don't tell me what the poets are doing

[dianna]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0DEvFKfaXk

[dianna]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnjJvzprjN0

[dianna]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjzrogZa9tg

[kenaz]

dianna...
If I could, ya know, thank you like a thousands times for the video, I just might?

[dianna]

Judge for yourself your vinyard's heady wine"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvElsg6wL-8

[transiten]

Great vids!

Let your Words and Nep-tunes out, they will create a ripple in the Source Field whether anyone is listening or not...

[dianna]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orar-V3y5Sk&feature=share&list=PL74A241945CEE7B62

[dianna]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqyr25Wr1Kc


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DJ42PXbxv4


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rUFcrP99rU

[skippy]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOXh_It065E

[dianna]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnOrrknTxbI

[transiten]

Could anyone elaborate on the saying "don't tell me what the poets are doing"..I understand it as an irony right? But don't get how :confused:

[dianna]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_RSJ6xuHbE


Spring starts when a heartbeat's poundin'
When the birds can be heard above the reckonin' carts doing some final accounting
Lava flowin' in Super Farmer's direction
He's been gettin' reprieve from the heat in the frozen-food section

Don't tell me what the poets are doing
Don't tell me that they're talkin' tough
Don't tell me that they're anti-social
Somehow not anti-social enough, all right

And porn speaks to it's splintered legions
To the pink amid the withered corn stalks in them winter regions
While aiming at the archetypal father
He said with such broad and tentative swipes why do you even bother

Don't tell me what the poets are doing
Those Himalayas of the mind
Don't tell me what the poets been doing
In the long grasses over time


Don't tell me what the poets are doing
On the street and the epitome of vague
Don't tell me how the universe is altered
When you find out how he gets paid, all right
If there's nothing more that you need now
Lawn cut by bare-breasted women
Beach bleached towels within reach for the women gotta make it that'll make it by swimmin'


Some general commentary on the song here
http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/65749/

[Carmody]

Could anyone elaborate on the saying "don't tell me what the poets are doing"..I understand it as an irony right? But don't get how :confused:

edited, done already ^^

[dianna]

seriously, forget Leonard Nimoy, skip to the rant about Amber Tamblyn @ 1:43 LOL LOL


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_hbStQV8KE

[dianna]

LOL, I spent many hours creating on my fridge --- this video is charming, but probably should be posted in one of the gender wars threads going on right now ...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZChIVEr0E4

[Antagenet]

Great To Be A Poet

oh the greatness of it is balanced
by the cost, the cost is so beyond
we don't even admit it fully

to the self, who managed to slip through birth
intact, all the way from heaven
the longest journey of disappointment

to a world of separate grabbing
extraction of payments, all the joy of uniting
overlooked, but when your heart remembers heaven

it never closes. this is the poets curse. every slight
pierces to the bone, every sad glance from anyone at all
every lost chance at a gentle life, stings

each nerve of longing tolls like a bell only you can hear
like the invisible breeze, your heaven becomes daily more distant
so distant you cry a mountain of tears just to forget

but never can. Great are the nerves propelled so much by love
your harpstrings that intonate always a better way, the utopia
so clear, so invisible, so real, so necessary, so impossible

there is no peace ever, only very brief love affairs
that send you back home, and the climax of understanding
between true friends in moments of knowing

15 years, poets die 15 years younger than the norm
but they live at least 400 years, sometimes a thousand
each possibility stretches into the slow motion hell of what could be

what are the poets doing? they do their time here, hoping for momentary
reprieves, they let their heart, in the end, reach into every distant pore
to make fireworks of peace, the screaming joy of silence

the care the care the care the never having given up, the last breath
of a marathon that never ended. not ever not even when they meet
eternity. they will be the ones in intensive care on the other side

who have to cry out all the pain they saw, all of everyone they met
all of the chemtrailed leaves, the molten desires that died on earth
the famished, the utter sadness, the very reaching of nirvana

[dianna]

Russell Brand Does Jazz Poetry




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8WOb-K5FSI

[dianna]

I Feel Like Saying A Beatnik Poem 1950's B Movie Style


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOXxDV5BdI

[Carmody]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_RSJ6xuHbE


Spring starts when a heartbeat's poundin'
When the birds can be heard above the reckonin' carts doing some final accounting
Lava flowin' in Super Farmer's direction
He's been gettin' reprieve from the heat in the frozen-food section

Don't tell me what the poets are doing
Don't tell me that they're talkin' tough
Don't tell me that they're anti-social
Somehow not anti-social enough, all right

And porn speaks to it's splintered legions
To the pink amid the withered corn stalks in them winter regions
While aiming at the archetypal father
He said with such broad and tentative swipes why do you even bother

Don't tell me what the poets are doing
Those Himalayas of the mind
Don't tell me what the poets been doing
In the long grasses over time


Don't tell me what the poets are doing
On the street and the epitome of vague
Don't tell me how the universe is altered
When you find out how he gets paid, all right
If there's nothing more that you need now
Lawn cut by bare-breasted women
Beach bleached towels within reach for the women gotta make it that'll make it by swimmin'


Some general commentary on the song here
http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/65749/

Hello cat fans. It is possible, you know, to have too many cats.

The cat house in the video is...real. Nothing faked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRQgbsDjFmw

[dianna]

Entering the Mythic Journey and Making Your Soul

Carolyn Elliott

http://www.realitysandwich.com/sites/realitysandwich.civicactions.net/files/imagecache/large/candle_0.jpg


...Real poetry is the side effect of poïesis. In ancient Greek, poïesis meant “making.” What is made in poïesis? The soul. What is the process of poïesis? It has various names, but in the Western tradition it’s been widely known as alchemy. This alchemy is a deep work of collective and personal transformation and evolution. It is the mysterious union of the conscious with the unconscious, of the pure witnessing faculty of the mind (Shiva) with the electric energy of the subtle body and heart (Shakti). It’s the way that genius stops being a source of suffering and becomes a source of joy.

...Any painting or piece of writing or house or garment or nation that was made by a person or group of people who used the occasion of making it as a chance to imaginatively work out evolution, collective or personal, is poetry. It is alive; it has a restless, provoking energy, a soul of its own. Looking on it, enjoying it, teaching it, reading it, hearing it, living in it can stimulate our own souls and launch us further on our own alchemical trip. The result of successful alchemy in any human life is abiding, grounded, ecstatic bliss; creative potency; and joy.

That which creates is that which is created. Should this surprise us?


1. The only reason to read or write poetry at all is to be helped on your own trip toward becoming a poet in this strong sense.

2. A poet is not an insipid person who writes nice verses in the company of polite professors and gets them published to wide-spread approval in pretentious magazines.

3. A poet is a soulmaker. She’s a dynamic force that radically changes the movement of thought and imagination within her generation. A real poet is a shaman and a healer, a warrior and a scientist, a philosopher and a living dream. She might write some verses or she might not. The verses might be published or they might not. This has exactly no consequence or bearing for the poet’s actual purpose and mission, which is to bring soul into the world, by whatever means available and necessary.

