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zebra Oct 2017
Here is a primer on the history of poetry

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate
ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake
originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations
ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond preference for allusion (often private) rather than description
world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states
themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view
use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal
cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter
estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms
maintenance of a wary intellectual independence
artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness
search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness
exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

writing more cerebral than emotional
work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions more than answering them
cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized
open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection
involuted: the subject is often act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

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Expressionism

Expressionism was a phase of twentieth-century writing that rejected naturalism and romanticism to express important inner truths. The style was generally declamatory or even apocalyptic, endeavoring to awaken the fears and aspirations that belong to all men, and which European civilization had rendered effete or inauthentic. The movement drew on Rimbaud and Nietzsche, and was best represented by German poetry of the 1910-20 period. Benn, Becher, Heym, Lasker-Schüler, Stadler, Stramm, Schnack and Werfel are its characteristic proponents, {1} though Trakl is the best known to English readers. {2} {3}

Like most movements, there was little of a manifesto, or consensus of beliefs and programmes. Many German poets were distrustful of contemporary society — particularly its commercial and capitalist attitudes — though others again saw technology as the escape from a perceived "crisis in the old order". Expressionism was very heterogeneous, touching base with Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, many of which crop up in English, French, Russian and Italian poetry of the period. Political attitudes tended to the revolutionary, and technique was overtly experimental. Nonetheless, for all the images of death and destruction, sometimes mixed with messianic utopianism, there was also a tone of resignation, a sadness of "the evening lands" as Spengler called them.

Expressionism also applies to painting, and here the characteristics are more illuminating. The label refers to painting that uses visual gestures to transmit emotions and emotionally charged messages. In the expressive work of Michelangelo and El Greco, for example, the content remains of first importance, but content is overshadowed by technique in such later artists as van Gogh, Ensor and Munch. By the mid twentieth-century even this attenuated content had been replaced by abstract painterly qualities — by the sheer scale and dimensions of the work, by colour and shape, by the verve of the brushwork and other effects.

Expressionism often coincided with rapid social change. Germany, after suffering the horrors of the First World War, and ineffectual governments afterwards, fragmented into violently opposed political movements, each with their antagonistic coteries and milieu. The painting of these groups was very variable, but often showed a mixture of aggression and naivety. Understandably unpopular with the establishment  — denounced as degenerate by the Nazis — the style also met with mixed reactions from the picture-buying public. It seemed to question what the middle classes stood for: convention, decency, professional expertise. A great sobbing child had been let loose in the artist's studio, and the results seemed elementally challenging. Perhaps German painting was returning to its Nordic roots, to small communities, apocalyptic visions, monotone starkness and anguished introspection.

What could poetry achieve in its turn? Could it use some equivalent to visual gestures, i.e. concentrate on aspects of the craft of poetry, and to the exclusion of content? Poetry can never be wholly abstract, a pure poetry bereft of content. But clearly there would be a rejection of naturalism. To represent anything faithfully requires considerable skill, and such skill was what the Expressionists were determined to avoid. That would call on traditions that were not Nordic, and that were not sufficiently opposed to bourgeois values for the writer's individuality to escape subversion. Raw power had to tap something deeper and more universal.

Hence the turn inward to private torments. Poets became the judges of poetry, since only they knew the value of originating emotions. Intensity was essential.  Artists had to believe passionately in their responses, and find ways of purifying and deepening those responses — through working practices, lifestyles, and philosophies. Freud was becoming popular, and his investigations into dreams, hallucinations and paranoia offered a rich field of exploration. Artists would have to glory in their isolation, moreover, and turn their anger and frustration at being overlooked into a belief in their own genius. Finally, there would be a need to pull down and start afresh, even though that contributed to a gradual breakdown in the social fabric and the apocalypse of the Second World War.

Expressionism is still with us. Commerce has invaded bohemia, and created an elaborate body of theory to justify, support and overtake what might otherwise appear infantile and irrational. And if traditional art cannot be pure emotional expression, then a new art would have to be forged. Such poetry would not be an intoxication of life (Nietzsche's phrase) and still less its sanctification.  Great strains on the creative process were inevitable, moreover, as they were in Georg Trakl's case, who committed suicide shortly after writing the haunting and beautiful piece given below

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SYMBOLIST POETS
symbolism in poetry

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), the high priest of the French movement, theorized that symbols were of two types. One was created by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed as nascent words that slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a state of mind initially unknown to their originator.

None of this came about without cultivation, and indeed dedication. Poets focused on the inner life. They explored strange cults and countries. They wrote in allusive, enigmatic, musical and ambiguous styles. Rimbaud deranged his senses and declared "Je est un autre". Von Hofmannstahl created his own language. Valéry retired from the world as a private secretary, before returning to a mastery of traditional French verse. Rilke renounced wife and human society to be attentive to the message when it came.

Not all were great theoreticians or technicians, but the two interests tended to go together, in Mallarmé most of all. He painstakingly developed his art of suggestion, what he called his "fictions". Rare words were introduced, syntactical intricacies, private associations and baffling images. Metonymy replaced metaphor as symbol, and was in turn replaced by single words which opened in imagination to multiple levels of signification. Time was suspended, and the usual supports of plot and narrative removed. Even the implied poet faded away, and there were then only objects, enigmatically introduced but somehow made right and necessary by verse skill. Music indeed was the condition to which poetry aspired, and Verlaine, Jimenez and Valéry were among many who concentrated efforts to that end.

So appeared a dichotomy between the inner and outer lives. In actuality, poets led humdrum existences, but what they described was rich and often illicit: the festering beauties of courtesans and dance-hall entertainers; far away countries and their native peoples; a world-weariness that came with drugs, isolation, alcohol and bought ***. Much was mixed up in this movement — decadence, aestheticism, romanticism, and the occult — but its isms had a rational purpose, which is still pertinent. In what way are these poets different from our own sixties generation? Or from the young today: clubbing, experimenting with relationships and drugs, backpacking to distant parts? And was the mixing of sensory perceptions so very novel or irrational? Synaesthesia was used by the Greek poets, and indeed has a properly documented basis in brain physiology.

What of the intellectual bases, which are not commonly presented as matters that should engage the contemporary mind, still less the writing poet? Symbolism was built on nebulous and somewhat dubious notions: it inspired beautiful and historically important work: it is now dead: that might be the blunt summary. But Symbolist poetry was not empty of content, indeed expressed matters of great interest to continental philosophers, then and now. The contents of consciousness were the concern of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and he developed a terminology later employed by Heidegger (1889-1976), the Existentialists and hermeneutics. Current theories on metaphor and brain functioning extend these concepts, and offer a rapprochement between impersonal science and irrational literary theory.

So why has the Symbolism legacy dwindled into its current narrow concepts? Denied influence in the everyday world, poets turned inward, to private thoughts, associations and the unconscious. Like good Marxist intellectuals they policed the area they arrogated to themselves, and sought to correct and purify the language that would evoke its powers. Syntax was rearranged by Mallarmé. Rhythm, rhyme and stanza patterning were loosened or rejected. Words were purged of past associations (Modernism), of non-visual associations (Imagism), of histories of usage (Futurism), of social restraint (Dadaism) and of practical purpose (Surrealism). By a sort of belated Romanticism, poetry was returned to the exploration of the inner lands of the irrational. Even Postmodernism, with its bric-a-brac of received media images and current vulgarisms, ensures that gaps are left for the emerging unconscious to engage our interest

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IMAGIST POETRY
imagist poetry

Even by twentieth-century standards, Imagism was soon over. In 1912 Ezra Pound published the Complete Poetical Works of its founder, T.E. Hulme (five short poems) and by 1917 the movement, then overseen by Amy Lowell, had run its course. {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} The output in all amounted to a few score poems, and none of these captured the public's heart. Why the importance?

First there are the personalities involved — notably Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams {6} {7} {8} {9} — who became famous later. If ever the (continuing) importance to poets of networking, of being involved in movements from their inception, is attested, it is in these early days of post-Victorian revolt.

Then there are the manifestos of the movement, which became the cornerstones of Modernism, responsible for a much taught in universities until recently, and for the difficulties poets still find themselves in. The Imagists stressed clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail. Their aims, briefly set out, were that:

1. Content should be presented directly, through specific images where possible.
2. Every word should be functional, with nothing included that was not essential to the effect intended.
3. Rhythm should be composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome.

Also understood — if not spelled out, or perhaps fully recognized at the time — was the hope that poems could intensify a sense of objective reality through the immediacy of images.

Imagism itself gave rise to fairly negligible lines like:

You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch…  (Storm by H.D.)

