Life in the 21st century as we all wait consciously or unconsciously for the apocalypse is boring and driven by distractions, an endless stream of distractions from the fact that 21st-century life is boring and driven by distractions. It is a life that is pointless, lonely, isolated, anonymous, mechanical, repetitive, robotic, imitative, electronic, vicarious, harried, bureaucratized, herded, wasted, bleak, despairing, impoverished, decadent, overripe for annihilation. So here are some distractions, scattered poems from my twenties not all of which are any good. Some are moderately disciplined (iambic pentameter or hexameter, or syllabically constrained (e.g., 1-2-3-4...)) but most are "free verse," and the first one isn't much of a poem at all, just a commentary on the vanity of the gym culture. The ones on this page are probably better.
***
At the gym.— The staring at my calf, the muscle, newly carved, old clay come to life (I am my own Pygmalion), sculpted beneath the skin the pockmarked skin, the staring at new creation ex nihilo ad nihilo, creatine-creation my calf my newborn baby, beautiful as the cut from the cow (dead now) on the dish—or in the dirt so to die as the diet of worms (‘From clay, to clay returned.’)—the staring, the stupid caring....
***
Detachment
Drippingly rain cuts the dirt
darkening it dissolving it
running it off into the splashed streets
sadly beneath absurd rubber tires
and the sky is white with the passed storm
and I am white with detachment
***
with a single glance
into my stunned, frozen eyes,
or a light caress,
she gently plucks the worn strings
of this tired violin-soul
*
computer-powered
I sit here robotically
day in and day out,
airplanes roaring overhead
as Field’s nocturnes console me....
*
death-defying love
enveloping one’s little
space upon this earth,
all-consuming blessedness—
that is what I’ll never have
*
smiling at the child
giggling pink life-bubbles
naïvely to me;
they all pop and pass me by,
but I am happy for her
***
Heavenly love
Ribbons of eroding moss sinking from the sky
down upon white lily-petals of cloud,
snowy ferns rainbow-flowing,
rain-feathers brushing my warm cheek to your blushing
lips.
Rushing, snow-melting streams of woman’s body
meet my open soul, drench my open heart,
pool in my palms (cupped openly) from which I sip
as breathing wintry air.
Your soul-puddle ripples in my hands.
I drink you, drink your liquid hair, your liquid eyes,
your snowy breasts and moss-soft skin,
and slowly together we dissipate skyward—
earth-memories evaporating.
Eternal streams of stars engulf the night, swallow
the world; there we hover blackly, stilly.
There we hover.
***
nipple lips kissing
cool sweat of the cupped palm warm
soul undulating
***
A Garden
This is a vision.— I am sitting on the rug
In my bedroom, my back against a pillow propped
Against the bed (the maroon comforter),
Shoes off, shirt off (except a t-shirt), legs extended
Far off into forgetfulness, laptop on lap.
My laptop!—(What a name! “Laptop”. Suitably
Poetical.)—‘What would I do without thee, dearest?!
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways....”’ No;
That were—I mean, would be—to make this poem (so-called)
Excessively didactic (though I fear the damage
Is done already). Even so, I love you, laptop.
—Where was I?— Here I sit (or rather, lie: my grade
Of incline is closer to forty-five degrees
Than ninety), with my blaring headphones safely snug
Against my grateful ears (they’re being damaged, but
They don’t object); Beethoven is shouting—pounding
His silver hammer like a Nietzschean against
The anvil of Platonic Beauty, so that sparks
May fly—into my willing mind, or soul, or brain,
Or what-have-you. It’s a symphony—the sixth,
To which I’m partial. (Debussy once asked why this
One in particular is so beloved by all;
His answer....had something to do with the idea
That man and nature are divided by a gulf
Unbridgeable, and that the wonder which man feels
For something so mysterious and charming is
Communicated in this symphony. I think
That this is sheer bullshit. “Mystery”? And “gulfs”?
And metaphysical “wonder”? No! Philosophy
Has no place in the Kingdom of the Musical;
It is a trespasser—and it had best beware
Lest it be instantly revealed as a fraud,
A charlatan, a loathsome brute, when placed beside
The comely maiden, the Cinderella that is music.)
My mood is not....the other one, the offspring of
The Marche Funèbre; it is the radiant sister of
The cisalpine sunrise, or of Venice at dusk.
This solitude is far from loneliness; I crave
It, more than poets crave love—than Byron craved freedom.
To sit here on this rug—this drab and threadbare rug—
With music in my mind and freedom in my thoughts,
Is something more than paradise. —“Paradise”?
I pity those poor souls in Paradise, if it
Be not a room, a rug, a bed, a pen, and music!
***
Liebesbotschaft
Some people need some things that I don’t need.
Some people need to feel loved by all,
By everyone. They need the world to scream
Their names when they walk by and scramble so
To touch their hands. Others there are who need
To travel the continents, to migrate like
The albatross a thousand miles each year
Toward some receding point on the horizon.
