Attrition

Another angst-ridden poem about flawed relationships. Tiring, isn't it? The details change but the essence stays basically the same. New metaphor, same old shit. Why post it? Because I'm bored tonight and not up to writing something original. Although I have to say, if something like this is going to be part of my oeuvre, it's certainly a goad and motivation to write something better. I mean, four years out of high school and this is what I considered worth polishing up for publication? As the saying goes, it has a certain naive charm... But, really.

Attrition

we never showed the slightest discomfort
about the way things went wrong at the end.
no one really believed our straight faces.

we read the book together but when we neared
the end of the story, you sped up because you
were the faster reader and i lost the joy
of the plot as it reached a climax.

a matter of time:
the pages full of words i
needed to look up, but you
didn't have time for that.
you shed no tears:
after the heroine died upon reaching
her heart's desire, you sneered
openly at the blatant fiction.
no second chance:
you knew it was all a lie and
no woman lives in a perfect world
where she reaches an ultimate goal.
only too well:
the cards were marked from the
beginning, and only some know how
to read them and their secrets.

my heart fractured but you had set yours
in concrete to save it from sledgehammers.
you never felt the feather's touch.


August, 1980

©2006, wordlackey for php

The Mutant Shrine

An attempt to describe a punkish attitude. Despite what it sounds like, I did not intend "fire that burns coldly in hard veins" to refer to heroin or any drug. I was trying to contrast the celebratory and worshipful inebriation of ancient bacchanals with a quite different kind of modern worship. (We'll leave the whole somewhat related "Dionysus and the Maenads who tear him to pieces" thing aside.)

I regret not working harder with the cadences and rhythms within the lines of the poem. Pity. However I adore the last two lines and they way they distill (sorry) what I was getting at. They aren't perfect but I like them. Note my affected and conscious use of the spelling of "compleatly." Funny, huh? Even funnier is the anachronistic use of hogsheads to describe where the bacchanals got their wine. In Greece during that time, I believe they would have used amphorae to store wine. Let's just chalk it up to artistic license rather than ignorance, OK? "Dammit, Jim! I'm a poet, not a historian!"


The Mutant Shrine

The youth eternally within drunken awareness,
happily singing with the grape vines
Growing in abundance and hogsheads that never
entirely empty, never compleatly drain.

In the hills of Naxos, Bacchus reveled
with the ardent followers of his creed,
Celebrating fervently the coming of the full moon,
toasting happily with worldly certainty.

In the streets and alleys of the city, young
bacchanals perform different rites;
Death in their eyes, they imbibe not of wine
but of fire that burns coldly in hard veins.

No laughter echoes in the darkness of the alley
encasing the votaries who have forgotten
The name of their deity, and they hiss loudly
in the silence surrounding them.

They chant: All the gods are mutants,
deviants howling and hawking their wares;
We are the defiant and the hating,
and our love can kill the gods.

March, 1979

©2006, wordlacky for php

Reflections in a Fun House Mirror

[An example of my stream of consciousness prose/poetry. At the time, I would often use this writing style as a Rorschach to find out what was bubbling under the surface of my mind. Sort of a psychological diagnostic I did on myself. On occasion, it became less an inner roadmap and more a cohesive (in my subjective opinion) stand alone piece. This was one such.

I’m amused to note my early media criticism woven into this as well. The tone of cynical idealism is ill-fitting but, hey, I've never claimed perfection of vision or execution for my poetry. I was just trying to express something almost nonverbal so I tried to bend the language and form to suit the attempt. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

As may be obvious, not everything I'm posting here I would consider my best work. I decided to scan in some of my old "finished" poetry and, as the spirit moves me, I post a piece with some commentary. I feel even my failures are worth at least a cursory dissection and analysis from my vantage point decades later.

So why do it in public? Do I crave humiliation and brickbats? Am I looking for applause and admiration? I don't think any of those apply but I'm not certain. I note that I'm doing more of this while at the same time letting my more political blog DemiOrator relax a little. The rigors of critical thought are often tiring for me. Poetry, even just reading and posting it, engages other parts of my mind. Even though it is language, in my poetic process I use rhythm, visual and auditory maps, pattern creation, et cetera. It's relaxing for me. I feel at ease with creating and processing these verbal constructs, much more so than strictly linear writing and thought. It's a hobby, my fun and games. I'm sharing it here because I find it amusing and hope someone else might find it so.

And if you're offended by some of my words, I might suggest you look elsewhere for your Hallmark Moments™. I am unlikely to describe them here.]


