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Category: Poems

  • Attempting an Explication of the Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

    Are full of passionate intensity.



    Surely some revelation is at hand;

    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

    Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

    The darkness drops again; but now I know   

    That twenty centuries of stony sleep

    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

    Update: April 1, 2021: On the whole this poem is metaphorically about what happens to a civilization and the psychology of the individuals within it, when the underpinning rug of it’s spiritual belief system is ripped out from under it, when there is no fundamental myth supporting it. The “cradle” of the soul is rocked. The mythologies of the past aren’t speaking to us anymore because everyone knows they aren’t literally true, and this creates a chasm in the psyche which gives birth to a monster. And we are that monster with our blank and pitiless gazes because this earthquake in the soul turns us metaphorically into “the hollow men, the stuffed men, headpiece filled with straw.”

    Update: 8/15/20: I still feel as vexed by this poem as the rough beast feels vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. Which leads me to the main point of this update: Who’s rocking cradle had the power to wake up twenty centuries of stony sleep? Was this Jesus in the manger?

    Some rough beast, a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Maybe the biggest question of this poem is why is the thing slouching? It’s a huge monster with a lion body. We think of lion bodies as being fierce, muscular, solar king-like, even devine in their beautiful symmetry (“What immortal hand or eye/ dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”) not slouchy! Lions are proud. People who slouch are ashamed and or dejected with being. For someone about to become Jesus 2.0, the next savior of the world, he’s not too excited about taking the job, that’s for sure!

    And why go back to the original place? London, Paris, or New York would seem a more appropriate place for a new savior of this day and age to be born. With going back to the Levant, I sense its a metaphor that the ideals of the pagan West, namely that of the ideal of the individual, which is what the sense of the Grail romances, the pagan myths and fairy-tales, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment are all about, have now been thoroughly overthrown, for the ideals of the Levant which are that of the group. If you’ve ever experienced a mob mentality break out, you definitely have seen gazes that are blank, pitiless, and soulless. That’s the equivalent of falling to all three temptations of the Buddha (Lust, Fear, Social Duty) in one fell swoop.

    But why use “the Sun” as a simile? That definitely catches your attention. The sun is usually a metaphor and simile used for bright and hopeful sentiments. But not if your walking across the desert, right? Also, if you think of the sun only in its scientific definition, if you leave out the romance, mythological dimension of life, and only understand it as a function of physics, groveling as it were before shear fact, then the sun is indeed dead, a ruthless fireball fusing hydrogen into helium, that cares not a wit about life.

    Some part of us knows something is wrong, but….

    We are vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.

    Say what? Here’s my shot: A “rocking” cradle suggests instability, an unknowingness in an instinctual way, of whose side the MOTHER is on. Is she Athena or Circe? Does she want to kill us or for us to be the savior of the universe? Or in a way, as only Greek Mythology can intimate, be both? Or in another sense, the ground of our own being, of life’s being. Is it an inherently good thing, evil thing, or indifferent? I.e. “Something that should not have been,” as Schopenhauer suggests. Is nature, this thing that our consciousness rests on, inherently nasty, disgusting, and evil? If one has that sense, you will certainly be vexed to nightmare all the way back to birth.

    This is when it gets exciting, the adventure. Because this is the entire sense of the burning point what is uniquely you that wants, that must be expressed, that has never been expressed before. Becoming imminent, and yet in a gesture to the East, most likely spontaneously, as the eminence of transcendence, completely without ego.

  • The Secret Voice

    The screen is up and
    Borough Boy is
    being euthanized
    exactly as I write this
    5:18pm on Labor Day, 6:18 where
    it's happening in Saratoga, New York.
    The last race of the last day
    of the iconic meet.
    No one knows
    what is and what
    is not.
    History is still
    and could break both ways
    in superposition.
    People don't know if they
    are themselves or someone else.
    They believe its up to the mystery
    of another forgotten consciousness
    who has control for some unknown reason
    because its unfathomable that
    someone else exists.
  • Changing My Mind About Publishing in Today’s Media Landscape

    I pulled into Kroger’s tonight, and what I felt was a good poetic line seemed to flash into me —like so many do that don’t necessarily have a direct meaning consciously, but feel like they came from another place and I am just the receiver and feel like they are pointing towards something that is deep and true.