Some people need to be immortal—to live
Far in the future, not the present;—still others
Are tormented with lust for perfect knowledge.
These people, all of them, are Fausts, Faust-clones,
Unhappy as the universe expanding
Into nothingness—as nothing as
The abstract needs these tortured people have.
But I, my love, I do not need such things.
They’re nothing to me. For all I need, my love,
—And all I need—is in my arms right now.
And all I need is this soft shoulder, this
Soft cheek, these soft breaths exhaled with mine.
There’s nothing else. So I will stay here forever,
Not thinking of those people who need things
That I don’t need, since all I need is you.
***
Confession
The Nazi within me wants to rid the world of vice,
which he defines as “everything different from me.”
Specifically, bureaucracy has got to go, and people
who follow rules. Authority is always wrong.
The Nazi within me hates power and those who have it;
he thinks politicians should be lined up against a grey
wall and shot. (He is perfectly happy to do the shooting,
provided he is in the right mood.) The Nazi within me
hates people who are unkind, and he will strangle
anyone who is rude to that nice old Russian lady in
the bookstore. Tobacco and pharmaceutical executives,
and most people in show-business, are to be sent to
Sudan to wait hand and foot on the natives; and
everyone in the Pentagon has been assigned to Cambodia
to clear the mine fields. (This decision cannot be
appealed.) The Nazi within me judges everyone, he is the
final arbiter of everyone’s fate and takes great joy in
meting out punishment. For the crime of smugness you are
sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in Somalia; for the crime
of honking your car horn when it does no good you are
sentenced to one year in the room where they test car alarms.
The Nazi within me hates falsity of any sort but insists that
when he passes people in the street they quickly step out
of his way and give a respectful nod, while wishing they
could be as good-looking and godlike as he is. As for
those who do not wish this: Siberia is their new home.
***
shaggy sheep clouds skating down Bald Mountain
while a thousand white eyes look down
unblinkingly,
in wonder unblinking,
the rabbit-fur of Earth’s innards sleek and grey
and impatient beneath the unmoving night.
hot atmospheric felt caressing
kinetically frozen stone (white heat) eons-old
and doomed trees gasping.
raucous neon saffron-gash boiling,
liquid petrifaction (Earth’s candle, volcanic wick) oozing
up from under into
down feather-pillows of smoke
sweeping the complacent forests,
bleeding scattered life.
***
The midnight-aura
In the liquid sugar of this fantasia
I sing my dripping heart into the air
onto the frost-paned crystal that hovers and kisses me
its crisp threads weaving slowly web-like around me
round my molten-glass breath warm-blown
through chandeliers of lavender whispers
whispered
like a melting icicle
into the silent shivers of me
whence I sing
with the heart of Chopin beating in my outstretched
hand
hotly
***
Eternity
In the village hut,
Below the scalding metal roof
Below the crushing Laotian sun,
In the dark,
A blood-drained woman lies, leather-skinned,
Legs spread apart,
Dying, shrieking soundlessly, frozen
To her stillborn son in her arms.
But the waning day has no remorse,
And the coming night is empty
And not soothing,
And nothing—nothing changes.
On the fresh-tarred street,
Sprawled in the gutter beside the curb
With frozen mud in his hair,
Fingers rigid,
Lies a starved, bloodless man, homeless
Formerly,
Now nothing but something unpleasant
Which must be taken care of.
But the waning day has no remorse,
And the coming night is empty
And not soothing,
And nothing—nothing changes.
In the Adriatic,
Rusting, rotting like the hull
Of a submerged titanic ship,
In the dark,
A ruined palace of a city sleeps,
Unconscious
Of the irony, its famed canals
And piazzas home to memoryless creatures.
But the waning day has no remorse,
And the coming night is empty
And not soothing,
And nothing—nothing changes.
***
processions of stains of tortures of Jews
marching single-file the rank and file
of bitterest hate human-stained
human-fabricated hate
past the wide judgment-eye
glaring all the time
and all the while
hideous
death-throes
throw
death to
history
and all kindness
maimed mutilated
marching armies across
envy-sown battlefields
soaked with bloodlusting sadism
ripping apart Innocence’s corpse
as Love’s wide judgment-eye looks on and cries
***
The Prophet
I opened my ears and heard the past
sobbing
and the people in the past
sobbing
and I closed my eyes and saw the future
screaming
and the people in the future
screaming
and the bloody bodies slickly dying in heaps
and the suffocating
and the sobbing
***
The cry of impotence
If a tenth of the time I spend thinking of death
I spent thinking of life, I would be full of life.
If I thought to myself how little eternity means
and believed it,
I could live eternity every moment.
And I wouldn’t have to write like a wailing infant,
nor pretend to be weak because weakness was fun.
This damn sickness of having to need “perfection”
or prettiness because nothing matters
and everything changes
and everything dies
would no longer infect me
and I could live like someone in 18th-century Vienna
when the most unpleasant thing was horseshit on the street.
Just to not wonder why I so long for eternity and fullness
and have been birthmarked with this senseless yearning
for something outside the bounds of sense.