Reflections in a Fun House Mirror
(or: civilization as a sadosexual oral fixation)

jacked off/up revved up motor/morals revolving rotating faster faster shift into another gear into another level of status pyramid levels building higher and higher (the fourth estate watches) clinging to a vision of the right world of a utopian reality badlands never see daylight (the fourth estate knows) kept hidden on darkroom floors they (the dystopian badlands) are limited to real victims not the cameras microphones and subtle editing room mechanics (society erodes and i only laugh) who do not want to see bodies pumped full of bullets or the insides of jail cells or raped women (out of sight out of mind) tasting the real world and excising nauseous parts to make it more palatable/bland and lacking exciting tastes repe­tition dulling visions/dreams (forgetting) the savoury tang from licking idealistic cunts and cocks (forgotten) the liquor of regeneration...

...i swallowed my pureblood purebred visions some time ago not being able to take the schism created with reality but it didn't seem to change anything (the heartless still chew on the skin and bones of the helpless and vampyrize my soul...)

(...thrust rip skip-to-my-lou darling dangling jugular)(waiting for attachment...)

waiting,

inarticulate screaming;

can you understand the wordless sound?
did you even hear it?

(people are dying of starvation,
(right now, close to where you live
(and all over the world...)

why don't you eat them?
everyone else seems to...

June, 1978

© 2006, wordlackey for php

Mystery Achievements in Conversation

[This poem traveled a different path than many of my poems. Generally, my poetry is written in a single session. Oh, I revise them and clean them up later but major re-writing is rare for me. Usually revision is mostly adjusting lines, punctuation, changing phrasing, eliminating words, etc. This poem started out about a third the finished size below and was originally titled "When We Talked" in January, 1980. Somehow in the course of revision it grew substantially.

The use of short phrases to introduce several lines of related imagery was typical of my poem structure of the time. Although I understood more traditional poetry forms and structures at the time, I had little patience for using them. I preferred to essentially create forms for the individual poems that represented (to my mind) something specific about the content or subject. There were some self-constructed forms I reused often. Sometimes the form was not in the physical construction or placement of lines but internal rhythms and sounds within the wording and phrasing itself. Sometimes this would take the form of internal rhymes but more often it was patterned sounds within the text. Note also my use of the British spelling of "colour." I have these affectations...

As I've mentioned often here, the printed version of the poem in this blog does not contain the original indents or form. The scan above, while difficult to read, at least gives an idea of the original format. I'm resigned to the fact I won't be able to reproduce some of my more visually complex poems here. I haven't even made the rudimentary effort on the poem below because it's just such a compromise, I'd rather leave it plain and simple. ]

Mystery Achievements in Conversation

let them go:
the private lies twitching in the dark
of deepshaded thoughts in candlelit
cafes along the serpentine river.
the retribution:
feeding on society's garbage to find
that even burning bushes burn to cinders.
the dawning realization:
of hidden traumas coming to a
blackwhite surface in soft style.
give it to me:
the plane flying close to the tops
of waves cresting in the middle of
the pacific ocean, and we watch.
all leaders will be tall and brave:
better start thinking of alternatives
since the yellow pictures we hold of each
other are fading fast in the light.
dream all night long:
the stars shining down on
the flaming towers along the
turnpike, the nightland showing
its scarred and longing face.
can you hear me:
the car flaming as it hits the gas pumps
billowing flames blowing across the black
night sky, blotting out the stars.
laughing goals:
dreams just like everyone else here,
but they are so out of reach when
the daylight glare evaporates them.
they were such small lies:
the telling of false accomplishments
and singular encounters with bare
luminaries and incandescent suns.
could we speak:
only in tongues incomprehensible
to one another, using reference points
invisible to our individual cultures.
we knew nothing of each other:
only the victorian facades presented
in colours of our halcyon days muted by
the present and shuttered very tightly.
smooth wonderment:
mysterious communication of senseless
bodies beginning to feel and search out
the vaguely perceived achievement.
could we walk across the water:
the oil hot and consuming between us
claiming the right of holding us apart
but once, once we talked about it.
i hear the call:
quavering and faint across
the waters deep and inhabited by
creatures who understand the urge,
and they are silent when we swim.

January, 1980
©2006 wordlackey for php

Early Morning Credo

[A moody little piece of poetry, it seems more like an attempt at creating atmosphere than anything else. This also came out of the same romantic explosion/disaster mentioned in other posts, notably Broken Utterly (e.g., self-pity) and Napoleon's Russian Offensive. While those two poems reek of personal chaos and wild emotional thrashing, this one is calm and meditative by comparison.]