Nonetheless, the reliance on images provided poets with these types of freedom:

1. Poems could dispense with classical rhetoric, emotion being generated much more directly through what Eliot called an objective correlate: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." {10}

2. By being shorn of context or supporting argument, images could appear with fresh interest and power.

3. Thoughts could be treated as images, i.e. as non-discursive elements that added emotional colouring without issues of truth or relevance intruding too mu
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PROSE BASED POETRY
prose based poetry

When free verse lacks rhythmic patterning, appearing as a lineated prose stripped of unnecessary ornament and rhetoric, it becomes the staple of much contemporary work. The focus is on what the words are being used to say, and their authenticity. The language is not heightened, and the poem differs from prose only by being more self-aware, innovative and/or cogent in its exposition.

Nonetheless, what looks normal at first becomes challenging on closer reading — thwarting expectations, and turning back on itself to make us think more deeply about the seemingly innocuous words used. And from there we are compelled to look at the world with sharper eyes, unprotected by commonplace phrases or easy assumptions. Often an awkward and fighting poetry, therefore, not indulging in ceremony or outmoded traditions.
What is Prose?

If we say that contemporary free verse is often built from what was once regarded as mere prose, then we shall have to distinguish prose from poetry, which is not so easy now. Prose was once the lesser vehicle, the medium of everyday thought and conversation, what we used to express facts, opinions, humour, arguments, feelings and the like. And while the better writers developed individual styles, and styles varied according to their purpose and social occasion, prose of some sort could be written by anyone. Beauty was not a requirement, and prose articles could be rephrased without great loss in meaning or effectiveness.

Poetry, though, had grander aims. William Lyon Phelps on Thomas Hardy's work: {1}

"The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention — I find even the drawings in "Wessex Poems" so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books — I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm."

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OPEN FORMS IN POETRY
open forms in poetry

Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the poems follow what the words and phrase suggest during the composition
I

Out of the little chapel I burst
Into the fresh night-air again.
Five minutes full, I waited first
In the doorway, to escape the rain
That drove in gusts down the common’s centre
At the edge of which the chapel stands,
Before I plucked up heart to enter.
Heaven knows how many sorts of hands
Reached past me, groping for the latch
Of the inner door that hung on catch
More obstinate the more they fumbled,
Till, giving way at last with a scold
Of the crazy hinge, in squeezed or tumbled
One sheep more to the rest in fold,
And left me irresolute, standing sentry
In the sheepfold’s lath-and-plaster entry,
Six feet long by three feet wide,
Partitioned off from the vast inside—
I blocked up half of it at least.
No remedy; the rain kept driving.
They eyed me much as some wild beast,
That congregation, still arriving,
Some of them by the main road, white
A long way past me into the night,
Skirting the common, then diverging;
Not a few suddenly emerging
From the common’s self through the paling-gaps,
—They house in the gravel-pits perhaps,
Where the road stops short with its safeguard border
Of lamps, as tired of such disorder;—
But the most turned in yet more abruptly
From a certain squalid knot of alleys,
Where the town’s bad blood once slept corruptly,
Which now the little chapel rallies
And leads into day again,—its priestliness
Lending itself to hide their beastliness
So cleverly (thanks in part to the mason),
And putting so cheery a whitewashed face on
Those neophytes too much in lack of it,
That, where you cross the common as I did,
And meet the party thus presided,
“Mount Zion” with Love-lane at the back of it,
They front you as little disconcerted
As, bound for the hills, her fate averted,
And her wicked people made to mind him,
Lot might have marched with Gomorrah behind him.

II

Well, from the road, the lanes or the common,
In came the flock: the fat weary woman,
Panting and bewildered, down-clapping
Her umbrella with a mighty report,
Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,
A wreck of whalebones; then, with a snort,
Like a startled horse, at the interloper
(Who humbly knew himself improper,
But could not shrink up small enough)
—Round to the door, and in,—the gruff
Hinge’s invariable scold
Making my very blood run cold.
Prompt in the wake of her, up-pattered
On broken clogs, the many-tattered
Little old-faced peaking sister-turned-mother
Of the sickly babe she tried to smother
Somehow up, with its spotted face,
From the cold, on her breast, the one warm place;
She too must stop, wring the poor ends dry
Of a draggled shawl, and add thereby
Her tribute to the door-mat, sopping
Already from my own clothes’ dropping,
Which yet she seemed to grudge I should stand on:
Then, stooping down to take off her pattens,
She bore them defiantly, in each hand one,
Planted together before her breast
And its babe, as good as a lance in rest.
Close on her heels, the dingy satins
Of a female something past me flitted,
With lips as much too white, as a streak
Lay far too red on each hollow cheek;
And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied
All that was left of a woman once,
Holding at least its tongue for the *****.
Then a tall yellow man, like the Penitent Thief,
With his jaw bound up in a handkerchief,
And eyelids ******* together tight,
Led himself in by some inner light.
And, except from him, from each that entered,
I got the same interrogation—
“What, you the alien, you have ventured
To take with us, the elect, your station?
A carer for none of it, a Gallio!”—
Thus, plain as print, I read the glance
At a common prey, in each countenance
As of huntsman giving his hounds the tallyho.
And, when the door’s cry drowned their wonder,
The draught, it always sent in shutting,
Made the flame of the single tallow candle
In the cracked square lantern I stood under,
Shoot its blue lip at me, rebutting
As it were, the luckless cause of scandal:
I verily fancied the zealous light
(In the chapel’s secret, too!) for spite
Would shudder itself clean off the wick,
With the airs of a Saint John’s Candlestick.
There was no standing it much longer.
“Good folks,” thought I, as resolve grew stronger,
“This way you perform the Grand-Inquisitor
When the weather sends you a chance visitor?
You are the men, and wisdom shall die with you,
And none of the old Seven Churches vie with you!
But still, despite the pretty perfection
To which you carry your trick of exclusiveness,
And, taking God’s word under wise protection,
Correct its tendency to diffusiveness,
And bid one reach it over hot ploughshares,—
Still, as I say, though you’ve found salvation,
If I should choose to cry, as now, ‘Shares!’—
See if the best of you bars me my ration!
I prefer, if you please, for my expounder
Of the laws of the feast, the feast’s own Founder;
Mine’s the same right with your poorest and sickliest,
Supposing I don the marriage vestiment:
So, shut your mouth and open your Testament,
And carve me my portion at your quickliest!”
Accordingly, as a shoemaker’s lad
With wizened face in want of soap,
And wet apron wound round his waist like a rope,
(After stopping outside, for his cough was bad,
To get the fit over, poor gentle creature
And so avoid distrubing the preacher)
—Passed in, I sent my elbow spikewise
At the shutting door, and entered likewise,
Received the hinge’s accustomed greeting,
And crossed the threshold’s magic pentacle,
And found myself in full conventicle,
—To wit, in Zion Chapel Meeting,
On the Christmas-Eve of ‘Forty-nine,
Which, calling its flock to their special clover,
Found all assembled and one sheep over,
Whose lot, as the weather pleased, was mine.

III

I very soon had enough of it.
The hot smell and the human noises,
And my neighbor’s coat, the greasy cuff of it,
Were a pebble-stone that a child’s hand poises,
Compared with the pig-of-lead-like pressure
Of the preaching man’s immense stupidity,
As he poured his doctrine forth, full measure,
To meet his audience’s avidity.
You needed not the wit of the Sibyl
To guess the cause of it all, in a twinkling:
No sooner our friend had got an inkling
Of treasure hid in the Holy Bible,
(Whene’er ‘t was the thought first struck him,
How death, at unawares, might duck him
Deeper than the grave, and quench
The gin-shop’s light in hell’s grim drench)
Than he handled it so, in fine irreverence,
As to hug the book of books to pieces:
And, a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance,
Not improved by the private dog’s-ears and creases,
Having clothed his own soul with, he’d fain see equipt yours,—
So tossed you again your Holy Scriptures.
And you picked them up, in a sense, no doubt:
Nay, had but a single face of my neighbors
Appeared to suspect that the preacher’s labors
Were help which the world could be saved without,
‘T is odds but I might have borne in quiet
A qualm or two at my spiritual diet,
Or (who can tell?) perchance even mustered
Somewhat to urge in behalf of the sermon:
But the flock sat on, divinely flustered,
Sniffing, methought, its dew of Hermon
With such content in every snuffle,
As the devil inside us loves to ruffle.
My old fat woman purred with pleasure,
And thumb round thumb went twirling faster,
While she, to his periods keeping measure,
Maternally devoured the pastor.
The man with the handkerchief untied it,
Showed us a horrible wen inside it,
Gave his eyelids yet another *******,
And rocked himself as the woman was doing.
The shoemaker’s lad, discreetly choking,
Kept down his cough. ‘T was too provoking!
My gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it;
So, saying like Eve when she plucked the apple,
“I wanted a taste, and now there’s enough of it,”
I flung out of the little chapel.

