The Colossi Go To Sleep

Thank you for bearing with all the babbling about myself, women, poetry and the world. Mostly myself. I fight against the appetite to write about myself, an unneeded and unhelpful desire, a pitfall trick of the ego. I intend to be a man who talks much less and much better, a rebel and a sportsman, a scholar of serenity and perhaps religion, a different kind of nuisance. Everyone is a poet these days, and I don't blame myself or any of the others who make a claim to the title, but I want to be able to say "No. I do not write poetry. I am not a poet." The Colossi go to sleep in their bed of sands, the fate of all colossi befall them and harmony is well-kept. For when I do fail at accomplishing all that I wrote above, if I return to poetry, I will not disturb the sands of this blog, I will create a new one. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Please accept this last scribbling as a send-off in keeping with the spirit of the blog.

The Truth Being

Every single woman still in my heart

from Eve to Rebecca to Salome to Beatrice
each with their uniquely distorted view of me

and every vision of myself I have lost sight of
in voyages across glasses half empty

and even this thunderstorm we call a government
although it couldn't look me in the eye
and I couldn't understand how the hell you can trim a moustache and a people just like that

has passed through my little tent now.

My attempts at a well-disguised revolution of everything
hidden somewhere amidst these trees

have changed nothing:

as every single woman once in my life
and every vision of myself I have wrecked
and this moustache a government
passed by me in this park
I remain well unable
to sing to any of them.

Where Is My Own Irving Layton?

"I always think of something Irving Layton said about the requirements for a young poet...: ‘The two qualities most important for a young poet are arrogance and inexperience.’ It’s only some very strong self-image that can keep you going in a world that really conspires to silence everyone." 
                                                                                                                                         Leonard Cohen

Where is my own Irving Layton
an exuberant supporter
of my defeats?
Where are my true mentors, those
who do not drain whatever little is left
in my wallet or my heart or my marriage to the holy books? those
who do not diagnose me with anxiety? those
who tell me I am special? those who do not
themselves escape to a psychiatric ward
and weep and weep instead of owning up
after hearing what I have to say?

Where are my teachers? Where is the cure
for cancer? For pimples? Where is
what is not in sight? Where can I be blinded
by the light at the end of the tunnel? Where the train? Where is plastic surgery
without all the 'plastic'? Where have my prayers
gone? My Arabic? My childhood voice? My singing voice? Where
is my guitar? Where are the chords I'll never learn? Ladies? Where in the world is Waldo?
where in the world am I? Where the hell am I? Am I?

Where have you been? Where are you aching? Where do I
enter? Where is the handle? Where the decelerator?
Where is the world? To be? or Where do I buy rope?
Where oil? What precise spot on the ceiling
won't bear my weight and give me near-death?
A nirvana? An immortality in the present? A new outlook? New looks? This glorious spot,
this solemn Zen-master of a spot
must be found, warmer climates of the heart
must be found, cheaper plane tickets
must be found, better questions must be found
or I must die. But tell me:
Where is my own Irving Layton
an exuberant supporter
of my defeats?

New Notebook

I am not proud
that I rip off notebook pages
unsatisfied not with the content
but the handwriting

but this is the way the world is, too,

and although I can't say that I don't regret
the lives I've given up in the wind
more a papercut than paper
thin and soaked
empty space for the most part
skin and lines not blackened adequately
in battlefields and lovebeds--

but this is the way the world is, you say,
I could've been the solitary weak page
in the manuscript of an august masterpiece
not edited off, not quoted
while those pressed against me
would be caressed into immortality
by the generations of beauty.

Sancho Panza

I do admit I fooled around
with little Kut quite a bit
when I gave him this bloated mask
and such pretty people to meet

I put in him longing for home
then hid all homes away from him
when he found one I made him ask
whether it was worth the dream

Too much passion for a dead art
with too sparse a wordbook of love
the illusion of a great task
but shoulders not fit to push and shove

"Self-mockery in rhyme is smart"
he thinks, gosh, he will speak and speak
no glory in which he will bask,
not a single ounce of unique.

I do admit I fooled around
with little Kut quite a bit
when I gave him this bloated mask
and not the courage to quit.

The Voices

The Law says I'm now a Man
The pictures say I'm but a Boy
I think of everything I can--
then a She says "You're just my toy."

The Inside says that I'm a Soul
Brain Research states otherwise
Leonard speaks there'll be a Call
My Friends say I'm food for mice

The Heart screams "I'm Immortal"
but betrays itself when it aches
Time creeps on sweet and subtle
waits for when it'll eat my face

Graveyards with silence choose to speak
and mutilate dreams taking flight
whichever truth I choose to seek
already muted by the blight

See, these voices roar and blow
within my ears day after day--
Terrified I just hope to know
one day what I'll choose to say.

The Truth About Humanity

Those that say humanity is
the great monuments and empires
built and destroyed, great loves, great struggles,
great literature, great sex, great faith:
you are wrong. Humanity is
a sequence of not-yet-dead men stuffing cotton
into dead men's assholes
-so that they won't shit their sheets and coffins-
and hoping to be able to shit in a toilet
for oh god just a little bit longer
until they lie flat dead on a stone
their assholes exposed and rotting.

