Monday, July 27, 2009

An Offering of Poetry-- How Delightfully Droll!

Dredged up some more poems, one a couple of years old and the other a couple of months. In my more recent affairs with poetry, I've taken a different direction, experimenting more with enjambment, etcetera. Possibly some more of these to come, and I'm working on some actual new stuff to post. Fingers crossed!

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Infidelity

I can see where her head lay
A strand of hair where mine should be
My voice is silent in this house
An accusation of his infidelity

But I shall take, I shall shake, I shall break
These walls until they say
What harlot has usurped my vows
A week and a half from my wedding day



The Edge

The raindrops drip
as smoke on the sill
And the air thrums
with the words and the rhythms and the riffs
Of the human experience

And we breathe the
smoke and the liquor and the hour
As we shout our souls
into that thick air
In hopes that some other’s
will turn to ours (for what?)

And again we reel
With our cosmic clichés
into our philosophic armchairs
As we discuss lives
laid bare
(not ours of course)
by forsaking the world

But for all our eighty years
(some more
some less)
We have drunk but a
fourth of our cup

And so we lapse into
the words of the heads on our mantelpieces
Still shouting desperately
Grasping at explanation
Or meaning
Not seeking the edge
but the delineation of its silhouette
In the hopes that someday
If we see it if we sense
its dark smirk
looming on the horizon

We Will Know.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Overlooking the Abyss

Not quite sure what this is, so we're going to go with prose poetry. I didn't realize it when I first had the idea, but this more or less describes my experience with writing. Just a little dribble from my mind, but it's far better than nothing, which is what said mind has been producing recently.

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Last night I dreamt before I slept that an ivory maiden led me through an ivory tower perched on the edge of a cliff. It was high, the tower, overlooking an abyss, and from it bridges sprouted, many of them. They arched across the wide gulf, a spiderweb of safe passage. I told the maiden I wanted to stand on the highest point of the highest bridge, to straddle the abyss and watch its two edges meet eternally at a point just short of infinity. She smiled the smile of a lady saint and led me up staircases and down hallways. I thought at first we were walking in circles but realized we were walking in spheres; the maiden assured me this was the right way. The light was the light of a grey early morning—itself indistinct, everything else painfully clear. Often our shadows ran too far ahead and had to wait for us to catch them. I could not decide if the tower was one room or thousands. And finally we emerged at the tip of a spire, at the point where the bridge must begin. But instead of a path, the abyss bloomed before me, fading into a depth farther than I could fall. No walkways spanned it, nothing tethered its edges, and there was no sign that anything had tried. And so I balanced between waking and sleeping, calling out to the maiden who was no longer there.

Monday, July 20, 2009

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Blog...

This post was going to be an episode of me whinging and wringing my hands about how I haven't posted since February. There were going to be excuses, rationalizations, and a rather self-deprecating rant about my fear of writing. I decided to forgo all that-- it really wasn't worth my time or anyone else's--and instead make this a simple announcement: This Blog is Still Active. What's more, flying in the face of my laziness and self-criticism, I intend to update (gasp) frequently.

Well, at least more frequently than once every six months.

So I guess it's time to clear the rust and dust and rats' nests out of the old brain-motor, and actually get things rolling. I can't guarantee anything groundbreaking, but I can guarantee something, at least.

(Probably) Forthcoming:
-The first bits of a character sketch/story I'm working on
-Musings on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest
-A first attempt at prose poetry (??)

Now all I need to do is hire someone to stand behind me with a menacing look and make sure I update regularly. Any takers?