...Becoming a true poet, a lucid dreamer in this life—that is not easy, and that is not safe at all. ... It’s vital, intimate, demanding, and thrilling work. It’s an adventure into the depths of the unconscious, into the life force of the body. It’s a descent into the underworld whose outcome is uncertain.


... Recognize that there’s no use in anyone reading the written stuff called poetry or attempting to write it unless that someone is herself on a journey of poetic evolution, a journey to become a soulmaker and to stop suffering.

... Participate in a course of adventure ... the one that the famous mythographer Joseph Campbell observed as the underlying movement in all myth and folktale. This adventure is widely known as “the hero’s journey,” but ... I prefer to call it “the mythic journey,” ...

When we consciously, deliberately enter the mythic journey, we begin the work of joining our conscious with our unconscious, and so we become much more alive to symbol and metaphor, allusion and story, character and drama—all this stuff is the stuff of dreams, and it is also the stuff of poetry and myth.

The mythic journey is a labor of answering our heart’s call to evolve by deliberately engaging with and taking on the challenges offered by our own unconscious.

It stirs up stunning synchronicities, omens, and mysterious forces in our lives. It is a symbolic and imaginative process but not “merely” so—because as we do it, we find the symbols and the imaginations we meet in our fantasies and dreams becoming living realities out- side of us.

What Happens Once You Start This Journey

When we dreamers start to adventure into unknown and magical territory, we become hungry for the poetry of others, wanting guidance and confirmation that the path we’re walking can be navigated. We also become eager to create poetry—in verse or in action. If we’re not actively traveling this path, the poetry of others and the poetry that we ourselves generate is dull and irrelevant. Furthermore, we suffer.

... [It is a] process of becoming a soulmaker. Soulmaking, as John Keats noted, is the work of creating our unique bliss. In this process, we liberate our creativity and our joy, our power and our purpose. We become imaginatively rich and spiritually vibrant.

The interesting thing about soulmaking is that everyone craves it—an enlarged imaginative perception of themselves and the world, a deeper emotional connection to their own hearts and to the hearts of others, a wilder capacity for joy—and yet we have almost no societally sanctioned space for this endeavor.

Soulmaking is the rightful province of humanities education, as the depth psychologist James Hillman pointed out—yet in the present-day scrupulously secular academy, the word “soul” creates a scandal. Depth psychology itself makes room for it—but how many people have access to their very own archetypal analyst? In my work as a teacher, I brought soulmaking back to the secular humanities classroom—and in the present work, I offer soulmaking to the world at large.

No matter who you are or what you do, if you’re drawn to the dreamy side of life and you long to create a better world, you have genius within you that demands to be brought forth. It is not too weird, too useless, or too fluffy to go about the labor of transmuting your suffering to ecstasy.

...The soul will have its way with us, whether we will it or not. Our resistances to the process of undergoing deep adventure are just our fear and clinging to the surface stabilities of life.

If you’re clinging to the surface, if you’re afraid and tired and empty and see no lightning bolts of passion in your life, it is possible that you can liberate yourself and those around you by taking up the tools and processes this book offers.

This world, as the poet John Keats told us, is not a vale of tears. It’s a vale of soulmaking: a place to flame the little sparks of divinity that we are into roaring fires capable of our own unique bliss. Keats suggested that we make our souls by learning to read the terrors of the world through the expansive wisdom of our hearts. This process is an inevitable one—it can happen very slowly, over a mil- lion lifetimes, or it can happen right now, in this one, if the work is undertaken.

The Gift World as the Point of Creativity



What is the gift world? It’s a subjective experience of life in which your genius is fully supported and welcomed in its expression, and in which your needs and authentic preferences are joyously met by a provident universe.

Interestingly, the subjective experience of the gift world is brought about when you put your creative power to work in the project of fully supporting the genius of yourself and others through undertak- ing the mythic journey, and when you seek to joyously fulfill the preferences of others in a manner that delights you.

So the gift world is a bit of a paradox. It’s a subjective experience of life that comes about in part through your making it objectively real for others via your offering of your gifts. No one can be forced to enter the experience of the gift world, since participation in it requires deliberate action, but everyone can be invited to it via generosity, kindness, and the sense of sublime wonder (i.e., awesomeness) that our genius manifests through her work. Another way of thinking about the gift world is that it’s a world that is completely ensouled, a world where connection, love, warmth, and joy are everyone’s dominant experiences.

This idea that the gift world is the real point of all creative work gelled for me when I read on the American Visionary Art Museum’s website that the most common theme of visionary art (i.e., cool stuff produced not by trained artists but by people with a driving need to communicate something from within) is the “backyard recreation of the Garden of Eden and other utopian visions—quite literally building heaven on earth.”

...

I realized I’d been playing small—and yes, by playing small I mean aiming to get on the best-seller list or win a Pulitzer. Such goals are dry and dull, because they’re structurally part of the rather lame universe we habitually participate in—the one where struggle and competition are normal, where some folks win big while others lose, where some get to be glamorous artists and authors and others are confined to drudgery.

Why I'm Not Really into "Art"

I realized that the reason I’m completely uninterested in most work produced self-consciously as “art” is that such work tends to con- figure itself in a manner that aims to be legible within the present system—the mad world. As such, even if it offers to communicate high ideals, it leaves me rather cold, because such ideals are betrayed by the very fact that the work presents itself as a cultural commodity rather than a pure gift.

Too often, this kind of work lacks an essential generosity—it offers itself for the sake of being seen and admired rather than for the sake of giving forth love and power to its receiver.

I reflect, for example, that one of my most favorite poets, Rumi, gave his poems out wildly and freely.

Creative work is most inspiring and most exciting when it offers to freely lead us toward the realization of our best possibilities. I suggest that if you’ve ever felt in any way creatively underrealized or blocked, perhaps the source of your discomfort is that you’ve sought to make something that we will recognize as valuable “art” within our present condition rather than seeking to make or do things that call both you and us to our gift nature, our genius—a state where we are empowered, expanding, free, realized.



The following is excerpted from Awaken Your Genius: A Seven-Step Path to Freeing Your Creativity and Manifesting Your Dreams available from North Atlantic Books

http://www.realitysandwich.com/entering_mythic_journey_making_soul

[dianna]

My consort and I took a walk on this beautiful autumn day, and he announced to me a dream, a moment of clarity concerning death ... it was an awesome conversation and it reminded me of one of my favourite poets ..


John Donne

Death Be Not Proud

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-35lkG8BPvhA/Tk1pD770cwI/AAAAAAAAAoc/5dJA_oqAejc/s1600/donne.jpg


Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

[dianna]

Simply charming ...

Hieu Nguyen - "Buffet Etiquette"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJnbkS9CyhM

[Crystine]

He is an awesome young person.

