,
agrees us in this hollow trough.
We speak closer on this plane that meets us,
unifying irony, anguish, delights, and unspoken, purple-mouthed truth.
Following smiles will be knowing;
Here we are in the tubes worth knowing;
Beneath the salted snow in the vast empire,
Gatherings of milk-skins are set before the tables.
If it doesn’t strike us, it soon will,
And we are petering, teetering forward
Unto the great white depth
Ever before, with great spidered ironies
Like a rock-solid mold we want to run like the cheetah;
We once withheld this plot,
But now, now straightforward,
The never-ending piecemeal,
We can feel free to go unchallenged,
Marked smarted by those who know.
We find dilapidated mineshafts
And squeeze tunnels through where they wouldn’t be meant to meander;
______
Now I have this, which seemed to want to follow the above:
We’ve got cherries and bunting,
Bunt cake for the ride;
I haven’t made certain what the time will be,
But we can feel electricity shock through us
Like electric needles piercing our veins
We elapse forward and scurry back.
Nine times out of ten
We have a candle illuminating it for us
Yet we lag behind,
Adventuring ever forward as though we knew naught.
I don’t know how to hurry out of here,
But if there was a pleasant theme tune I would hum it;
As we carry on
Baskets and scenery
Heralds and clauses
Fairly missing in the sadscape
Hurtling before us like a rocket disaster
Deadbolt nine millimeter
We call it the coming and going,
The talking from east and west,
The nonchalant city brights
Ashen to our call;
It started with him and we have this world
We can’t come to a conclusion
We shall come to it at another time.
______
Does it work? Or better to re-arrange the first part with "Seventeen galaxies ago there was a meteor-strike?" Or...? Suggestions/re-arrangements/re-mixes encouraged.
Labels: Dalia
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Fred |
EDIT: Farewell, Peter. We hardly knew ye. Alas, you did not possess fries, nor did you maintain possession of a shake.
Labels: Fred
1 Comments
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Fred |
why then does the silence gouge?
the heft of it, the weight,
the seething light, the tearing absence.
there are those who have lived and died on less than this.
the coats hung like hammers in the closet,
the floors polished to a sheen like a heirloom weapon
at once sterile and ancient, oiled and mouldering;
these are both instruments and reasons.
brass speaks to gunmetal and pewter,
more of a whisper than a shout, telling the old fables;
the stillborn lion, the graying fledging,
the habits and consequence of our rising and falling.
the twists, the shock, the pirouette and feint and shimmer
they are all there, familiar as leather
I cannot help but think that this will not fade,
that this is what is true, that I can't help but bow my head
and follow along with a finger, underline a section
or occasionally fold back a page, but remain as helpless
as some downed animal, panting and choking on dust,
nostrils flaring and eyes shimmering.
Labels: Fred
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Dalia |
Maybe he opened his own tombstone
but then you were not born to think freely
Always elusive among the verdure
where waterfalls cough and nightingales quake
If he opened his tombstone to me and I wore his brown-stained shroud,
it doesn’t mean he invited me in to walk his way.
And how did you know and who told you
that, I love him
What choice did he have, signaling trumpets and chariots and war?
Only my own image is spooned upside down
He did not fear the consequences,
his distorted image self-loved in the water
He never lost a partner in the shoals,
never waded through vomit and feces,
scurrying like a rat through gutter trash
Who had the power to reign over all this
at the mention of hunger pains?
Maggots and urine can trump all this.
Humiliation and sacrifice are like a rushing river,
like a seafloor beneath crashing waves.
Maybe he cried alone, maybe he carved his future out in dough,
but he did not touch a warm blanket in a field of daffodils
and he did not meet his mistress behind the cabaret
or drink tea with Mamluks or lose his savings at cards
or wake up to discover last night’s bad idea.
I hold these leaves to be self-evident,
turning to dispel the new day (we are not the once-more remembered thought).
Labels: Dalia
3 Comments
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Fred |
Your angels are as hard as silk,
arrayed around the room like marble shadows
skin like vellum, faces a vaseline blur,
an incomprehensible shimmer,
it is hard to think of anything
other than this:
a steadied hand and no hallucinations
anymore.
it is a waste of time
to be afraid of the inglorious destruction,
their cool, vicious embrace,
how everytime you think you're well
you know it's pure hyperbole,
an attractive impossibility.
the reasons as are as apparent and inscrutable
as an ancient, knotted coral reef.
the voices rise in an updraft of flint and cashmere.
Labels: Fred
0 Comments
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DrewTM |
I can only say "it is so,"
and uncurl and stretch that into my memory,
Laundry on a drying line.
Skeins through windy plains.
Have you sought the whole?
I have, and I halve and hatchet
Crushed conversations down to nothing.
I choke up fake answers.
to satisfy my friends
to mechanize my ends
to anesthetize my lusts
(Can five pounds of domed fat
Make me lose my head?
Can seven pages of stained fiber
Bring to me a new one?
Can six suggestions of life
Pull me off of my tower?
Can numbers even describe
a human mind? A Human Mind??)
Grass pushes cracks through caked asphalt.
Interjections pile up beneath cobbled words.