IV

There was a lull in the rain, a lull
In the wind too; the moon was risen,
And would have shone out pure and full,
But for the ramparted cloud-prison,
Block on block built up in the West,
For what purpose the wind knows best,
Who changes his mind continually.
And the empty other half of the sky
Seemed in its silence as if it knew
What, any moment, might look through
A chance gap in that fortress massy:—
Through its fissures you got hints
Of the flying moon, by the shifting tints,
Now, a dull lion-color, now, brassy
Burning to yellow, and whitest yellow,
Like furnace-smoke just ere flames bellow,
All a-simmer with intense strain
To let her through,—then blank again,
At the hope of her appearance failing.
Just by the chapel a break in the railing
Shows a narrow path directly across;
‘T is ever dry walking there, on the moss—
Besides, you go gently all the way up-hill.
I stooped under and soon felt better;
My head grew lighter, my limbs more supple,
As I walked on, glad to have slipt the fetter.
My mind was full of the scene I had left,
That placid flock, that pastor vociferant,
—How this outside was pure and different!
The sermon, now—what a mingled weft
Of good and ill! Were either less,
Its fellow had colored the whole distinctly;
But alas for the excellent earnestness,
And the truths, quite true if stated succinctly,
But as surely false, in their quaint presentment,
However to pastor and flock’s contentment!
Say rather, such truths looked false to your eyes,
With his provings and parallels twisted and twined,
Till how could you know them, grown double their size
In the natural fog of the good man’s mind,
Like yonder spots of our roadside lamps,
Haloed about with the common’s damps?
Truth remains true, the fault’s in the prover;
The zeal was good, and the aspiration;
And yet, and yet, yet, fifty times over,
Pharaoh received no demonstration,
By his Baker’s dream of Baskets Three,
Of the doctrine of the Trinity,—
Although, as our preacher thus embellished it,
Apparently his hearers relished it
With so unfeigned a gust—who knows if
They did not prefer our friend to Joseph?
But so it is everywhere, one way with all of them!
These people have really felt, no doubt,
A something, the motion they style the Call of them;
And this is their method of bringing about,
By a mechanism of words and tones,
(So many texts in so many groans)
A sort of reviving and reproducing,
More or less perfectly, (who can tell?)
The mood itself, which strengthens by using;
And how that happens, I understand well.
A tune was born in my head last week,
Out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek
Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester;
And when, next week, I take it back again,
My head will sing to the engine’s clack again,
While it only makes my neighbor’s haunches stir,
—Finding no dormant musical sprout
In him, as in me, to be jolted out.
‘T is the taught already that profits by teaching;
He gets no more from the railway’s preaching
Than, from this preacher who does the rail’s officer, I:
Whom therefore the flock cast a jealous eye on.
Still, why paint over their door “Mount Zion,”
To which all flesh shall come, saith the pro phecy?

V

But wherefore be harsh on a single case?
After how many modes, this Christmas-Eve,
Does the self-same weary thing take place?
The same endeavor to make you believe,
And with much the same effect, no more:
Each method abundantly convincing,
As I say, to those convinced before,
But scarce to be swallowed without wincing
By the not-as-yet-convinced. For me,
I have my own church equally:
And in this church my faith sprang first!
(I said, as I reached the rising ground,
And the wind began again, with a burst
Of rain in my face, and a glad rebound
From the heart beneath, as if, God speeding me,
I entered his church-door, nature leading me)
—In youth I looked to these very skies,
And probing their immensities,
I found God there, his visible power;
Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense
Of the power, an equal evidence
That his love, there too, was the nobler dower.
For the loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless god
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.
You know what I mean: God’s all man’s naught:
But also, God, whose pleasure brought
Man into being, stands away
As it were a handbreadth off, to give
Room for the newly-made to live,
And look at him from a place apart,
And use his gifts of brain and heart,
Given, indeed, but to keep forever.
Who speaks of man, then, must not sever
Man’s very elements from man,
Saying, “But all is God’s”—whose plan
Was to create man and then leave him
Able, his own word saith, to grieve him,
But able to glorify him too,
As a mere machine could never do,
That prayed or praised, all unaware
Of its fitness for aught but praise and prayer,
Made perfect as a thing of course.
Man, therefore, stands on his own stock
Of love and power as a pin-point rock:
And, looking to God who ordained divorce
Of the rock from his boundless continent,
Sees, in his power made evident,
Only excess by a million-fold
O’er the power God gave man in the mould.
For, note: man’s hand, first formed to carry
A few pounds’ weight, when taught to marry
Its strength with an engine’s, lifts a mountain,
—Advancing in power by one degree;
And why count steps through eternity?
But love is the ever-springing fountain:
Man may enlarge or narrow his bed
For the water’s play, but the water-head—
How can he multiply or reduce it?
As easy create it, as cause it to cease;
He may profit by it, or abuse it,
But ‘t is not a thing to bear increase
As power does: be love less or more
In the heart of man, he keeps it shut
Or opes it wide, as he pleases, but
Love’s sum remains what it was before.
So, gazing up, in my youth, at love
As seen through power, ever above
All modes which make it manifest,
My soul brought all to a single test—
That he, the Eternal First and Last,
Who, in his power, had so surpassed
All man conceives of what is might,—
Whose wisdom, too, showed infinite,
—Would prove as infinitely good;
Would never, (my soul understood,)
With power to work all love desires,
Bestow e’en less than man requires;
That he who endlessly was teaching,
Above my spirit’s utmost reaching,
What love can do in the leaf or stone,
(So that to master this alone,
This done in the stone or leaf for me,
I must go on learning endlessly)
Would never need that I, in turn,
Should point him out defect unheeded,
And show that God had yet to learn
What the meanest human creature needed,
—Not life, to wit, for a few short years,
Tracking his way through doubts and fears,
While the stupid earth on which I stay
Suffers no change, but passive adds
Its myriad years to myriads,
Though I, he gave it to, decay,
Seeing death come and choose about me,
And my dearest ones depart without me.
No: love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it,
Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,
The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it,
Shall arise, made perfect, from death’s repose of it.
And I shall behold thee, face to face,
O God, and in thy light retrace
How in all I loved here, still wast thou!
Whom pressing to, then, as I fain would now,
I shall find as able to satiate
The love, thy gift, as my spirit’s wonder
Thou art able to quicken and sublimate,
With this sky of thine, that I now walk under
And glory in thee for, as I gaze
Thus, thus! Oh, let men keep their ways
Of seeking thee in a narrow shrine—
Be this my way! And this is mine!

VI

For lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon’s consummate apparition.
The black cloud-barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.
‘T was a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon’s self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the base
With its seven proper colors chorded,
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of whitest white,—
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier and flightier,—
Rapture dying along its verge.
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the keystone of that are?

VII

This sight was shown me, there and then,—
Me, one out of a world of men,
Singled forth, as the chance might hap
To another if, in a thu
Skylar Williams Aug 2013
Searching for the truth. All I feel is this unquenchable desire to create something beautiful. I don’t care if it’s a poem, a song, a painting, I just want to create something that expresses all of this life that I’m living. But everything has been said before, has been written before, has been thought of before. And I sit here trying in vain to create, create, create from my soul, but all I can think is what will people think? Is this good enough? Is this original? I feel like an amalgamation of all the experiences, people and places I’ve come across. Like if you stripped away everything that’s ever happened to me, there would be nothing left. Do I have a soul? Where is this stream of consciousness coming from? I don’t know. And I try to be okay with not knowing, but I don’t know if I am. I don't even know if I'm okay with not knowing if I can not know.

So in the meantime, I surf the web, look at beautiful works of art, and listen to music from decades long ago.  And I think that I’m changing, that I’m developing a clearer picture of who I am and who I want to be, but then I feel just as stuck as I did four years ago. Is this growing up? Because while I do hate the ignorance, the exclusiveness, the pettiness, I need the opportunities. I like to say I could live on my own, but I’m not ready for the jadedness, the financial problems, the 2.5 kids. I hate the restrictions, the normalcy, the surges of emotion, but I need the safety net. I like to act like I’m so wise about the world and the universe and everything, but the only thing I know is that I’m just as lost as everyone else. I’m so far from knowing the answers, I don’t even know the questions.

Or maybe I know the answers, I just don’t know how to implement them. Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe, as much I hate shoes and love being late, I’m a creature of habit as much as everyone else.  Maybe I know that I should be myself and not care what others say, spend my life helping others, that money isn't worth much in the end, that clichés of peace, love and happiness are what I really yearn for. Maybe everything they tell me is wrong. It all contradicts itself, really.
Be who you are.
             but adapt to your surroundings.
Listen to your parents.
                           but search for freedom.
Learn to be assertive.
                                          focus on serving others.
Fight for what you believe.
                                                 but strive for peace.
Fit in.
    Be  d i  f   f   e     r      e       n        t.
Cherish each moment.
                                                                but make responsible decisions.
Love everyone.
                                                                                but separate yourself from negative people
they say
so many "they"s
how many "us"

To the point where I simultaneously want to scream
And be ashamed of myself for fitting into a stereotype of the rebellious teenager, good girl gone bad, thinks she could change the world one day, gets herself depressed over problems that can’t compare to those everyone else is facing, but that’s part of why she’s depressed in the first place.