[dianna]

“Everyday Deception” art from HeadSpace

http://nothingmentionednothinggained.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/everyday-deception.jpg

Art of Deception

yobarney (2009)
http://www.everypoet.net/poetry/blogs/yobarney/the_art_of_deception



The art of deception
Is a magician's illusion
To make one’s perception
Become their conclusion

But once you arrive at
The Big Top Show
You’re loved and adored
For the truth they don’t know

The fear that you feel
That you’ll be exposed
Makes your heart beat faster
Enough to explode

The lie that you live
Underneath your mask
Is an unwanted chore
A laboring task

It gets hot in the mask
And under your skin
The only way to vent
Is to reveal your sin

So I stand here naked
Please come to my reception
Immediately following
My “Art of Deception”

Hors d’oeuvres will be served




“And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.”

― William Shakespeare, Richard III

[dianna]

Charles Bukowski

Alone With Everybody


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSS73a7ZdGY


Alone With Everybody
the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.



The Genius of the Crowd


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cLmmmb3Op0


The Genius Of The Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

[dianna]

Jesus Jerky on a Gone Dead American Train


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mKWYqzEwoM

[dianna]

The laughing heart (Tom Waits reads a Charles Bukowski poem)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHOHi5ueo0A

The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Charles Bukowski

[william r sanford72]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti..from the book..A Coney Island of the mind.

truth is not the secret of a few
yet
you would maybe think so
the way some
librarians
and cultural ambassadors
especially museum directors
act
you'd think they had a corner
on it
the way they
walk around shaking
their high heads and
looking as if they never
went to the bath
room or anything
But i wouldnt blame them
if i were you
they say the Spiritual is best conceived
in abstract terms
and then too
walking around in museums always makes me
want to
'sit down'
I always feel so
constipated
in those
high altitudes.

Truth Alaways.
William.

[dianna]

To A Stranger
by Walt Whitman


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOuSASiEzSE


Passing stranger! you do not know
How longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
Or she I was seeking
(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely
Lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other,
Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,
Were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become
not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,
face, flesh as we pass,
You take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night, alone
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

[dianna]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti..from the book..A Coney Island of the mind.

truth is not the secret of a few
yet
you would maybe think so
the way some
librarians
and cultural ambassadors
especially museum directors
act
you'd think they had a corner
on it
the way they
walk around shaking
their high heads and
looking as if they never
went to the bath
room or anything
But i wouldnt blame them
if i were you
they say the Spiritual is best conceived
in abstract terms
and then too
walking around in museums always makes me
want to
'sit down'
I always feel so
constipated
in those
high altitudes.

Truth Alaways.
William.

Hi William, have been reading Ferlinghetti because of this post (was not familiar with him before) --- here is so far one of my favourites ...


I Am Waiting

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting
for someone to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep through the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped’ onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to ‘be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty’s clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am waiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

[william r sanford72]

thanks for the poem.its also one of the reasons i fell in love with his work.i was 15 when i found coney island of the mind...in an old paper back book store...sure miss that store..and the way it smelled.thank you dianna.
truth always.
william

[dianna]

Edward Gorey

A personal favourite ...

Gashlycrumb Tinies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKzpUYFyePs


A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.
B is for Basil assaulted by bears.
C is for Clair who wasted away.
D is for Desmond thrown out of the sleigh.
E is for Ernest who choked on a peach.
F is for Fanny, sucked dry by a leech.
G is for George, smothered under a rug.
H is for Hector, done in by a thug.
I is for Ida who drowned in the lake.
J is for James who took lye, by mistake.
K is for Kate who was struck with an axe.
L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks.
M is for Maud who was swept out to sea.
N is for Nevil who died of ennui.
O is for Olive, run through with an awl.
P is for Prue, trampled flat in a brawl.
Q is for Quinton who sank in a mire.
R is for Rhoda, consumed by a fire.
S is for Susan who perished of fits.
T is for Titas who blew into bits.
U is for Una who slipped down a drain.
V is for Victor, squashed under a train.
W is for Winie, embedded in ice.
X is for Xerxes, devoured by mice.
Y is for Yoric whose head was bashed in.
Z is for Zilla who drank too much gin.

[william r sanford72]

Robert Frost..from the book.In The Clearing.

A conceptSelf/Conceived

The latest creed that has to be believed
And entered in our childish catechism
Is that the All's a concept self concieved,
Which is no more than good old Pantheism.

Great is the reassurance of recall.
Why go on further with confusing voice
To say God's either All or over all?
The Rule is, never give a child a choice.

[dianna]

LOL, not sure what this bubblehead is actually talking about, but she is awfully cute, and I think she is making a good point … (although Im not sure I agree with it) she just made me laugh so I thought I would post it (if anyone can transcribe this I would be grateful…)


Jargon is the Death of Culture


by NickMeador on February 4, 2014 in News
On the Maraya Karena Show, the eponymous host speaks about the under-acknowledged connection between language and reality, and what happens when meaning slips from our patterns of expression:

What will murder all our movements?
JARGON!!!
In this syntactical reality our greatest obstacle to heaven on earth is mindless repetition of stale language.

Video is titled "Death of the New Age" ????

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaYYZOU2nbs

[dianna]

Henry N. Beard, Poetry for Cats: The Definitive Anthology of Distinguished Feline Verse

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/718R7QNN4DL._SL500_AA300_.gif

From CATS ARE KIND

"A man said to the universe,
'Sir, I exist!'
'Excellent,' replied the universe,
'I've been looking for someone to take care of my cats.”

[william r sanford72]

...Dante's Inferno,..Canto III...

And lo! towards us coming in a boat
An old man, grizzled with the hair of eld,
Moaning: ¨woe unto you, debased souls!

Hope nevermore to look upon the heavens.
I come to lead you to the other shore;
Into eternal darkness: into fire and frost.

And Thou, that yonder standest, living soul,
Withdraw from these people, who are dead!¨
But he saw that i did not withdraw...


ps.just bumpn a classic.
Truth always.
William.

[dianna]

...Dante's Inferno,..Canto III...

And lo! towards us coming in a boat
An old man, grizzled with the hair of eld,
Moaning: ¨woe unto you, debased souls!

Hope nevermore to look upon the heavens.
I come to lead you to the other shore;
Into eternal darkness: into fire and frost.

And Thou, that yonder standest, living soul,
Withdraw from these people, who are dead!¨
But he saw that i did not withdraw...


ps.just bumpn a classic.
Truth always.
William.

A funny and surprisingly good overview … I especially like at the 6:53 mark when a "welcome to New Jersey" sign is flashed as the narrator talks about the 9th circle, darkest part of hell ...

Dante's Inferno - Oh, Hell!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdmPi7ki2-A

[dianna]

Charles Baudelaire, The Vampire


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b2VsXq2vx0



Thou, sharper than a dagger thrust
Sinking into my plaintive heart,
Thou, frenzied and arrayed in lust,
Strong as a demon host whose art

Possessed my humbled soul at last,
Made it thy bed and thy domain,
Strumpet, to whom I am bound fast
As is the convict to his chain,

The stubborn gambler to his dice,
The rabid drunkard to his bowl,
The carcass to its vermin lice —
O thrice-accursèd be thy soul!