    Normally I’d put the line in Notes like I’ve done hundreds if not thousands of times before and that’d be the last I’d see of it. Today I said, “Screw it, let’s post it.” And there from my car, from my Chrome browser on my iPhone 7+ I opened up my WordPress, created a new post and typed in the line. After I hit save, another line came to me that I added, and while I was in the store a third.

    We’ll see how this experiment goes, but my point is, something keeps calling me toward this way of doing things in “real time” as the phrase goes.

    Here’s another example with music. A few months ago, I had a somber tune (sweet sad) come to my head on a Saturday night about like this one, and right here in front of this iMac I propped my iPhone, opened up Garageband and recorded it, knowing it would be my next single.

    But then a case of the “perfections” came in, and I still haven’t published it. I feel now like I should have gotten it out there, if not that night, for sure within the next week, even if it had a bracket of (Demo) beside it on Spotify. Now so many months later, the tune has sort of lost its “spark” inside of me, and even if I could lay down a technically better performance from taking my time, it would have lost its emotional spark that getting it at the moment or close to the moment would give.

    Of course ten years ago, much less twenty or thirty, this would have been a ludicrous approach, but as an example, I was just listening to Rick Beato talking about the B-Side Police single “Murder by Numbers” and as much as I love Synchronicity. I would just absolutely love as much a sort of “B-Side” album of the band recording the whole album live in the same mode of “Murder by Numbers” — mistakes and all.

    The great Carver Mead said “Listen to the Technology.” My gut is telling me that the technology, offering itself like this with its focus on immediacy, is telling us to publish, even in the formal arts of poetry and music, with the same immediacy that social media does.

  • Two New Iambic Dimeter Poems

    The neurons fire
    In love tonight
    The singing choir
    relieves my fright
    sleep with the Rose
    submerge the sea
    The bower knows
    what’s inside me
    She’ll come again
    another door
    her song the wind
    ears to the floor.
    Don’t say a word.
    Love’s almost born.

    —————————-

    Let conscious breathe
    you won’t I know
    but can’t we dream
    away we go?
    September morn
    blues Christ can play
    The bells adorn
    The nightly day
    The purring moon
    she finds her tide
    we’re in a swoon
    away we ride.
    Her romance seeds
    The worlds best deeds.

     

  • A New Poem in Iambic Trimeter: Visiting Isis’ Sister

    I know it wasn’t fair
    to those who dance below:
    Between our creaky stair
    Descends our nightly ghost.
    I’ve come to see my girl
    Her sister plays alone.
    Here in her deathly world
    Her grievance sings her song.
    What does she want from me?
    A willingness to die?
    Like Jesus on the tree,
    A needle through the eye?
    I sacrifice my bliss
    For you my little sis.

  • Hafiz Poems

    In A Tree House

    Light
    Will someday split you open
    Even if your life is now a cage,

    For a divine seed, the crown of destiny,
    Is hidden and sown on an ancient fertile plain
    You hold the title to.

    Love will surely bust you wide open
    Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy

    Even if your mind is now
    A spoiled mule.

    A life giving radiance will come,
    The Friend’s gratuity will come –

    O look again within yourself,
    For I know you were once the elegant host
    To all the marvels in creation.

    From a sacred crevice in your body
    A bow rises each night
    And shoots your soul into God.

    Behold the Beautiful Drunk Singing One
    From the lunar vantage point of love.

    He is conducting the affairs
    Of the whole universe

    While throwing wild parties
    In a tree house – on a limb
    In your heart.

    —————