Early Morning: Credo
(or: Magic is not Enough)

i was talking with you again after all
the bars had closed down for the silken night
the words shooting splinters between us
the philtre type words i tried to use
had no power and fell behind us

strange chords vibrated in the air
eked out on the wall in #2 pencil
as we continued our beloved dialectic
on emotional definition and the meaning
of heartblood pumping strongly

dead poppies on the corner as we
slide past our conversation halted
in reverence the moment of silence
extending for five blocks as we
inhale the fragrance of their essence

all the centuries call out like
ophelia from the slick river surface
speaking to us on the length of
endurance magnified by the present
dead and just flotsam on the top

i believed talking could alleviate
the triphammer tension mounting in
our souls but only fools count on
anything and i should have known
we were in deep up to our weak necks

you wouldn't look into my face
and my hands twisted mindlessly
as we strode making their own
eloquent statements very querulously
telling of the yearning of the heart

our dreams lost in the first sunrays
as we come to the front door of the apartment
we enter and the sun blinds us through
the picture window looking over the city
we gaze at each other for a moment quietly

we retire still not understanding

March, 1980
©2006 wordlackey for php

City Night

An early example (1977) of my stream of consciousness poetry. And, no, I have no idea what the hell I was doing with the punctuation in this. Perhaps I was using them in the older fashion, as pauses for reading aloud. I just don't remember but it's kinda strange.

I was rather enamoured with using slashes to combine words in odd ways. "Para/fables" is, I think, a grafting of parable and fables with the additional use of para meaning to the side of or along side of.

When I look at it now, it reminds me of a rap lyric. Not when I wrote it but there are flowing rhymes and rhythms throughout and a bit of lyrical sensibility. Obviously neither the content nor the vocabulary is "rap" as we know it today. And I have the fairly widespread white boy musical disability: total lack of musical rhythm. But word rhythm is something else, I can do that. When I read it aloud, even I, beat deaf cripple that I am, can find a pulse to it.


City Night

High pressure elation shooting

from the tips of pain-encrusted

nerves toward the silent and endless,

(mouthing syllables of lost distance)

emerging from para/fables

crooning their own versions of night

in a lustful craze that burns,

burns elves as if they were fagots

distilled from a different substance

(apollo in antitonal) visions seems

mirthless and without poesy...

sigh draws nigh unto completion

encased in competition,

enclosed in a deep dark city sensation,

pins stab in flickering neon,

irresistible flow of millions as one

rarefied and diversified entity

pushpulling pleasure and pain thru sieves;

gyrating madly and noisily there,

here in a/the centre of far flung sadness,

happiness yet floats a banner:

singles, couples, groups, the whole: kinship

of one for another, miracle rated (ranted),

communicationslanted, bantered offhandedly,

horror binds/winds fear/intoxication,

discounted hopes on sale (by mail),

scandals prattle everywhere in scores,

outraged public mores (they cry: more!),

too downed out to listen (vitamin-Q),

too upped to stop (caffeine on the brain),

(question: what/when/how is sane

relative to anthill city life?)

the hill is a razor sharp knife;

not occam's razor, for how do

you define these variables?

(the razor has serrated edges.)


October 1977
©2006 wordlackey for php

Broken Utterly (e.g., self-pity)

[Just another in a seemingly endless series of poems during the period about heartbreak and self-recrimination. A redeeming feature in this example, in my mind, is there seems to be more than a hint of humor and an awareness of how these feelings are very commonplace as relationships end. As the saying goes, I got over it.

Once again I run up against the formatting limitations of Blogger. Lines of the third verse were indented somewhat differently in the original. These difficulties in reproducing the form I originally envisioned is affecting my choices of which poems I'm putting here. I'm tending to avoid those with complex levels of indenting. I think that's a shame because some of those poems are also more complex in structure because of these visual cues. That's my opinion.]

Broken Utterly (e.g., self-pity)

tell me once again
can't hear you
the bloody movement of hands
deep in warm entrails
savage glee, the talons rip
thrust thru the surface of
the best things in the world
things you can’t find
in darkness
want to be kind
snarl out the syllables
in mean violet tones of pain
maddened creature struggling

tell me once again
i'11 shout it out
without any thought
sad confusion
never wanted to love
never asked for this
it comes demonshape spastic
flailing limbs of victims
such a scandal
such an event
so nothing
all zeros drawn on
a deepblue backdrop
more pain
more dogs

torn out the heart beats slowly pulsing

game of catch as catch can played very intensely

dropped cold in the grey dust

shiny shoes step lightly on dead muscle

with no strength left to contract

tell me once again
intimacy can kill
maybe i'll believe you
this time
the fragments of antipersonnel
weapons screaming in the air
filling walking forms
to the brim
trapped by the situation
the buzzing combat flies
barred from the continuum
a real flair
for this destiny
a triumph of some weakness
taken in years ago
on voyages without number
to lands without names
it could happen to you


March, 1980
©2006 wordlackey for php

Scopolamine Lecture: Prolix

[I seem to be annotating these poems as I'm posting them. A little context, a little storytelling help me feel like this isn't just an exercise of living in the past. I also think it's the nervous chatter of embarrassment.