I called on the swift sword to smite
One blow to free my life of this,
I begged perfidious aconite
For succor in my cowardice.

But sword and poison in my need
Heaped scorn upon my craven mood,
Saying: “Unworthy to be freed,
From thine accursed servitude,

O fool, if through our efforts, Fate
Absolved thee from thy sorry plight,
Thy kisses would resuscitate
Thy vampire’s corpse for thy delight.

[skippy]

Le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre.

Paul Valéry

[dianna]

I dream, therefore I exist.
August Strindberg


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/August_Strindberg_100viktigaste.jpg


Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.


…..

Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg (a shipping agent) and Eleonora Ulrika Norling (a serving-maid). In his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, Strindberg describes a childhood affected by "emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism and neglect.". When he was seven, Strindberg moved to Norrtullsgatan on the northern, almost-rural periphery of the city. A year later the family moved near to Sabbatsberg, where they stayed for three years before returning to Norrtullsgatan. He attended a harsh school in Klara for four years, an experience that haunted him in his adult life. He was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year. In the autumn of 1861, he was moved to the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. As a child he had a keen interest in natural science, photography, and religion (following his mother's Pietism). His mother, Strindberg recalled later with bitterness, always resented her son's intelligence. She died when he was thirteen, and although his grief lasted for only three months, in later life he came to feel a sense of loss and longing for an idealised maternal figure. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson.According to his sisters, Strindberg came to regard them as his worst enemies. He passed his graduation exam in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.



…..

Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse.


…..


I am a socialist, a nihilist, a republican, anything that is anti-reactionary!... I want to turn everything upside down to see what lies beneath; I believe we are so webbed, so horribly regimented, that no spring-cleaning is possible, everything must be burned, blown to bits, and then we can start afresh...


…..

Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Maxim Gorky, John Osborne, and Ingmar Bergman are among the many artists who have cited Strindberg as an influence. Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists."




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt3vYWZFxK0


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDB97j8_HSk


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0k8Ey30GLU


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrgXRpX6Bco


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrgXRpX6Bco

[dianna]

In a Dark Time, Theodore Roethke

http://www.rugusavay.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Theodore-Roethke-Quotes-44.jpg

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.


I have been thinking about this poem all day … I would like to be in an Opium Den thinking about it however LOL

A difficult poem, about the world, about the self, about reality -- that you normally don't see. This isn't the AA "moment of clarify" -- rather it's madness pushing the poet into a visionary state ... a state where the universe is more imbued with meaning, more soaked in meaning than in the day-to-day, errand-running reality.

Look at the "clarity" in the first line -- that the speaker's "echo" -- all of our "echoes" in the universe constitute "a lord of nature weeping to a tree." In other words, we've all been sundered ... exiled from the natural world, the world in which we could just take our place in reality ...and all human activity is a weeping, a mourning for this state .... a desire to get back to that origin union with the world.

The final lines get at the so-called mystical state, defined as the union between the Divine and the Human. In this poem, the poet goes through a dark night of the soul, is purged of fear and sorrow and somehow plunged into a world soaked in meaning and "comes out the other side" -- free of fear, free of the human concerns" and -- in that visionary state -- experiences a temporary union with the divine -- "one is One" -- God enters the mind and the mind is God.

It's a trippy poem -- but it's part of a Romantic tradition of visionary quests -- when you risk the fear and pain that comes with plunging yourself into the darkness of self, you can be rewarded by fighting through to a visionary state in which you see a world more radically imbued with cosmic meaning -- and you temporarily achieve union with this mystical truth.

The nature of the mystical experience is that you fall away ... it's always transient, always temporary, and you always feel pain falling back into the dull day-to-day world -- but the poet and the mystic, those heightened states are worth the risk.

[giovonni]

http://blog.libero.it/Blaze/getmedia.php?%26cl%26ogm}KghugJw}e|%60%3B%258%3D35 13%27%3F249i%25%3Aaiedieo%25kphFz%2717%27%3E%05kmc nmgjgx{%27ek%2Fne|ol-%3F^
In a dark time, the eye begins to see


End of The Night


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZZ2yEZEE7Y

[dianna]

E.E. Cummings

http://www.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/eecummings-e1306333030188.jpg


“a total stranger one black day
knocked living the hell out of me-
who found forgiveness hard because
my(as it happened)self he was
-but now that fiend and i are such
immortal friends the other's each ”


― E.E. Cummings



Now remembered largely for his funky punctuation, E. E. Cummings was for decades one of America’s most celebrated, controversial, and popular poets—the dashing, impecunious prince of Greenwich Village. In an adaptation from her new biography of Cummings, Susan Cheever recalls one winter night in 1958 when the Harris Tweed-clad modernist, a longtime friend and mentor to her novelist father, rocked her teenage world.


From Vanity Fair: Full Article Here:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/02/e-e-cummings-susan-cheever-biography

http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/72/ec/45/72ec4526092c0c1b6909a46e6168f922.jpg


During the last years of his life E. E. Cummings made a modest living on the high-school lecture circuit. In the spring of 1958 his schedule took him to read his adventurous poems at the uptight girls’ school in Westchester where I was a miserable 15-year-old sophomore with failing grades.

I vaguely knew that Cummings had been a friend of my father (the novelist John Cheever), who loved to tell stories about Cummings’s gallantry and his ability to live elegantly on almost no money—an ability my father himself struggled to cultivate. When my father was a young writer in New York City, in the golden days before marriage and children pressured him to move to the suburbs, the older Cummings had been his beloved friend and adviser.

http://meetville.com/images/quotes/Quotation-E-E-Cummings-alone-lovers-love-poetry-Meetville-Quotes-214618.jpg

On that cold night in 1958, Cummings was near the end of his celebrated and controversial 40-year career as this country’s first popular modernist poet. Primarily remembered these days for its funky punctuation, his work was in fact a wildly ambitious attempt at creating a new way of seeing the world through language—and this even applied to his signature. The progression from Cummings’s official name (Edward Estlin Cummings) to his signature as a Harvard undergrad (E. Estlin Cummings) to the emblem for which he became famous (e. e. cummings) began with his use of a lowercase i in his poems in the 1920s, though he wouldn’t adopt the style officially until the late 50s.

http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-listen-there-s-a-hell-of-a-good-universe-next-door-let-s-go-e-e-cummings-45317.jpg

Cummings was part of a powerful group of writers and artists, which included James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse—some of whom were his friends—and he strained to reshape the triangle between the reader, the writer, and the subject of the poem, novel, or painting. As early as his 1915 Harvard College graduation speech, Cummings told his audience that “the New Art, maligned though it may be by fakirs and fanatics, will appear in its essential spirit … as a courageous and genuine exploration of untrodden ways.”



http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RhacaaNe5RM/UC6Ay-jElPI/AAAAAAAAACo/Tx04YdXqz1Q/s1600/nobody+but+yourself.jpg

[dianna]

Mad Girl's Love Song, Sylvia Plath

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ub4Y3Tr6Me4/TDnVdt7NjNI/AAAAAAAAAPE/2b85qWz_PMk/s1600/mad+gir's+love+song+copy.jpg


I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

[dianna]

Crucify Your Mind
Sixto Rodriguez (a definite poet)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFlBQqNK_Wo


Was it a huntsman or a player
That made you pay the cost
That now assumes relaxed positions
And prostitutes your loss?