Sakura

I am done now
learning to yearn
for things unattainable
the introduction of you
an all-sufficient instruction for me
in that regard;
I am done with the desire
to explore the whole of this world
or have the whole of this world
come explore me in awe
before either me or this world
is stuck in the ground in a coffin--
The sunken cities
that hide in the swollen seas
your large pupils swim in
is all I want to go to.
The sonatas,
the sonatas of fear and laughter and sweat
your long fingers can draw from me
all I want to hear, your fear,
your fear and laughter and sweat all the taste I want on my tongue.
you see: My heart
no longer a house for the imitations
of great things, no longer like
the cheap dusty Sacred Heart of a plastic Jesus
in another forsaken church
but a mantelpiece for your light feline sit,
that crossing, oh that soft crossing of your legs
that makes the whole of this world tremble,
and the bastard you grin like.

You Come Down From the Stage

You come down from the stage
already feeling like a tree
fooled into a full blossom
by a treacherous March morning

you come down from the stage
utterly alone, the personas you loved,
the personas you hated--the personas that blissfully weren't you washed away,
gone, and once again there is no excuse
for this haircut that is rather a lack of a haircut
once again there is no excuse
for this face, this pitiful waste of benzoyl peroxide
and (never quite) Clean&Clear.

you come down from the stage
to an empty bed, that was all the gazes you'll have on you
for the next god knows how many months,
now you have to live with everything
the make-up remover will not take off
the hunchback of your character
exchanged with a more difficult kind of hunchback

You come down from the stage
already feeling like a tree
that fooled itself into a full blossom
in a March morning almost like any other

ready to have its flowers
frozen and cut down by the winter
ready for nothing else,
nothing else at all.

An Airport Emergency Journal

            The way priorities of passion and greed are drowned at times is clear only when the water is burning the nostrils and the throat and the heart. ''How do I fucking make sure that I stumble upon the blonde in the lobby again?" becomes "Where the fuck in this room is my passport." Desire turns to despair, desire made cold and wet like wet clay, uselessly smearing and freezing on all the fingers. It is the perfect little red booklet that you need now, not the perfect little red nipples: That which is made perfect by its seemingly unreal loss has overcome that which is perfect in its lifelike dreams. Indeed, loss overcomes imagination. You imagine perfect little red nipples again, other perfect little red nipples; but every time you lose that perfect little red booklet -for you do lose that booklet very often, in hotel rooms, in bags, in airports, as if to abandon the name and the likeness that is you or as if to cut all this crap and pleasurably imprison yourself in a waiting room of an airport forever-, every single time, the nipples will be gone. Everything will be gone. A gentle, mellow aching of the heart for a few hours and no more "Oh I am so happy and so anxious and so curious and so fucking frightened that I will be living on another continent in a few months and oh what is the food like and ah the culture is definitely inferior yes but yeah human rights and freedoms are certainly much, much superior" but only an "Oh will I be alive the next second, please let me be alive the next second' now. The nipples gone, the passport gone, the hotel rooms gone, airports gone. Only the heart remains. The heart of the matter. Not that any of it matters. Nipples in a hotel room and a glorious higher education in a foreign continent and other dreams of the future shall be unravelled only if they are to be unravelled, because the ache shall heal only if it is to heal and if it is to turn into a torn, dead heart then it will turn into a torn, dead heart. Loss drowns all passion and greed, death drowns all loss and passion and greed; and the fear of death drowns all, even death. But if your heart is not aching yet, none of this will matter much to you, I know and approve this, the audacity of an uninterrupted, unbothered life. If -or when- your heart is not aching anymore, this will really not matter much to you either, not anymore. I know and approve this, too, the foolish, immense forgetfulness that characterizes the human being, making him the slave to passion and greed crying out in joy and exaltation. But you've paused graciously from your passion and greed to read this crap, so I will cut to the point: Go on, go on like this, write little meditations or chase nipples to suck or lose and find your passport, whatever you think will help you get through with the fact your heart is slowly -or quickly, (''oh please not quickly''--the first and foremost and the only shared prayer of all men and women)- becoming torn and dead; but pause just for a little moment every once in a long while: Think about trying to become the kind of person who doesn't lose a passport, not quite that often, think about not worrying about death and separation that much, it cannot possibly be good for your heart. Or think for a moment about seeking medical attention. Then carry on.

Gifts

My gift
is to read lucidly and impress the elderly
in two languages
and win at
small insignificant things
like not pulling the doors that say PUSH and predicting rain.

Your gift
is beauty
I would kill you
if I knew I could steal your gift that way.

I read men and women whose gift is
to write like mirrors;
unravel body and soul, make and unmake
dawn and dusk between two covers
I would burn every single letter they wrote forever
if I knew I could steal their gifts that way.

I know of someone
whose gift is impeccable health of mind
who is alive despite knowing that
his name will be on a gravestone somewhere someday
I would unleash maladies on the world
Pestilence and plague, dusk, eternal dusk
if I knew I could steal his gift that way.

This
is the kind of person that I am:
shameless twat, servant to the vest
who wants the dawn and the dusk, winter and summer,
your gifts and his, all the gifts, greedy, yes, won't stop--

luckily someone gave me a gift of paper and pen
so I lie still in my little lair, buried
in jealousies disguised as longings
my desire endless
my limbs unmoving
my blessings uncounted,
scheming and scheming.

Is Impressionist Landscape Poetry Possible?

A bleak

cliff

gray

headache

after

A dawn

sour

river delta

dry, so dry

stomachache

after

a starless

debauchery

first transparent

then gray

damp

dim

a quarry

increasingly solitary

after

a violet

lily

lambs

whistle

dusk

heartache

after all

all that remains.

***

This piece was a derivation from another experiment:

New Year's

a headache

is all that remains

after a stomachache

after the heartache.