Tag Archives: youth

NaPoWriMo/NaPoREADMo #8 — While is a verb

Posted on by
9 


While is a verb


In the rainwashed gullet, in the skeletal, 
sketched out waste network of the city, 
something marks the invisible boundary 
of an anonymous and boneless aloneness.

A slight and fragile lance has fallen to rest 
in the green and scraggling cracks of the city.
An instrument that softens all the blows,
it’s heart a black stillness that plunges deep, 

sips hunger from a cylinder and slips its 
spike into nightless sleep. Palsied children 
sweat on couches and search for a place to 
get away for a while while what took them 

away waits to take them again to any place 
but here. Washed up on the shore of things, 
they barely remember and no longer care. 

A night-house on the point of ever-beckoning 
return calls and calls and calls. 
				                    We measure 
our lives in so many units of so many kinds. 
How exactly do we measure our deaths?









Keepin' the "Po" in NaPoWriMo....

Four Fold

Posted on by
13 
(...a talisman, perhaps...)




Four fold and full of mirth,
words yield lack and dearth.
Dreams hold drams of killing kind,
coarse drink for healing cuts
of youth’s most mean mistakes,
cleaned now and nearing clever,
never wise but wistful ever.

Quoets for Poets: 8/8/13

Posted on by
14

(Many thanks to KB and Tiffany for showing me where to go with this one.  It’s not their fault I ramble so…I’m not always good at following directions…and besides, they probably had no idea…they were undoubtedly just pointing at trees or something and I, of course, said, “Yes!  That way!  Of Course!” and went crashing off into the trees…)

“What if the delight in poetic form were actually a delight in and return to infantile sensualities?”

“…we see that what is childlike and infantile lies in the form, what is adult in the content.  Content and form then make two poles, across which the magnetic energy of the poem arches.”

“The form pole pulls the poem back then toward infancy, the content pole pulls it forward into adulthood.  Adulthood seems to be the recognition that there are others in the universe besides you, greater causes and greater beings.  the poem surely needs character–the drive forward into experiences–probably embodying pain–that the infant never dreams of in his crib.”

—-Robert Bly 

…and this is why–in that arching electric zone of contact and conflict–

…and precisely where–in that very place within
where mind meets body…

“where the reader’s mind reaches toward something heard or uttered as though vocality were one of the senses.”

—-Robert Pinsky

…where mind meat’s body, where inspiration mixes into the elixir of expiration, where fantasy confronts reality, where…

“…the social realm is invoked with a special intimacy at the barely voluntary level of voice itself.”

—-Robert Pinsky

…where, in the beating of the suffering heart…

“Embarrassment–a halting consciousness of other people, the sudden barricade of social awareness, obstructing emotion and threatening to take over the mind–is in a way the most basic, irreducible manifestation of social reality.”

—-Robert Pinsky

…the blossom of suffering…

“To be thrown back “forever” on oneself alone suggests a degree of mobility, a freedom from constraint and dependence, that is potentially exhilarating as well as deranging: a liberation, as well as a void.”

—-Robert Pinsky

…becomes the creative act…

…and poetry leads to compassion…

“The path itself does not lie there waiting for you to walk along it.  It needs to be cultivated, nurtured—literally, “brought into being.”  Such a path might open up in a revealing moment of insight, only to be lost again through subsequent neglect.  To believe in a path is not enough.  One has to create and maintain it.  The practice of the eightfold path is a creative act.”

—-Stephen Batchelor

…for this path we walk…

…this path we all walk…

…is always walked alone…

…this we remember as we walk…