Were you tortured by your own thirst
In those pleasures that you seek
That made you Tom the curious
That makes you James the weak?

And you claim you got something going
Something you call unique
But I've seen your self-pity showing
As the tears rolled down your cheeks

Soon you know I'll leave
And I'll never look behind
'Cos I was born for the purpose
That crucifies your mind

So con, convince your mirror
As you've always done before
Giving substance to shadows
Giving substance ever more

And you assume you got something to offer
Secrets shiny and new
But how much of you is repetition?

[dianna]

The Misunderstood Eccentric Philosopher
http://theeccentricamericanteen.tumblr.com

http://37.media.tumblr.com/05b98118d1aeadbe4fc2621043fab78d/tumblr_mg3bv7NOoe1qlb3jvo1_r1_1280.jpg

http://37.media.tumblr.com/30d299bd1805cada18c9f52b7e9809d7/tumblr_mxeiqdB5p91t47u3no1_500.jpg


“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer



“If there was a God. I would spit in his face for subjecting me to this. If there was a Devil, I would sell my soul to make it end. If there was something Higher that controlled out f***ing fates, I would tell it to take my fate and shove it up its ****ing ass. Shove it hard and far, you motherf***er. Please end. Please end. Please end.”



http://31.media.tumblr.com/826ff47c8b6a7f6113102c6f6f31bcbb/tumblr_mjeqrbwvtA1qfhi0ho1_500.jpg
http://24.media.tumblr.com/cfba3c91f8e19346f1cc241ccbfd1698/tumblr_mhzokzCba11qfhi0ho1_500.jpg


“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

http://31.media.tumblr.com/826ff47c8b6a7f6113102c6f6f31bcbb/tumblr_mjeqrbwvtA1qfhi0ho1_500.jpg




http://24.media.tumblr.com/e1dffd6cf52f2ad86b74633e5f944514/tumblr_mhdjhoWqJf1qfhi0ho1_400.jpg


“If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

http://24.media.tumblr.com/535fd296d7016cfe446d08c21c044fa8/tumblr_mgn56bpKLW1qfhi0ho1_500.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/ba4241b06b8fb23aca1294ba647cc068/tumblr_inline_mgg1ipSRSL1qe901m.gif

[dianna]

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Gl2gly5PE_4/UWDb9IuXl_I/AAAAAAAAEYo/rJ2dlyASG-Y/s1600/Allen-Ginsberg-Quotes-5.jpg

[dianna]

Slam!

http://www.blackyouthproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Slam-gray.jpg


One of the most vital and energetic movements in poetry during the 1990s, slam has revitalized interest in poetry in performance. Poetry began as part of an oral tradition, and movements like the Beats and the poets of Negritude were devoted to the spoken and performed aspects of their poems. This interest was reborn through the rise of poetry slams across America; while many poets in academia found fault with the movement, slam was well received among young poets and poets of diverse backgrounds as a democratizing force. This generation of spoken word poetry is often highly politicized, drawing upon racial, economic, and gender injustices as well as current events for subject manner.

A slam itself is simply a poetry competition in which poets perform original work alone or in teams before an audience, which serves as judge. The work is judged as much on the manner and enthusiasm of its performance as its content or style, and many slam poems are not intended to be read silently from the page. The structure of the traditional slam was started by construction worker and poet Marc Smith in 1986 at a reading series in a Chicago jazz club. The competition quickly spread across the country, finding a notable home in New York City at the Nuyorican Poets Café.




Button Poetry
https://www.youtube.com/user/ButtonPoetry


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnKZ4pdSU-s


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQucWXWXp3k

[dianna]

Where Wild Spirits Make a Home
Patricia Lockwood’s ‘Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals’

Patricia Lockwood’s sexy, surreal and mostly sublime poems seem to have been, as James Joyce said in “Ulysses” about a batch of folk tales, “printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.” They scatter lightning and lawn debris across your psyche.

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/fashion/daily/2014/06/04/04-motherland-fatherland-homelandsexuals.o.jpg/a_3x-vertical.jpg

Rape Joke



The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.

The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”

No offense.

The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.

Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.

The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.

The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.

Not you!

The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.

He wasn’t threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.

The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.

How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.

The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.

The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.

OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.

Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.

The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.

The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s My Century, which he never even tried to read.

It gets funnier.

The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.

The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!

The rape joke is that he was your father’s high-school student—your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.

The rape joke is that he knew you when you were 12 years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.

The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.

The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.

The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.

Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.

You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.

The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.

The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.

It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.

The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.

The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.

The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.

The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.

The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.

The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.

Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.

Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends—haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.

The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.

The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.

The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.

Admit it.

From The NewYork Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/books/patricia-lockwoods-motherland-fatherland-homelandsexuals.html?_r=0


Ms. Lockwood is a young poet, now 32, who was born in a trailer in the Midwest. She never went to college. She’s found an ardent audience on Twitter, where she dispenses mischievous “sexts” as if from an eyedropper.

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/05/29/arts/jpbook/jpbook-master495.jpg

Last year, one of her poems, an extraordinary piece of writing called “Rape Joke,” first printed on the website The Awl, began to be passed around. It quickly became the least insipid thing to ever receive 100,000 likes on Facebook. It’s hardly too late for you to like it, too.

As is true of all Ms. Lockwood’s work, “Rape Joke” is slippery; its mental freight is elusive. It’s a satirical work that nonetheless brings your heart up under your ears. It begins:


The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.
The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

This poem moves onward for five more pages, with nary a misstep. It’s a sustained performance that blends awful utterance (“The rape joke is that you were facedown”) with riddling wit. The author interrogates the limits of language, and walks you quite far out on the plank and intentionally leaves you hovering.

Can you end a poem like this one by summoning up the Beach Boys? This writer can.


The rape joke is that the next day he gave you “Pet Sounds.” No really.
“Pet Sounds.” He said he was sorry and then he gave you “Pet Sounds.”
Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.

“Rape Joke” is the centerpiece of Ms. Lockwood’s second collection of poems, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.” The author’s first collection, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black,” was published in 2012.

The first thing to know about “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals” is that it contains a lot of zoombinating, to borrow Harold Bloom’s favorite term for sex. People get it on; so do animals; so do inanimate objects.