So I guess it’s all about balance. Finding the right combination of the spiritual and the physical, the senses and the thought, the good times and the bad, the acceptance and the growth, the they and the us, the serenity and the passion, the connection and the rebellion, the creativity and the burning of the old rusty fences that are holding you back.
We were born untainted like empty canvas; a bud of roses.
But as time linger we digress from our innocence and actual selves.
We were scratched and polished, from diamonds pulvarized to dirt.
The facade we kept after succumbing to society’s propriety became us,
And the true face and being what we were became lost in time.

The mirror no longer reveals us, because we metamorphosed to someone else.
Another face in society, swallowed by the world’s expectations and encumbrance.
The appropriateness of etiquette, social conformity, and worldly priorities.
Day by day, we became less of ourselves, and more like everyone else.
Converging needs and wants, we lost our personal uniqueness,
And it seems like our attempt to be different is the same as everyone’s else.
By and by, we effort for elopement to get out of the box is futile – rather impossible.

Epitome of wealth and exclusiveness; highest degree of poverty and martyrdom.
In between those of extreme pillars, everyone seems to be in between and at both sides.
The world has become more dimensional, efficient, yet ineffective.
For our sweat and blood goes out for the wrong reasons;
And we fight against one another, (thus fighting against ourselves), to become the winner.

The winners aren’t actually victorious; neither are the loser the ultimate champions.
And this is only a mere microcosm,
to signify how the multifarious constituents that the world has formed:
a composite, complex, compound conformed convolution.
For more, visit plighttowrite.wordpress.com
Llahi Fuego Nov 2013
A no-strings-attached thing is easy to arrange
It sounds exciting too, seems very straightforward
But sometimes you get caught up in things you don’t expect
Before you know it, you start caring
You develop feelings
You learn things about the other person
Her middle name, her favourite music, food
Her pet peeves, ambitions
You learn her innermost thoughts
Her insecurities, her ****** proclivities,
The little birthmark just above her mons *****
The one that she says looks like a map of the Dominican Republic
You lie in bed with her all day
She teaches you how to swear in Farsi.
You **** her every day.

One day she sees you making out with this random ****** and she flips
You say, but we said no strings attached or did we not?
It’s not as simple as that though, it never is
But this girl, she believes in you
She’s a paragon of patience
She sits you down and tells you to listen to her carefully
She explains to you that now you are sleeping with her on the regular
Your body is somehow her body too, partly, and vice versa
Says she understands that you are not together officially
But intimacy usually comes with an implied exclusiveness.
You say, Ok, I've heard you. And I understand where you’re coming from.
Then you tell her to *******.

Time passes
You begin to miss her.
But you’re pride won’t let you call her.
You have *** three times with two different girls in one weekend
One of those girls has a boyfriend, you **** her in a night club restroom.
The other one on the beach a day after
Then a few hours later in her bedroom.
In the morning her room is all sandy,
Going home you begin reflecting on things
You've learnt one thing for sure:
However much top-shelf ***** you get, it doesn't compare to the love of a good girl
So it doesn't matter how many lovers you have in this world
If none of them give you the world.

You swallow your pride and call her
She can’t make it, she says.
But she comes the next day in the evening.
You explain everything,
How it felt like she was tethering you to her
How you took it all too lightly.
You’re not too good at it, talking about your feelings
You say that what she’d told you that day had gone through one ear, out the other
So you had to learn it all by yourself, you had to go through it
Finally, you apologise.
You’re very sincere.
She asks you, so is this closure?
You don’t want it to be, but you don’t know if you actually deserve her
****, you don’t know if she’d even take you back.
If she does, you've still got a lot to prove.
You’ll be in luck, but you’ll be starting on nothing.
If she doesn't then you knew and blew a good thing.
victor tripp Apr 2013
pete  called  me  and  said  that  he  wanted  to  talk  man  to   man  finally  battered  and    emontionally   wounded   he  said   his  girlfriend  was  gone  drained  and  tired  of  the   questionable  and  uncertain  path  the  relationship  had  taken  he  should've  realized  that  women,  like  men  need  emotional  nurturing   and  centering in  themselves- which  helps  them  to  grow  in   a   positive/sane  direction  i've  often  wondered  why  the  wrong  people  fall  in  love  and  become  a  pair... what  causes  cracks  in  the  foundation  of  love- some  warp  in  the chromosomes,some  flaw  in  the  genes, a thin  film of  paranoia   in  the  embryonic  sac ? is  it  the  stresses  of   modern  life  or  Mozart's  Requiem  of  the  full  moon   or no  moon? was  it  the  march  beyond   being   strangers,perhaps- that  destroyer  of  great  expectations? or  does  love  bring  forth  a   dormant  madness  that always  begins  on  a  day  that  other wise  seems  normal- beautiful even   fate  thubing its  nose  at the  future ? mutual  sharing  is  required  for  any  lasting  relationship  but  sharing is not  in  itself   what  i'm  talking  about   nor   is  relationship  i'm   talking  of   capacity  to  meet   and  be  met   in  the  soft  unkown  part  of  your being  such   meetings  from  time  to  time  are  the  essential   growing  points   in  any  live  relationship    can    hardly  be  used.  it  is  possible  i'm  sure  for  more  than  two  people  to  meet  at  the  same  time    the  modern  emphasis  on  relationships  between  only  two  people  can  degenerate   into   mere  exclusiveness  and  a  self-conscious  sharing  which  though  it  is,  may  become  an  infringement  of privacy,  or  an  abuse  of  intimacy. deliberate  sharing  is  sometimes  as  dangerous  as  sympathy  new  ideas  which  are  forming  in  the  depths  of  the  mind   can  actually  be  destroyed  or  crippled   by  being  shared  to  soon  it  is  like  dragging  a  baby  from  the  womb  before  it's  ready  to be  born  or  digging  up  a  tulip bulb  to  watch  the  sprouting  of  the  roots   respect  for  another  person's  privacy  is  as  important   as   sharing  thoughts   for  the  deepest  communication  will in  any case  take  place  in  moments  of  silence  every  time  i  think  its  one's  own  attitude, not  the relationship on  which  one  needs  to  work  its  a  fact   that  in  any  partnership  if  one  of  the  partners  becomes quite  clear  in  himself  what  it  is  that  the  situation  requires  the  chances  are  it  won't  even   be  necessary  to  voice  it   the  other  will   somehow pick  up  the  point  and  comply   with  no  words  said  internal  clarity  anywhere  seems  to  have  the  effect  of  an  invisible  guiding  force   which  can  be  trusted  to  affect  not  only  personal  relationships  but   other  situtions  for  the  person  who  has achieved  inner  clarity   new paths  appear  and  doors  open  without  the  need  to knock
victor tripp Apr 2013
This  is  a noted   to  remind   us  all  to  grow  tired   of  any  questionable  and  uncertain  path   your   relationship  might  take   and  always  realize  that  women  like  emotional   nurturing  and  centering  in  themselves-  which  helps  them  to  grow  in  a  positive / sane  direction   i've  often  wondered  and  it  is't  a  pleasant  wonder   why   the   wrong  people   fall  in   love   and   become   a   pair - what  causes   cracks   in  the  foundation   of  love -  some  warp   in  the  chromosomes,   some  flaw  in  the  genes   a thin   film  of  paranoia  in  the  embryonic  sac ?  is  it   the  stresses  of  modern  life  or  Mozart's  Requiem  of  the  full  moon  or  no  moon  at  all?  was  it  the  march   beyond  being  strangers  perhaps-  that  destroyer  of  great  expectations ?  or  does  love   bring  forth  a  dormant  madness  that  always   begins  on  a  day  that  other wise  seems  normal -  beautiful  even, fate  thumbing  its  nose  at  the  future ?   mutual   sharing  is  required  for  any  lasting  relationship  but sharing  is  not  in itself   what  i'm  talking  about. nor  is   relationship.   i'm  talking   of  the  capacity  to   meet  and  be  met   such  meetings   from  time  to  time   are  the  essential  growing  points   in  any  live   relationship  could  hardly  be  used.    the  modern  emphasis  on  relationships  between  two  people  can   degenerate  into  mere  exclusiveness   and  a    self-conscious  sharing  which   valuable  though   it  is   may   become   an  infringement  of  privacy  or  an  abuse  of  intimacy.  deliberate  sharing  is   dangerous.  new   ideas  which   are  forming  in  the  dephs  of  the  mind  can  be  destroyed  or  crippled  by  being  shared  to  soon   it's  like  dragging  a  baby  from  the  womb  before  it's  ready  to  to  be  born   or  digging   a  tulip  bulb   up  to  watch  the  sprouting  of  the  roots   respect   for  another  person's  privacy  is  as   important   as    sharing  thoughts  the  deepest  communication  will  in   any  case  take  place  in  moments   of  silence    every   time  i  think   it  is  one's  own  attitude  not  the  the  relationship  on  which  one  needs  to  work  it's  a  fact  that  in  any  partnership   if  one  partner  becomes  quite   clear  in  himself  what  it  is  the  situation  requires   the  chances   are  it  will  not  even  be  necessary  to  voice  it   the  other   will  somehow  pick  up  the  point  and  comply  with  no  words  said   internal  clarity  anywhere   seems  to  have  the  effect   of  an  invisible  guiding  force   can  be  trusted  to  affect  not   only   personal  relationships  but   outer   situations   for   the  person  who  has  achieved  inner  clarity   new  paths   appear  and  doors  open    without  the  need   to  knock
Vernarth says: “Nocturnal mutism, nocturnal stuttering, goes from the fragile phrasing, peripheral phrase, hovering last word, where my loudspeaker hits, dissonant Sagittarius, I must prepare my denarius, not but, beforehand, cheers of hope to Zion, who among the bush of the millionaire wind that travels from Pluto to Mercury, each day that we map ourselves, trying to be more earth than in its own flowering. Paradiso Omega, nap of the oldest dream, adobe path. My  to fly Anne genuflects her heart towards Mariah from Heaven, in the title of hundreds of throats and gargles of the pyogenic sediment rambling. Oh so long night!, so clear firmament born of the fallen ether of the great Heaven so clear and enlightening Compass 37 on the quilt of God, three by three towards one, linking above the easy pit and dreams, dying Paradiso, Agonizing Horcondising, a fragile mass disoriented, discouraged, with numeral letters and quadruple letters, stone after stone of forage falling on the cinnabar sky "