***
Went to a party, didn’t get drunk and didn’t have fun. Feel a peculiar anger against the world.—
The candle is flickering because it’s getting dark, and people are flickering with it, away into the rabid black night, swallowed and hopefully digested; rage drips from my skin and I try to stomp it out but can’t, it’s there in the sheen on the black tar and trails me home, a stench of burning flesh hovering over it; the calluses on my eyes have blinded me so I rely on instinct to find my way back, but everywhere I turn I slip on puddles of rage; meanwhile I think of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Hart Crane and Kurt Cobain and suddenly my fist clenches with fingernails digging in, and I raise the gun and blow my brains out.
***
Trapped behind bars
At times when the light is on in my bedroom
and the night outside is blue and I look
through my barred window at the blue night,
I see strips of infinity across the sky.
And between them I can see my cloudy profile
repeated and distorted again and again
from the horizon to the apex,
like in the distorting mirrors at amusement parks.
It’s almost unrecognizable, but because I want
to see it I see it.
It’s there, stamped into the blue clouds in front of the moon.
(I want to blot out the moon, that serene patch!)
And I try to engrave that distant image of myself
into my mind, before I go to sleep every night,
but I never can.
And I realize how frightening it is to be alone.
***
A Bukowskian non-poem
In six hours I’ll be having
dinner
with the Asian chick,
charming
her pants off,
speaking my filtered
cock
between mouthfuls of fish.
Her smile
will be as unwavering as
my desire, which will be
as unwavering
as my erection.
Maybe I’ll
mention
my adventure with
malaria in Sapa,
a stupid
overreactive
episode
which will not fail to garner
applause.
(Every time a female laughs
is
another notch in your belt.)
Or maybe I’ll talk
about
how much rice I had to eat
in Korea,
rice twice, thrice,
a day,
for a year,
and she’ll laugh laugh ha ha.
Meanwhile I’ll eat my
fish.
I wonder
what Vietnamese pussy tastes
like.
***
love-
less I
lack a life
outside the knife-
sharp stabs;—picking scabs
off crust-dry bloodless wounds
to watch them bleed self-pity,
self-pity dammed back long eons
before this agonizing moment
let flow the flood of bloody self-pity;
and yet the agony is life’s blood,
my life-blood, without which I’d curl
up, shrivel and char to coal-
black insipid “real life”
of talking, smiling,
laughing without
knowing why....
—O, to
love!
***
you
I love
sun-harnessed
power of life
glowing tides of tears
moon-begotten through you
star-yearning astronomer
drifting buoyant through galaxies
distant star-beaded light necklaces
enwreathing invisibly your white neck
radiating sun-kisses through space
reaching from your unbounded eyes
outside temporal vacuums
inside concrete worlds
where bland life happens
which I reject
just because
I love
you
***
After the accident
I see her without closing my eyes,
she sits right there in front of me,
her eyes reaching for my fingertips,
her tiny smile hugging me.
Neither of us talks, though we want to:
words would be dangerous.
I cannot bring myself to smile,
though hers is unwavering
and tries to reassure me.
She is barefoot, as so often;
her unbroken skin is barely pale.
The tear in the knee of her jeans
makes me think of wet grass
and the day I met her there
a long time ago.
Her eyes drop, the smile fades;
she leaves me.
***
Regrets
I feel as though I gave too little
and kept too much;
and so too much was lost
and little will last.
***
Midnight pining.— The moments when you feel the pressure of lusty tenderness but you aren’t in the mood to jerk off and yet you keep thinking of the girl whose image chokes your heart like a wrung sponge and you have to wriggle from its grip or claw out from beneath this damned anvil crushing you but you can’t because the sexual release of whipping your cock to congestion has no relation to the required release of constipated tenderness, tenderness—tenderness.
***
What are your thoughts?
What do you think of this?
A world in which people are dogs and dogs are people,
And the dog-days linger like dying.
A world in which the nights, the lone nights, are slept through
Alonely in beds for two (bookend beds) while censored dreams come through.
A world in which all wishes are for an immortality which no one wants,
And people know one thing only, and that is futility.
A world in which sleep is not rest and people are not genuine.
What do you think of this?
***
Bareness
Looking at the snow, I know that I should go.
The moon is hidden by orange street-light, but I should go.
I am finished; my work is done, and things are dull.
Dusty books, dusty desks, dry reading
From dying books two years old, or dead-born.
I’m tired of things, and things are tiring too.
Outside the world, nature, nature is ever young,
Ever young-returning, turning old men into young.
There is a spot somewhere, snowy or summery, where
It is bare, life is spare, one can sit and be aware. And there
Is only silence or wind, no cares, trees standing quietly,
Things barely moving in the wind except for grass or falling snow.
—No, summer is where to be. Under the sun is where to be
When one no longer feels young, when feelings are done.
Warmth on the face upturned, eyes closed, all feelings
Focused in the skin, memories forgotten. Books
And desks and metal things and former hopes forgotten.
Only immediate sensations and enormous space.