If you can’t find a partner, Elvis said, use a wooden chair. Today the pent-up have streaming pornography, and one of Ms. Lockwood’s great gifts as a poet is her ability both to subvert and revel in porn’s stock language and images.

Most of her best lines are wildly unprintable here. But in a poem titled “Revealing Nature Photographs,” woodlands transmogrify into a peep show: “nature is big into bloodplay,/nature is into extreme age play,” she writes.

The poem continues: “nature is hot/young amateur redheads, the foxes are all in their holes/for the night, nature is hot old used-up cougars.” Then: “nature is completely obsessed with twins.” It’s a jungle out there, she reports, so you might as well grab a vine. In another poem, about cheerleaders, Ms. Lockwood zeros in on “the calm eye of the panty in the center/of the cartwheel.”

There’s some Lydia Davis and some Regina Spektor in Ms. Lockwood’s verse, some Stevie Smith and some Stevie Nicks. When her poems miss, which they frequently do, their ideas seem larval and merely cute. A poem titled “Perfect Little Mouthfuls” begins: “What have we dumped in the ocean? All/the dolphins have begun growing breasts.” There are “Flipper” jokes here than I can’t bring myself to type.

When her poems hit, however, they land hard, from unexpected angles. A poem titled “List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers” opens like this:


First there was Helen of Sparta, who did it only
with oil, no one knows how; then there was
Maggie of England, who even on the battlefield
put men back together; and then there was Rose
of the deepest South, who stood up in her father’s
clothes and walked out of the house and herself.

The indelible, dreamlike details continue to fall like snow. These soldiers “passed/the hours with ticklefights. They grew their mustaches/together. They lost their hearts to local dogs,/what a bunch of girls.”

But this strange and grainy poem also accommodates a potent awareness of war. “Someone thought long and hard how to best/make my brother blend into the sand,” the narrator declares. Then we read:


My brother is alive because of a family capacity
for little hairs rising on the back of the neck.
The night the roadside bomb blew up, all three
sisters dreamed of him. There, I just felt it,
the family capacity. My brother is alive because
the family head sometimes hears a little voice.

The little hairs on my back rose often while reading “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” as if it were the year of the big wind. That’s biological praise, the most fundamental kind, impossible to fake.

[giovonni]

from Brian Wilson's ~ Pet Sounds

Kat Edmonson ~ I Just Wasn't Made for These Times


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKhHkkEAooY

[dianna]

Words That Speak


Any request from another – heard by you – should not be ignored; for it is coming from yourself! ~ Neville Goddard


http://www.zengardner.com/wp-content/uploads/The-words-you-speak-700x466.jpg


Words that speak what is in the heart are filled with spirit and spirit is life. This is true… words have power. I’m sure you’ve noticed… this is a noisy, word-filled world, and many of the words we hear and read are, to put it nicely, ‘waste’: no real information, oftentimes lies or exaggeration, and sometimes vile and polluting.

What harm has been spread through words. Would people change if they realized their words shape their fate? Hateful, loving, truthful, deceitful, angry, reconciling… speaking a word is actually doing a deed. We learn to be conscious of our deeds, knowing that what goes around comes around, as they say. But what about words?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9tWLvR6xg


Words

Someone and someone
were down by the pond
Looking for something
to plant in the lawn.
Out in the fields they
were turning the soil
I'm sitting here hoping
this water will boil
When I look through the windows
and out on the road
They're bringing me presents
and saying hello.

Singing words, words
between the lines of age.
Words, words
between the lines of age.

If I was a junkman
selling you cars,
Washing your windows
and shining your stars,
Thinking your mind
was my own in a dream
What would you wonder
and how would it seem?
Living in castles
a bit at a time
The King started laughing
and talking in rhyme.

Singing words, words
between the lines of age.
Words, words
between the lines of age.

[conk]

A0jF2H7etTc
STEVE EARLE
"Warrior"


This is the best time of the day-the dawn
The final cleansing breath unsullied yet
By acrid fume or death's cacophony
The rank refuse of unchained ambition
And pray, deny me not but know me now,
Your faithful retainer stands resolute
To serve his liege lord without recompense
Perchance to fall and perish namelessly
No flag-draped bier or muffled drum to set
The cadence for a final dress parade
But it was not always thus-remember?
Once you worshipped me and named me a god
In many tongues and made offering lest
I exact too terrible a tribute

Take heed for I am weary, ancient
And decrepit now and my time grows short
There are no honorable frays to join

Only mean death dealt out in dibs and dabs
Or horror unleashed from across oceans
Assail me not with noble policy
For I care not at all for platitude
And surrender such tedious detail
To greater minds than mine and nimbler tongues
Singular in their purpose and resolve
And presuming to speak for everyman

Oh, for another time, a distant field
And there a mortal warrior's lonely grave
But duty charges me remain until
The end the last battle of the last war
Until that 'morrow render unto me
That which is mine my stipend well deserved
The fairest flower of your progeny
Your sons, your daughters your hopes and your dreams
The cruel consequence of your conceit

[william r sanford72]

In a Dark Time, Theodore Roethke

http://www.rugusavay.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Theodore-Roethke-Quotes-44.jpg

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.


I have been thinking about this poem all day … I would like to be in an Opium Den thinking about it however LOL

A difficult poem, about the world, about the self, about reality -- that you normally don't see. This isn't the AA "moment of clarify" -- rather it's madness pushing the poet into a visionary state ... a state where the universe is more imbued with meaning, more soaked in meaning than in the day-to-day, errand-running reality.

Look at the "clarity" in the first line -- that the speaker's "echo" -- all of our "echoes" in the universe constitute "a lord of nature weeping to a tree." In other words, we've all been sundered ... exiled from the natural world, the world in which we could just take our place in reality ...and all human activity is a weeping, a mourning for this state .... a desire to get back to that origin union with the world.

The final lines get at the so-called mystical state, defined as the union between the Divine and the Human. In this poem, the poet goes through a dark night of the soul, is purged of fear and sorrow and somehow plunged into a world soaked in meaning and "comes out the other side" -- free of fear, free of the human concerns" and -- in that visionary state -- experiences a temporary union with the divine -- "one is One" -- God enters the mind and the mind is God.

It's a trippy poem -- but it's part of a Romantic tradition of visionary quests -- when you risk the fear and pain that comes with plunging yourself into the darkness of self, you can be rewarded by fighting through to a visionary state in which you see a world more radically imbued with cosmic meaning -- and you temporarily achieve union with this mystical truth.

The nature of the mystical experience is that you fall away ... it's always transient, always temporary, and you always feel pain falling back into the dull day-to-day world -- but the poet and the mystic, those heightened states are worth the risk.


thank you!!!..bumpn his work.great poet..
truth and balance...