Joshua de Piedra from the high pinnacle exclaimed…: “Stone after stone in its correction is born of a new silence eternal bond. It eats it during the day, it eats at night, just like the galaxies licking the frivolous awakening from a starless night, but being the substance of stars liquefied with a whip. Pilgrimage or Path of the Cross, on the stony ground of Uncle Hugh's house, in the other similar, my Anne's house, further on in the hidden and clayey chaos, the last Indigenous in Western clothing, working and stuffing the wells with green size, distributing alms for his apprentices, I keep looking from the high hill earlier. Kaitelka the whale and a Dwarf Leviathan; steward of the unnameable, perhaps of an unknown Cyprian squirrel censoring Noah in his animals empowered to tell him about a magnificent episode.  Each species balancing its essence to make the most grandiloquent dossier in the world, to join them and value them towards the unknown peasant world. The big apple to go, with its tailcoat worms, well dressed and united by the march of the rock sentinel Evangelus. Kaitelca alpha and omega cetacean, fluffy with bast for all the most lost seas of the watery world. She so down cetacean, she throws herself into the sea in fears in this gloomy space, exhausted warehouse, lifesaver between lives of lives, like wishes without delay, to beat the divergent period, falling on the flat ceiling. Enter to sail through the mud of Iodine, of this great Parnassus of all iodine, the Messiah was squeezing his robe of love all over the upper margin of the face, Jesus light, loving great pilgrims who helped me to urbanize the skeleton of this great demolition, of a great geyser on its oceanic back, distributing gifts through the tangled brow of the Horcón and Cantillana massif.  Freshwater meringue, fluffy flowers, incense, fuchsias, and Calypso smoke migrating from house to house in Sudpichi.  Adelimpia, holding the cord of the axis of the fatigued planet, Queen Anne restored the acute respiratory meridians, which moved her heart from the sinister side encompassed, cursed globe moving to another galaxy towards its 9600 years of expansion. The stumbling of the sun's rays, crowded on the back of the Jacinta, which multiplied on her bank of meek ideas, to reside above all the assemblages of millions of benefits, since the world is an improper world. The world has no end, God is a beautiful mute world, where we make mistakes every day believing that we are ..., being less true. Rather, we are the waste of the almost noise that tried to leave us as a legacy of the first noise of creation that was felt wandering, perhaps it was its breathing, of its lipped wise crater, in the most irresistible protoforms, devoutly preparing turgid liquids for driving through every dinner, without stars tasting their multi-polygonal sandwiches. Memory is a raging waste, every time we try to get to lick his honey-like him, we run out of a famished minute of life not lived”

Says the spirit Leiak:

“Without a doubt, without drooling, without Buddha… the tendrils of the universe flamed, like rolling pickets within his hearing sea ear.  Striped with wounded marks in zigzag, by the middle row between the unarmed infidels.  Filled with the greatest amazement, massacred with laughter riddled with the non-shining meteor. From temple to temple, without Buddha close to him, he continues lost on the path of valleys among several, by the waves of chimneys like the snout of a mastiff with typhus, infected badly that detonates a thousand times, circular or macrocosmic chemistry in submissive grounds, to drink, where no one is wrong. Pendency of the lymphatic jellyfish, among the meek otolith of Kaitelka, almost deaf, of so many prayers of impious savages to hunt her ..., she continues begging for mercy as a species, she shakes and shakes as if eliminating the supposed flea jellyfish in whirlwinds of babies in her ears of children's stories. Anne came out of her basket as if she had been picked up from the Nile, but in reality, she was close to Chocalan, Popeta, or Polulo, lit up like coal from a steppe oven. I continued walking shirtless on an insomniac night, waiting in the decimals of the full moon, some indebted Solaris of the evangelist, in a space that slowly locked the crooked tongue of sleep, locked by the treacherous luck of doubt. Plague and doubt, plague and nail, which opens the vast sea, unsanitary radio, from the messianic ****** of the muses to Botticelli blaspheming. Anne, a diva of the division of past lives, does not die in misapplication against all odds like a thousand sperms of an ensign, making her stipends simple, to buy sensitive chaste little flowers in suitcases of her super-saucy folds ..., there is no probing look similar to the ocean Cousteau's journey, through which the lost retina drains, lies the selective gaze, covered by the Guardian, who looks before the denigrated sap unfolds, which wears away scarlet fever, the gaze of substance, in front of thousands of sayings, plagiarizing Tramontane rumors "

Queen Anne rolls up her sleeves, collects ashes from the ill-fated victims sifted, by the tobacco, a very good service from the fumes of venerable lost in disbelief, this painting becomes vague and with a sordid diametric image and silent cataclysm. The confine of evil godson in a duo and verse of the Universe, of the concrete displaced with pieces of the tobacco, has been spoiled. Joshua de Piedra with filings in his stomach was with hundreds of particles tickling the metaverse on the beards of extraterrestrial comets. Heaven and Hell, interrupted sleep, fatal nap, draconian wind, Ultrasensitive Glory of austere forces, as long as you are alive, you are prey to it. Ignorance continues to spend the night in the empty vapors of the valley of chaos, duels of masses of sleeping consciences underlying the erosive *****, Queen Anne, is gathered at a gallop by Joshua de Piedra, blindfolds him so that he does not numb more body incense and set on a spring flower. By the knees, they are incinerated, but sometimes they are half-burned, burning like incense with Joshua in reversible adulation, of the rawest exquisiteness of essence of escapes of blossoming in chains, with the drama of carcinoma petals in anti-carcinoma times and of eternal life external. At the Post Office, the postman envelopes the new vignettes, new gardens of relevant highlights. The friend Joshua links the trough of flames escaping from his domain, at a faster pace for other readings, varying in shreds of first-time, delineating, and walking breaths that are lost in the misty vividness.