Roots ripple stone still in the quarry.
I trip over the questions that I own.
Labels: Drew
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Dalia |
of you and you and them,
cast into genres,
sifting through chaos and muck
for a rare few within arbitrary pockets of safety.
I will know you when I know what your fight-or-flight looks like.
I can’t bend enough to show them what I mean,
but sometimes there are eyes that don’t flicker
and then I am bound.
I can’t always stifle my potential,
and so I hurtle forward.
I am so free, I can do what I want.
This is the filtered product of all the if they hadn’ts.
Why only appears retrospectively,
and only how can be traced.
This launching point is the mustard seed.
Seeds yielding moments before initiation.
I can’t forget how true this is.
My mind steals empty inkwells,
And empties out the ocean.
I produce another crucible to convince you of the legend.
Arguably this field has had all in store since Horus.
I found tautology beyond these words snaking.
We haven’t even spoken of a thousand words.
I can’t remember another time we smelt so smooth and chaste.
I can’t come now because of where we’ve been.
Sites to breathe and tell are all we are winged to flee.
Labels: Dalia
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Dalia |
If you could be ever-loving backward,
The story would have just begun:
We cozied on ship to a land far away.
We encountered sea-grudges and serpents and kindled paths unspoken.
Little were the wells that quelled that ocean.
This odyssey is well-known,
And we can only revisit it unique.
Levered markers dipped into the cast,
Forming a colossus of wind-speared servitude.
We sliced up meat for this, and fed it to the dogs.
We couldn’t be nixed like a candle,
So we just hurried forth,
More stranded by the river than phased by the quake.
It didn’t stand to deliver,
So we eddied forth.
We were continuous
For the love we never got to try
We couldn’t close our eyes
We couldn’t fail to notice what was beached there before us
We couldn’t help but hold what is remarkable
So we alighted onto the shore
Donning our pirate’s garb, pocketing the keys to the hold
And clambered down into the great white depth
Raking and wading and plashing forward
So we came closer and of course we found treasure
But it’s not anything you would think
It’s not lace or snakeskins or coffers or coats
It’s just, you know, with a shrug
I won’t try to remember what happened, but what remains is here,
sandy and straightforward
We stand humbled, rectified,
With eyes like prisms
But we could not stand still once more
Until we hoisted away
Carried off our knowledge
Transferred our abilities
To the hope’s once more important tribute
Gingerly treading along,
In toto we sallied out.
These directions will find us where we were last time,
Energizing to the habit,
And not really spending the lot of one’s career
Ever wondering what might happen without such waste
The exams and future had no effect on me
We met the Kraken, we met the maven,
We met the fairy and the pharaoh
I played my fancies on the Aeolian harp.
We bring them back caulked in bottles
But it’s all a maelstrom still,
waiting to be told.
Labels: Dalia
0 Comments
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Matt |
"I don't get it
No one ever taught me this before
We didn't learn it that way
It's too hard
I HATE History, it is too boring
WHO CARES? THEY ARE ALL DEAD!!!
I'm never going to use this..."
"... wait a minute...
is that how you do it?
That's all there is to it?
That's so EASY!
Why didn't anyone else explain it to me like that?
That makes so much more sense than how I heard it before.
What? You don't get it either? I know how to do it now, let me show you."
"Mr. Mullen, I have a B in history!!! I have never had a B in history! You are a great teacher!"
"Mr. Mullen, I talked to my mom about the election and she said, 'how did you learn all that smart people talk?' I learned it from you! She has NEVER called me smart before! Thanks!"
/Why I do it.
Labels: Matt
1 Comments
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Fred |
I have tried to answer “why,”
I have and halve,
Until I’m left with the vestiges of an assumption.
Or when the dew ends somehow in dryness,
thickened with sawdust and midday.
And I will soon forget the suffocation of hunger,
bone on steel, everything I heard here.
I cannot make a way for you to get here,
the fare is paid in buffalo nickels and haystacks;
only parcel out the distance
(as the crow or raven flies,
undeterred by the shifting currents of air,
unencumbered by levity and certainty)
with the length of my arm.
I can only say "it is so,"
and uncurl and stretch it into my memory,
laundry on a drying line.
Labels: Fred
0 Comments
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Dalia |
Not the cost of bread,
But if you’re killed in a rockslide,
If you’ll be dug out of the rubble?
(A man with no legs got onto the metro,
He was not begging for money because he was selling something.
I didn’t give him anything,
And he said “Miss,” and I made way for him to pass.
And then I objectified him here,
Dragging himself along the floor,
His right arm bound like my right arm.
So now he’s an artifact,
‘Cause legless men look good in poems,
And so maybe after reading this,
You’ll give him a pound for his trouble)
Measured out with railcards,
With the taking of coffee and tea,
With the intake from the waterpipe
And the exhalation of silent, timestricken maladies,
I have tried to answer “why,”
I have and halve,
Until I’m left with the vestiges of an assumption.
Labels: Dalia
1 Comments
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Anshul |
Somehow I ended up in DC this thanksgiving. This was a very unplanned visit so I tried to do my best on these pictures.
Labels: Anshul
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