[dianna]

http://37.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lall3dWTSc1qb886vo1_500.jpg

“It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.” Ernest Hemingway

[dianna]

Bukowski’s Letter of Gratitude to the Man Who Helped Him Quit His Soul-Sucking Job and Become a Full-Time Writer
by Maria Popova
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/08/12/charles-bukowski-john-martin-letter/


“Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut,” Charles Bukowski wrote in his famous poem about what it takes to be a writer, “don’t do it.” But Bukowski himself was a late bloomer in the journey of finding one’s purpose, as his own “it” — that irrepressible impulse to create — took decades to coalesce into a career.

http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/CharlesBukowski.jpg


“To not have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.”


August 12, 1986

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s overtime and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

“I put in 35 years…”

“It ain’t right…”

“I don’t know what to do…”

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the **** out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!”

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank

[william r sanford72]

Rime of The Ancient Mariner.read by orson wells.
oRGnoFf2cZQ
truth and balance.
William.

[dianna]

Be Kind
Charles Bukowski

http://tvmtalkies.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/buk3.jpg

we are always asked
to understand the other person's
viewpoint
no matter how
out-dated
foolish or
obnoxious.

one is asked
to view
their total error
their life-waste
with
kindliness,
especially if they are
aged.

but age is the total of
our doing.
they have aged
badly
because they have
lived
out of focus,
they have refused to
see.

not their fault?

whose fault?
mine?

I am asked to hide
my viewpoint
from them
for fear of their
fear.

age is no crime

but the shame
of a deliberately
wasted
life

among so many
deliberately
wasted
lives

is.

[dianna]

Some Words About the Poem

Diane di Prima
http://realitysandwich.com/228902/some-words-about-the-poem/


http://www.arras.net/ubu_set/folk_poetry.gif


Poets speak truth when no one else can or will. That’s why the hunger for poetry grows when the world grows dark. When repression grows, when people speak in whispers or not at all, they turn to poetry to find out what’s going on.

Poetry holds the tale of the tribe—of each and every tribe, so when we hear it, we can hear each other, begin to know where we came from.

We write poetry to remember, and sometimes we write poetry to forget. But hidden in our forgetting, encoded there, is our remembering—our secrets.

Poetry holds paradox without striving to solve anything.

Sometimes it speaks the unspeakable.

Always the stream of language points backward toward its source. Toward the moment before speech: headwaters of the river of language that streams through unfolding worlds.

The poem can be ritual or dance, prayer or dirge. It is music, story, riddle, lullaby. Song, spell, enchantment. Hex or blessing. Serenade or reverie. There is nowhere it can’t go, nothing the poem
can’t be.

The poem is dream and dreamer intertwined. It remakes language in the act of being writ. Mind and tongue, breath and mark. Papyrus, clay, paper, cyber-bit and byte.

When spoken, the poem cuts a shape in time, when written it forms itself in space. It often dwells there in paper or parchment before you pick up your pen. At those times all you have to do is trace what is hidden in the page. At other times you may hear the poem broadcast, spoken like a radio in your head & you can write it down like taking dictation.

And yet it is always, inevitably, rooted in our flesh—the very flesh of the poet who writes or types: Music begins to atrophy when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music, a great poet observed. The poem is our breath, our heartbeat.


…..

All artists are warriors, aren’t they?


The Poetry Deal
Diane di Prima

http://therumpus.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/The-Poetry-Deal-175x200.jpg


Born in Brooklyn in 1934, di Prima emerged as a member of the Beat Generation in New York in the late '50s; in the early '60s, she founded the important mimeo magazine, The Floating Bear, with her lover LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). In the late '60s, she moved to San Francisco, where she would publish her groundbreaking Revolutionary Letters (1971) with City Lights. Her other important books include Memoirs of a Beatnik, Pieces of a Dream, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, and Loba. She was named San Francisco Poet Laureate in 2009.


http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100643970

[dianna]

The poetry and brief life of Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

https://libcom.org/files/images/blog/xu%20lizhi.jpg


On the last day of September, a 24-year-old migrant worker in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen killed himself. Xu Lizhi jumped out of a window of a residential dormitory run by his employer, Foxconn, the huge electronics manufacturing company with a million-strong workforce that makes the majority of the world’s Apple iPhones.

In most cases, Xu’s suicide would have been yet another footnote in the vast, sweeping story of China’s economic boom and transformation. He is one of a legion of young Chinese migrants who emerge out of rural obscurity to find work in China’s teeming cities, only to end up crushed by both the dullness and stress of factory jobs, insufficient wages and a steady accumulation of personal disappointments.
But Xu was a poet. And, after his death, his friends collected his work and got some published in a local Shenzhen newspaper.

The poems, translated at the leftist website Libcom.org, are a wrenching echo of the alienation and hardship felt by countless people in modern China and, for that matter, in other parts of the developing world. They lament the grinding ennui of the assembly line, the squalor of a migrant worker’s narrow, frustrated existence.
- See more at: http://disinfo.com/2014/11/haunting-poetry-chinese-factory-worker-committed-suicide/#sthash.ikpOJAi0.dpuf

https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry

“On My Deathbed”

我想再看一眼大海，目睹我半生的泪水有多汪洋
I want to take another look at the ocean, behold the vastness of tears from half a lifetime

我想再爬一爬高高的山头，试着把丢失的灵魂喊回来
I want to climb another mountain, try to call back the soul that I’ve lost

我还想摸一摸天空，碰一碰那抹轻轻的蓝
I want to touch the sky, feel that blueness so light

可是这些我都办不到了，我就要离开这个世界了
But I can’t do any of this, so I’m leaving this world

所有听说过我的人们啊
Everyone who’s heard of me

不必为我的离开感到惊讶
Shouldn’t be surprised at my leaving

更不必叹息，或者悲伤
Even less should you sigh or grieve

我来时很好，去时，也很好
I was fine when I came, and fine when I left.

-- Xu Lizhi, 30 September 2014

《冲突》
"Conflict"

他们都说
They all say

我是个话很少的孩子
I'm a child of few words

对此我并不否认
This I don't deny

实际上
But actually

我说与不说
Whether I speak or not

都会跟这个社会
With this society I'll still

发生冲突
Conflict

-- 7 June 2013

《我就那样站着入睡》
"I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That"

眼前的纸张微微发黄
The paper before my eyes fades yellow

我用钢笔在上面凿下深浅不一的黑
With a steel pen I chisel on it uneven black

里面盛满打工的词汇
Full of working words

车间，流水线，机台，上岗证，加班，薪水……
Workshop, assembly line, machine, work card, overtime, wages...

我被它们治得服服贴贴
They've trained me to become docile

我不会呐喊，不会反抗
Don't know how to shout or rebel

不会控诉，不会埋怨
How to complain or denounce

只默默地承受着疲惫
Only how to silently suffer exhaustion

驻足时光之初
When I first set foot in this place

我只盼望每月十号那张灰色的薪资单
I hoped only for that grey pay slip on the tenth of each month

赐我以迟到的安慰
To grant me some belated solace

为此我必须磨去棱角，磨去语言
For this I had to grind away my corners, grind away my words

拒绝旷工，拒绝病假，拒绝事假
Refuse to skip work, refuse sick leave, refuse leave for private reasons

拒绝迟到，拒绝早退
Refuse to be late, refuse to leave early

流水线旁我站立如铁，双手如飞
By the assembly line I stood straight like iron, hands like flight,

多少白天，多少黑夜
How many days, how many nights

我就那样，站着入睡
Did I - just like that - standing fall asleep?