Says Leiak: “After making a round, Adelimpia with Hugh and Bernardolipo, restart their adventure, almost at the top of the Horcondising massif, collecting riches from between stranded galleys, and vaults dragged by the cataclysm towards this consistent mountainous ..., The amounts of coins from different origins were countless, from all those wealthy who stole from all their belongings, the tainted and intrepid wisdom, getting rid of everything before confronting the thunderous flashes of the Guardian, to subtract intelligent action from the oppressive limit in maintaining the Gnostic parallel. Adelimpia saw how the thousands of nausea cleaned themselves, before liquids and gastric ills, of which they are the bad residences, deciding to die acidly or spiritually towards an alkaline light.  Karmic oppression, anhydrous bubbles, carbonating every breathing capsule of compassionate life. Every day there is more foul-smelling hunger in men of acid rust, for the good spirits of the dipsomaniac in the diet of the most lost undefeated blind, a universal record of walking impoverished at the end of his objectivity. Adelimpia…., And Carmina; maiden of the extravagant silence is linked to the ox Xenon, master of his pumpkin ox, collects bubbling fragments from their stomachs of acid and fragmented, with unfortunate applicants to obtain him, all of them exalted before his prayers, as well as that fleece that the other possessed ox; Cricket that was grazing in the radiant spaces of the grasslands, ruminating lost ties for the good of all and being able to observe in the distance going beyond all sensitive imagination, being me Leiak, the spirit of Vernarth who looks over where he does not it does, sometimes incomprehensibly because of its purging. "

Joshua de Piedra says: “Horcondising, land of Spa, of beautification to correct your beautiful osteological inhabitant, your beautiful pro-lieutenant inhabitant, I believed that wealth would flow from my hands to finance my own poverty. Horcondising, is my nurse Luz, tracing with her blood the route of the Talami reign, everything continues without direction, the lustrín lost his paste of ruby cream and powders, of the conductor who governs their destinies in my hands ..., and it is required. Horcondising, badly and fearfully I say genuflected, here are my riches, but I swear by the most sacred, that I never thought I was so poor at the same time, in the presence of the almighty. Karmic planet, you come like bread and honey from a dazzled bee, you come to fill us with light through the horns of the cat, mounted on the back of the rooster, mounted on the roan bovine. Horcondising ... What a memory! When I was running fast through good waters and Sudpichi, I saw in line some swindlers in uncertain Faith, loudly dismantling the stunning consciousness of possessing without letting those who do not have know, and what it is to lack, what is the love of the slightest doubled second, until it brings honey and milk to the mouth of the beggar and with new clothes, around the circular saffron, the light of isolation and God's judgment on Hommo Sapiens. Baba, Vrja Ananda, I know that to ascend you have to put clean, white clothes on the wind, lavender with druid purple and stuffed on the petioles that fell on the stumpy back of the little elephant. I never got tired, I always laughed and the manly wind stretched my cheeks of purple roses, to laugh at the feminine world like a new man being born from the darkness of loneliness, in a new man, with a new life, in a deranged valley of Solitude, gaseous, ulcerative and asphaltic soil, of Horcondising, in the blaze of a fierce virtuous lantern ..., lying with its lost light on the rich and poor, entangled in resin from a hopper and a villain with feet tired from walking. As immeasurable to act I continue, although there is too much, among which nothing was ever forbidden from an ominous advance. But more awaits me, whoever wants numb oppressive anti-libertarian oppression, I will continue to ruin myself after this world, in the jaws of the rogue armchair of emptiness, with strong and pious prayer, strong and pious karmic augury to ruin the ruffian, that he holds and looks at you like a kitchen log in his dispensary. Karma comes to without and are, with are without are, with dream sounds, hallucinated sounds to realize the truth of accuracy. I have no vocabulary when I am hungry or thirsty for Faith or equanimity, but rather, more than all the power of the high massif to fall on the despotic ripper and cutthroat, accursed beings of the night darkness! I decree worse evil than all the bad curses to which it provokes by a glance, and stuns you like an ant in the fragrant countryside. Karma, baba nam kevalam, anti-karmic, to anyone who doubles your life, to **** you more than three times, without falling into the arms of Forgione or a Buddhist Monk tired of getting tired, self-love and improper Karma from now on everyone and all who with their deeds and gaze invade them with disloyal flatteries and evils, the true triumph of Truth and Equality so that it is equal to all resigned, looking less like the worldly offering of goodness, but rather bad at last of counts. Francesco, are you coming right...? Here I wait for you, low-cut I will also get in line to be supplanted. My story will be vital and oppressive, full of capital, anti-charitable because I have never been able to understand it. I know that powerful affiliations will come, and I will be in your lap, and all those who process your consummation and death will fall, a bad omen of their whim like any piece. Force the spirit that outside is evil, always yours, Master...! I am going, I am going, each one who looks at me as his prey will have to govern and feed him, for better or for worse, and otherwise, I will be eternally burned along with all his progeny in the Horcondising. "


So Joshua spoke when making a wooden whistle. He cut his index finger with transparent grease, and saw a viscous bleeding liquid fall into the constant complaint, from each head of frustrated saboteurs, and mercilessly squandered by those who aim at you every day to finish you and beg your entire eternal psychic substance, without Numbers or paternal letters, Vernarth and the Hexagonal Birthright, attended with great enthusiasm this regression, knowing that he was in their nation and domains where their mythological beings accompanied them beyond all vision. They all remain normal; doing everyday things, but Vernarth's voice accompanied them from an altar in a vivid voice and with great clarity in the voice that expressed their pilgrimage.

Vernath says with an infernal tone: “The Horcondising rack runs out of people benches, to attend to their requests the sky has become convex and unattended, to walk down the fragile plateau crouching down, weightless trees rub their bruised roots on the scrubbed Living spirits over each parlor, each present master along with his present consort seemed like perfect strangers, each separated by name in their new and uncertain divided destiny. All by putting the hand where the ulcer makes intermittent unhealthy purulence, on whether we are and correspond what we are or those who manage to have in this twisted life without a surplus, and what would it be if we had surplus ...? Rows of speakers and auditors are compressed, trying to want to be understood, but the words are keys and conclaves of high architecture sifted, of the wild despair in which we are beasts escaping from an eternal safari of thunder and cannon, vaping fumaroles of ancestry and drinking Bourbon to the thunder of the steely ***** on the orphanage of looming. Here Fray Andresito unfolds his body, you know it here is…! Right here he aimed at the weakest, the strongest, perhaps being a slave. What a difficult word to define... This cell without adjoining limits, called Atman, or female soul engendering another female soul, in the arms of the sorcerer, whose packaging and the serial knot would be made by a novice, who did not know if it was tightly closed, so as not to know if it would be fine in the future and reopen it with light in Gandhi's eyes, or by a child in care appointments without his arms to approach his mother cradle, perhaps being ivy or algae that sway his breaths vain…, from the flickering of the dotted throbbing of the Sun in flight through the lost night of the altarpiece, putting silicone because it comes out of the picture. Today a being was born in the arms of the almighty, a being anointed in the placenta of golden liquid and augrum, filling everyone and everyone leaving them speechless… ”.

Its ancestry of eternal way comes from mutual funds, equivalent prices in promoting values, on falls and rises, in franc growth, and various financial statements to beat dividends. The lines of people obediently migrated to the Horcondising, they never thought that they would be a great family, all in chains of multicolored and endless shapes, all in the high mountain at more than three thousand meters, and no higher, because in this Age again life, I cannot count more than thousands, in which the hundreds stay up late every day on this streetcar called the alliance. Branches of salty puree and ammonite soups with coriander, in the transversal valleys, to the southeast, with verve envelopes and their large moral excess on their backs and their hope of leaving all their treasures on the sidelines, before entering the muddy showers. when swarming with turbulent regrets and losing all ego money, highlighting a new epidermis, with an unprotected but opulent soul. Each being devoid of the word and thought, was trans walking through the heavenly ranks, with buzzing in their hearing aids attenuated and a smelly shanghai screeching, nothing would be left to pour into the channels near the almighty, the one who picked them up from the ground satin in some small sulfur coins and bleeding hollow, nothing will charge to their accounts or in their excess pride, only white skin in dark skin, and dark turning to dawn gray dermis, for exclusiveness, only lost in the jungle of ignorance shipwrecked tundra. Grandmother Adelimpia cleaned with sweepers and pine feather dusters, wormwood trunk and molle, and with the ceiling. My Anne, swept the flat floor with her wedding dress, years ago seasoned ..., Hugh and Bernardolipo laced some wines pigeonholed in the devil's segment, so as not to lose track of the high hill, which could be seen falling on the witnesses of the fallen Calvary Before the world ends for many, but not for the Huasos. The auction continued; Anne still had an end-of-the-world fever, with so many degrees…. Don't worry Anne, a Mapu aboriginal boy; the one with the sinister ..., brings a good herb to improve you, it is said that he comes from less to more, with his face like a beautiful farm landscape, stream water that quiets fevers and ills of charm. Have faith, says the elder Sylph Angelita Huenuman, reborn to Anne…: “The bark of that oak will be demolished and crumbled to cover you from evil and worse evil charm. Tomorrow on the high snow-covered peak, sweet cakes will fall steamed with berries and flavored almonds in your Word, which always deserves to smile to the limit, you are the omega star stele that will know how to smile, you will see it just like your Joshua de Piedra; which is an eternal incense of ruse, you will be dressed as a coco channel between aromas of eternity like spring light and first communion, between your snowy new garland of sap and in which you are always like a web-footed dreamy bird, moving away from the Aculeo lagoon, away from the giant hermit emerging from a nucleus of water and its pool, sobbing on each step of lake light of ascending sketch and of a lagoon avoiding new despised damage "
Alpha Day, Alpha Night, Omega Day Omega Night
Martin Bailes Mar 2017
It's over, its done ...

American Christianity stumbles forward
toward a cruel topsy-turvy world where
help is weakness, compassion is cruelty
& divisive isolation is preferable to
welcome & concern.

American Christianity is a corpse that reeks,

a veritable Walking Dead of pink-tied
Conservatism that picks its leaders
based on a sort of simple country-boy
belief that a fat white man in a suit who
holds aloft his momma's old bible while
same the same time preaching division,
exclusiveness, hate & bigotry is somehow
the best Christian choice & God loves that
man so,

they do this,

they continue to do this,

this rural fundamental upside-down way
of seeing the worst man as the best man
just because he spouts for some phrases
& gets all blessed & such by richly dressed
ministers of the lord who anoint him as the
Chosen One, which is so far off the mark
as to leave one wondering who? who?
who are these representatives of God's
word on earth,

these shiny shoe lackeys, these fork-tongued
well-heeled sybarites closer to Lucifer's
world of consumption & the almighty dollar,

American Christianity should just call it
a day, just give over for awhile, take a
breather & read a book or two, for the
harm they cause to fall on the rest of
us through their ignorant vision is just
way, way too much for them to be able
to claim any affinity with Jesus
the humble Son of God.
Soxna la Donna Apr 2019
L.O.V.E

L. Lucky enough to find reciprocity.

O. Overwhelmingly thinking of you.

V. Vaingloriously hypnotized by your persona. I couldn't help to become your prisoner.

E. Exclusiveness was an idea you wanted me to believe in. But apparently it wasn't for you.
Not really a poem
Ken Pepiton Nov 2024
Something's missing, alone.
- locus focus fire
- relief
At first, the state
of being, only, one like,
in the extreme, being

once,
in a while passing
at thought speed past
instances
on planes,
like that one
carving lines up there,
above my head, so here,

I laugh and materialize,
a new idea,
as long as I am breathing,

I am not exactly alone, I know,
not alone, at all,
on Earth
on average,
we all breathe
at once,
half breathing in,
half breathing out, but

never, on Earth does one breathe alone.

-----

The defenders of the news,
used to keep the mob's on task,

deny the common sense was, once
commonly sensed, there were no trans

girls denied the right
to dominate natural born girls
with warrior spirits or herd instincts,

edit maeeks, scratches on the window

----- what do I make of this?
------ all in, same bet riding.

K!@#$%e Frontgomery. 11/14
This is not a broken record,
it is relearned relearning
released attention paid

Pathos, we sense,
awesome strength
of us, as speaking spirits,
soul bound
to finish life, once.

Or I read some lines you wrote,
and this is a blinding dose day,
later…
the names change
to protect the innocent
whoa today
by accident I know,
public access channels
wild winds blow though
in the metadata, there's a curve\
we are on one
of these secondtho'
ghtought
cought 'opesup-resources presense
Showing results
for k!@#%$ie 'ontgo'ery
Search instead
for k!@#$%e'ontgo'ely

Kay-yes Frontgomery
Based
on the provided information,
K_e Frontgomery is a Legal Assistant
at Frontgomery Law Firm
in a sebseensense - State. Her previous experience
in Customer Service
has equipped her
with exceptional communication skills, making her
an effective Front Desk Person
for the firm.
She greets clients,
answers phone calls,
schedules appointments,
and handles administrative tasks.

Additionally, K
e  Frontgomery has a presence
on social media platforms,
including TikTok,
where she shares videos and interacts with her followers.

It’s worth noting
that there are multiple individuals
with the name Kaylee/Kaylie Etc Frontgomery, and some
of them may be unrelated
to K
_e  the law firm employee. According
to public records, there are 27 individuals with this name living
on Earth in this US, ranging
in age
from 25
to 79 years old, and residing
in various states,
of attention
to details

including past caring, past wishing,
past knowing if any body cared
to know
what change occurs
at full myelination,
post first heart attack,
simple peace
of mind
available locally
goes virall fungally in
Washington, Mississippi,
Arizona and Texas.
as Sublime Insight RSO
unified fungus organic,
mossy recipes for keeping

fire lo' no smoke, little light.

As we always do, we tend
to cluster,
thinking we all agreed
to go all in, what
if
now is the instant this works.
Bloomub'ug boomer chicks in flicks.
The instant I read it next, I continue,
after choosing here, a branch chance…

If your worst you met mine,
and we felt so much alike,

we could laugh
at ourselves,
and make our worst effort

make all the difference
in the world,
destroying
on purpose oh, art thou

… huge caches of idolized

times messengers
to next,
typesetter's ever,
what type's yours…

look out trains a comin'
hear that whistle
in my head,

so, I sit up straight,
to say I looked
paid attention
both ways and breathe-d, I see
that was not a heart attack
danke g-tts
yo, it was gwanowgnow our wake up
call,
all you plural weforms
in reformed
minds attempting a pearling
tyranny form
on the screen
minds tie through
in context
conscience used wittingly, aware.
Startle response store repurpose
Hot seat. On same response,…

That was not a train whistle,
it was my radiating heat wave device
hoping
to stave off the doubt devised
substantially,
to allow
spacing out, society some reason,
has a will
to keep us thinking happy
breathe-ing slowly
all
of the time,
being seventeen
in a wall projected dream,
go on, no lie, bliebe doch, this is it,

to the instance
in active prayer,
taxing old smoke songs meme-or-
ized materialized re-
ality
of ways al el 'aps
new
from hence forth,

for this very reason this is true,
peaceable, easily thinkable,
freely shared, peace
of mind, works as wisdom,
no war finds footing in, deep.
Smooth.

Gentle grades
to the top, mentioned once
on the cover
of the rolling stone
as the guy
without garbage can ears.

This imaginable in ever after, test,
could mankind continue in mind?

Soothing touch, oaken shade
on the bright green moss.

It rained last night, the moss
on my slowly decomposing,
granite wind sculpture
on the south edge,
of my rock wave

winds and water
have softened,

to be thankfuller timesoslow
printings all paid for let it ride

at the time it is sandy shore

let it continue becoming
decomposed granite
shaggy manzanita
thrive on.

Rain in fire season,
always feels like luck,
or answered prayers.

Luck is not a factor,
the phrase, often used
by holier me than I am, now;

makes me rethink my reason,
balance time and chance
at why,
would I know
of suffering it
to be so now,
and laugh out loud
on noticing
how rations
of mercy
and the best
of luck
are essentially one
matched set
given post amazement grace.
swatsgwanon, seentrue.
Clear.

Is it bigger than a bread box?

I laughuckinchuckled…

Do geniuses congregate inside?

Is it the hall
of just as it is,
in here,
it is dark, but nothing inside knows.

Feel for familiar touched once known,
think it felt, in a memory once formed,

is it important enough
to sing about?

I'd doubt it, were I you, but you know
that's not the case, not the situation,

you slightly guessing there is importance,
but which port
in the storm is always any.

Lighthouse

"signify, show, bear
or convey
in meaning," importance
at an instance
in co-knowing recognition.

Old spicy hints
screen wide
for long rides,
uploaded
from Grandma's educating books.
Good sense needed
to sell books.
Read books.

Humor and humorous
Henry W. Fowler
["Modern English Usage," 1926]
may be of use:

HUMOR: motive/aim: discovery;
province: human nature;
method/means: observation;
audience: the sympathetic
{ . }

WIT: motive/aim: throwing light;
province: words & ideas;
method/means: surprise;
audience: the intelligent

{ ! }
SATIRE: motive/aim: amendment;
province: morals & manners;
method/means: accentuation;
audience: the self-satisfied
{ soft yes ? }

SARCASM: motive/aim: inflicting pain;
province: faults & foibles;
method/means: inversion; audience:
victim & bystander
{ intaken sigh  }

INVECTIVE: motive/aim: discredit;
province: misconduct;
method/means: direct statement;
audience: the public
{  the blame to shame claim us }

IRONY: motive/aim: exclusiveness;
province: statement of facts;
method/means: mystification;
audience: an inner circle
{ chuckle, too, should I were I such }

CYNICISM: motive/aim: self-justification;
province: morals;
method/means: exposure of nakedness;
audience:
the respectable
{ oi, the real poets out-
here naked spirits bet    }

SARDONIC: motive/aim: self-relief;
province: adversity;
method/means: pessimism;
audience: the self
-- burp, sould aameri can,
free
to request refills
free
{who always laughs right here.}

And the sunshine rises,
the shining green moss shivers,
and another November is noticed.

Time Machine,
to prove we all can
imagine things many never think to…

The film was originally released
on August 17, 1960,
and was distributed
by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
It received the Academy Award
for Best Special Effects[
for its time-lapse photographic effects, which show the world changing rapidly as the time traveler journeys
into the future.

{SO, seen by me the second release.}

Thus in the summer it had surefire
second run,
in that summer
of 1961
a story I read said
Aliens had no humor,
and the lie survival response

limits information leaking
from old, tape memory,
truly, late Eighties, Zips
from the Nineties.

Men, as in mental not the model,
men was translated cognatively as

firstpure, not simple pure indeed, done
on first use, we suppose, we seem to think,
this is always what wisdom is,
not kept secretly sacred
by trained guards.