-- 20 August 2011

《一颗螺丝掉在地上》
"A Screw Fell to the Ground"

一颗螺丝掉在地上
A screw fell to the ground

在这个加班的夜晚
In this dark night of overtime

垂直降落，轻轻一响
Plunging vertically, lightly clinking

不会引起任何人的注意
It won’t attract anyone’s attention

就像在此之前
Just like last time

某个相同的夜晚
On a night like this

有个人掉在地上
When someone plunged to the ground

-- 9 January 2014

《谶言一种》
"A Kind of Prophecy"

村里的老人都说
Village elders say

我跟我爷爷年轻时很像
I resemble my grandfather in his youth

刚开始我不以为然
I didn’t recognize it

后来经他们一再提起
But listening to them time and again

我就深信不疑了
Won me over

我跟我爷爷
My grandfather and I share

不仅外貌越看越像
Facial expressions

就连脾性和爱好
Temperaments, hobbies

也像同一个娘胎里出来的
Almost as if we came from the same womb

比如我爷爷外号竹竿
They nicknamed him “bamboo pole”

我外号衣架
And me, “clothes hanger”

我爷爷经常忍气吞声
He often swallowed his feelings

我经常唯唯诺诺
I'm often obsequious

我爷爷喜欢猜谜
He liked guessing riddles

我喜欢预言
I like premonitions

1943年秋，鬼子进
In the autumn of 1943, the Japanese devils invaded

我爷爷被活活烧死
and burned my grandfather alive

享年23岁
at the age of 23.

我今年23岁
This year i turn 23.

-- 18 June 2013

《最后的墓地》
"The Last Graveyard"

机台的鸣叫也打着瞌睡
Even the machine is nodding off

密封的车间贮藏疾病的铁
Sealed workshops store diseased iron

薪资隐藏在窗帘后面
Wages concealed behind curtains

仿似年轻打工者深埋于心底的爱情
Like the love that young workers bury at the bottom of their hearts

没有时间开口，情感徒留灰尘
With no time for expression, emotion crumbles into dust

他们有着铁打的胃
They have stomachs forged of iron

盛满浓稠的硫酸，硝酸
Full of thick acid, sulfuric and nitric

工业向他们收缴来不及流出的泪
Industry captures their tears before they have the chance to fall

时辰走过，他们清醒全无
Time flows by, their heads lost in fog

产量压低了年龄，疼痛在日夜加班
Output weighs down their age, pain works overtime day and night

还未老去的头晕潜伏生命
In their lives, dizziness before their time is latent

皮肤被治具强迫褪去
The jig forces the skin to peel

顺手镀上一层铝合金
And while it's at it, plates on a layer of aluminum alloy

有人还在坚持着，有人含病离去
Some still endure, while others are taken by illness

我在他们中间打盹，留守青春的
I am dozing between them, guarding

最后一块墓地
The last graveyard of our youth.

-- 21 December 2011

《我一生中的路还远远没有走完》
"My Life’s Journey is Still Far from Complete"

这是谁都没有料到的
This is something no one expected

我一生中的路
My life’s journey

还远远没有走完
Is far from over

就要倒在半路上了
But now it's stalled at the halfway mark

类似的困境
It’s not as if similar difficulties

以前也不是没有
Didn’t exist before

只是都不像这次
But they didn’t come

来得这么突然
As suddenly

这么凶猛
As ferociously

一再地挣扎
Repeatedly struggle

竟全是徒劳
But all is futile

我比谁都渴望站起来
I want to stand up more than anyone else

可是我的腿不答应
But my legs won’t cooperate

我的胃不答应
My stomach won’t cooperate

我全身的骨头都不答应
All the bones of my body won’t cooperate

我只能这样平躺着
I can only lie flat

在黑暗里一次次地发出
In this darkness, sending out

无声的求救信号
A silent distress signal, again and again

再一次次地听到
Only to hear, again and again

绝望的回响
The echo of desperation.

-- 13 July 2014

《我咽下一枚铁做的月亮》
"I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron"

我咽下一枚铁做的月亮
I swallowed a moon made of iron

他们把它叫做螺丝
They refer to it as a nail

我咽下这工业的废水，失业的订单
I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents

那些低于机台的青春早早夭亡
Youth stooped at machines die before their time

我咽下奔波，咽下流离失所
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution

咽下人行天桥，咽下长满水锈的生活
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust

我再咽不下了
I can't swallow any more

所有我曾经咽下的现在都从喉咙汹涌而出
All that I've swallowed is now gushing out of my throat

在祖国的领土上铺成一首
Unfurling on the land of my ancestors

耻辱的诗
Into a disgraceful poem.

-- 19 December 2013

《出租屋》
"Rented Room"

十平米左右的空间
A space of ten square meters

局促，潮湿，终年不见天日
Cramped and damp, no sunlight all year

我在这里吃饭，睡觉，拉屎，思考
Here I eat, sleep, ****, and think

咳嗽，偏头痛，生老，病不死
Cough, get headaches, grow old, get sick but still fail to die

昏黄的灯光下我一再发呆，傻笑
Under the dull yellow light again I stare blankly, chuckling like an idiot

来回踱步，低声唱歌，阅读，写诗
I pace back and forth, singing softly, reading, writing poems

每当我打开窗户或者柴门
Every time I open the window or the wicker gate

我都像一位死者
I seem like a dead man

把棺材盖，缓缓推开
Slowly pushing open the lid of a coffin.

-- 2 December 2013

《惊闻90后青工诗人许立志坠楼有感》
"Upon Hearing the News of Xu Lizhi's Suicide"
by Zhou Qizao (周启早), a fellow worker at Foxconn

每一个生命的消失
The loss of every life

都是另一个我的离去
Is the passing of another me

又一枚螺丝松动
Another screw comes loose

又一位打工兄弟坠楼
Another migrant worker brother jumps

你替我死去
You die in place of me

我替你继续写诗
And I keep writing in place of you

顺便拧紧螺丝
While I do so, screwing the screws tighter

今天是祖国六十五岁的生日
Today is our nation's sixty-fifth birthday

举国欢庆
We wish the country joyous celebrations

二十四岁的你立在灰色的镜框里微微含笑
A twenty-four-year-old you stands in the grey picture frame, smiling ever so slightly

秋风秋雨
Autumn winds and autumn rain

白发苍苍的父亲捧着你黑色的骨灰盒趔趄还乡
A white-haired father, holding the black urn with your ashes, stumbles home.

-- 1 October 2014

[Iloveyou]

Wonderful thread, Dianna, excellent idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hjPZpaXNsw

Is there anybody who loves this piece like I do ?