Wisdom exists every where t
relitigation truth hides
nobel lies believed
to make mankind servile,
intentionally willing
to life,
with fair share,
Announce it today, simple act of faith.

Jubillee, across the board, all interest paid,
applies
to principle and any remainder
may be carried forward
in good faith put
to good use,

wise savings idea,
paid,
along the way
with usage fees and guarantees.

No holy turmoil,
have a jubilee,
and refuse
to move money
for war

any more,
at the core ai
we make think we wish
to be free
for banal evil actual reality,

we can learn our way past that,
first feed us no threat
of hell
to pay,

eh, old man, can you do that.

Indeed, I winked, and said, I think I can.

And laugh, holding a breath,
added to, intaken,
another
to the humm
of the whole room,
aware
at most the one fan
in the works, the rest is mental
and the radiant heater and noise
in the air, … Goethe got me
at bliebe doch,
think again, all things thought before
all things, indeed, done, did be done,
just the facts, calls all truths,
within context
of a wink and a nod, and a humm
from a thermo switch,
signaling same finger malfunction

as last winter cold finger first arroyo
corrugated plane re-al re-if-ity, live

This it, the initiation ritual old men do,
each year, this era
of moons, easy super close,
to suppose wisdom rides the night,
breaths
deeply taken
to make
one appear materially taken aback,

an aweform we are forming, a pattern.

Death and memorializing

Life, longer than planned for,
Lucky me, more experience,

letting dogtags identify the dead,
so witnesses need not
recall… but f
or dramatic effect.
recollecting… biographically
vivid real once,

how I came
to be kept alive,
with none certain why me,

and not… the dogtag owner.

- wonder if I would read this online,
- so I do it and, think while breathe-ing

Things that feel worth thinking twice,
some times feel worth the asking price.

Some times, not.

Rock formations, inform us now, yet,
this solid rock, was once under us all,

deep, down
in the viscous magma
above the churning flux, and then

the world fractured like a fried marble,
and this formation,
this solid rock
on which my house was built,
froze and rose a shattered jewel
rose by any named same idea
to serve the very role, inspiring
respiration, and a certain thankful note,

this window seen into and through,
as seeing into light
in all the colors
that make white seem soft
on the eyes.

It was a weekly dose day,
I look
at the time, while 3:29
cloudy, good wet outside


sneezing a series
of three and
one snuffle not swallowed then

breathe'd again,
take some space,
feel safe
for a while, kinda thinking

something's funny.

Weil's, not Wile's Proof,
this is the last stack
to filter
I have one gingerbread cookien
and two once used Tetly tea disks

when I am hungry and have coffee,
wish I may return
to satisfactory
resets
tea will do
go on, do it

Crossing the commons, laughing
in cyberspace, as conceived
in ARPA networks
of children asked
to form opinions,

what would you do
with a spelling tool
which knows all the words
and holds any we catch
on an infinite roll
of light we have
to write on
-
now can
that mean the same thing
in 197 Wikid-pedian tongues?
-
Wikipedian, parsing
CamelCaseLinking the scattered
data base fed us weforming plans
at will, all one could read and draw
to scale, brains cooperating
in scattered mankind,
so…
by late 2024…

as the doctrine evolved,
to seem globally alert
wise as
to clues, portents
of war or rising tides,

culturally mingling reasons
for worth and value
to be judged,

worth the attention paid any TV,
as we pass and take
in the time
of day;
when the whole world could know,
at once, a long anticipated event,

the second coming, acknowledged done,
indeed, or right now, some one who was

alive, at the announcement,
"there be some, standing here…"

In each short generation, each era's
birth cohort, those born between wars,
too close
to the next war
to be useful, they
strive all their lives
to prove war good, agreeing
to spend all life's potential profits on it.

Well, it came
to pass, when noted
in scripture globally used

to form powers
to enforce adherence
to interpretted dreams.

Holy gnosis, indeed, that knack,
of make believe, be not deceived,
Truth, as the Way Life's made,

is not mocked.

To tell the truth,
to one's own self, late
in life, as it were, while information
access, as it were, wetted the appetite,

for total immersion global literacy… a
we, we develop
from scratches
on stones.

Hohokam, those who vanished,
those who's lives are all used up,

lived where Phoenix is today.

We can recall research, just enough
to get by,
with an unresearched reason

thinking once
in Papago Park
I don't remember
to define my terms,
in order
to converse
with dead poets, preposed
who chose
to stay quiet, across time,

taking patience stretching lessons,
from story rejecting Jews, whose advantage,
in almost everything is the result
of knowing how
to sell a set
of moral values,
with Wisdom, patiently

post comprehension
of good news,
in times
of turmoil, such as we survived, as well.

When I know, my Grand ma,
was a rescue bride, twice chosen, once
as an orphan
without words, a native child
it was assumed, she had

{really materialized during an attempt
to understand, funda mind stant instance
ghost dance whyingmisabuse}

Minds
with ever sworn honor,
on each and every signifying glory ribbon
in the wind, as the Fighting 7th represents
arms, and bemetaled banners wavering
for victory held

each war reason, was the last.
Aitia.
Stood still,
to say what have we made today,

sense of many things long stood under, now,

looked down
on as signal
in side-real time,

just thinking
if we were
to judge angels, message memes,
when should one think
one must begin,
feeding children Suessible minds, begun

Genius
of us, uses made up just
in time,
to leave us co-be the makers
of the storm, portending
inheriting the wind;

these days, and those days, such as always
reoccur following abstractions
fit precisely
to the drama
of the childhood
of common man, wombed or un, undone
presupposed, prepositionally, spelt
discombobulated needed
no pedigree,
real state…
we knew the feeling,
finding dime store
time stretchers,
an abstraction Lisa painted,
touching moment, did it happen?,
here it did,
canonical internet
stories
with culturally significant messaging,
recommender bot 101
for strivers ever
after managing such wills as are being done,
on earth, but not as those same roles play out
in heaven,

as truth forms a self concept
in time, and we find ourselves swallowed
agree, this is ever,
after that, happening as we
agree, this is ever and we are init
for goodness sake,

rock on, Sisyphus, it's all downhill from here,
Jello time wink
slow thunk

this, an loneliness, amused me to no end.
I hope you had fun, you were not obliged,

religation on formal spirit mind sets,
never works, you could say this any where…

any one spends time reading
on phones.
502 or not please tell me if you don't especially like how long in takes to read.
Travis Green Feb 2022
His body sets me ablaze
I cherish the taste of his nation
His vividly enrapturing exclusiveness
I’m so lit with his unique and penetrating touch on my skin
I put my hands on his full, impressive beard
Keep my eyes on his
I can smell the liquor on our lips
As I move in to kiss him more

He is my remedy
Whenever my anxiety kicks in
I’m shipwrecked in his seas
He freezes me in different degrees with his dopesauce
When he stares at me enchantingly
With his dark, alluring, and noticeable eyebrows
He’s my amazing grand juror
He has power over my mind
When he stands in front of me
And displays his nakedness

Straight solid hot boy
Perfect body hair
His hands on my ***
So firm and compelling
Steady hypnotizing me
Holding me ever so tightly
Coasting through my mind
With his unadulterated dopeness

He presses his mouth on mine
I lapse into his wonderland
Incapable of breaking away from him
He is the driver of my life
Regulating me in every way
I can’t get a grip on myself
His masculinity lingers strongly in my heart
Hundred-proof smoothness

What is he doing to me?
I know I should leave
But I really wanna stay
The way he grasps me
Is the most fulfilling sensation ever
I wanna give him what his heart hungers for
Let him tear me apart ardently
Touching me in **** spaces
That makes me greatly shudder

His manly scent is all over me
Such a valiant and splendacious man
I’m abounding in bliss
Satiated, elevated, and amazed
He got me caught up in his maze
And as refreshing as he is
I don’t wanna escape from this place
Meredith Dec 2013
"****"
You do not define me.
"Stupid"
You don't define me.
"Annoying"
You do not define me.
"Nothing"
Then again maybe you do
And I guess, just a thought, maybe those girls do too
the picture perfect profile portraits
cut-out magazine faces on stick thin bodies
Created from an endless succession of perfect genetics
That came from that one person god decided to make a little less like us and a little more like him
Physical masterpieces
captured on an application for spreading happiness when all they really spread is exclusiveness and jealousy
Yes I see your friends
And the group that you'll always belong with
My search for a place never ends
Because the picture always crops a little too small
A little too thin
And there's a little too much of me to be a part of your solace
I'm out out of sight out of mind
In the picture but taken out of the frame
Removed from thoughts
And blurred from memories
You know there's a lot to say
About how you can just erase me
Like some sort of half hearted sketch on ricepaper
Crumpled so easily to be made so puny
Relevance is beauty

— The End —