As I've said before, many of these older poems are emotionally strange for me now. I admit I have trouble telling how meaningful they might be to other people. I see the patterns, the underlying references, but I don't know if other people can see them. The problem with my poetry is that I'm often busy expounding on my personal mythology and touchstones, rather than attempting to adjust to the sensibility of the outside reader. Like dreams, my poetry has often functioned as my way of sorting out my thoughts and emotions. I suspect much of it comes across as quite cryptic and/or shockingly graphic.

I advise readers to approach my poems like bits of fiction. I often write about situations and characters which are completely imaginary and often surreal. It would be a mistake to read too much of my personality into them.

This brings me to the following poem. I'm a little unsure of the date but probably 1981-82. The tone may come across as callous yet strangely light. Often the key to my poems is the title. The title will provide a setup. Another way to look at it is the poem is a dictionary entry. The title will be the word entry of a dictionary and the poem as a whole will be the definition. Or maybe that's bull.

There's a saying that writers are liars. I talk about getting to some underlying truth but mostly I puts the pretty words together. Shiny, shiny! Oh, sad! Angry! All of this and more. (grin)]

Scopolamine Lecture: Prolix

laughing as we found you broken on the beach
like an unstuffed doll, spewing forth ocean smells
with a slight whiff of rancid grease on your breasts.
you were such a good dancer at one time,
connecting discontinuous images into stories
hewn like almost-forever in our memories.

i once felt your hot touch on my neck when
we were both warm bodies in the sunshine.
the picnic had been finished for some time
as we read sections from giraudoux's electra
while sipping wine with a very full body.
we might have made love that afternoon
but for our talking about it.

there is a gnarled tree overhanging the gully
where a stream sometimes flows and you once sat.
the ravine was dry the day we all went
to visit it in honour of your viscous memory.
we stood next to the tree recalling your face and,
giggling gleefully, we pushed it into the gully.

i remember asking you one evening why you
had never blown dandelions across the fields.
you looked at me with eyes mascara dark and
said: 'who am i to preempt the blowing winds?
they have their uses as i have my own.'
i asked you what function you fulfilled and
your eyes left me, fleeing into the green distance.

we couldn't help applauding when
you finally resurrected, taking
half bows with a curious smile.
i saw deep in your eyes
a gleam of faraway lands i
was destined never to see,
and my heart shattered.

© 2006 wordlackey for php

Thyestean (or, how I named this blog)

[I named this blog after the last lines of this poem. Thyestean means cannibal. Some cultures speak of the "divine madness" of poets. This poem is reflective of that tradition. Or perhaps it's a piece of "performance art." You decide.

In the early 1980s, I actually put together a poetry manuscript under the title "Sullen Oblations at Alien Altars". It never really went anywhere. Oh, I think I submitted it to the "Alice James" (?) poetry award but it was unsuited to their needs. It's been gathering dust since. Putting some of those poems up here is my way of reclaiming them and trying to reconnect with my somewhat stunted creative energies. Many of them are flawed from my current perspective but I'm putting them up without editing. It's embarrassing but very interesting to me to see how my mind worked at the time.

I always wanted to write fiction but lacked the discipline or skill to adequately flesh out a story. In my poetry of this time, I see character sketches and suggestions of fuller stories. I'm starting to look at those aspects as a positive thing rather than a failure of my fiction writing. Whatever.]


Thyestean

never knew whence came the word
thurl served with flourishes
and sly smiles cast knowingly.

new mad poets throw their
newest creations out the window,
constructs of possible paths
leading from the crux splaying out
spiderthread trails through their minds.

One particular word toyer took
the poems from his typewriter
and ate them, phrase by phrase,
as soon as they were finished,
the tastes satiating him alone.

the feast done,
no dieties castigated him
as he performed yet
another sullen oblation
at their alien altars.

November, 1981
© 2006, wordlackey for php

The Gone World Being Really Gone

[A rather less-than-impressive meditation on the influence of the Beat poets on Punk Rock with slight reference to the 1960s counterculture. I consider this an interesting failure. The last line is obviously and embarrassingly ripped off from a Harlan Ellison short story named "Croatoan". And, of course, the blatant use of the beginning of Ginsberg's "Howl" in the third verse. It's not plagarism, it's an homage. Right. I did this sort of thing fairly often in my poems of this period. If you think you recognize fragments of music lyrics in other poems here, you're probably right. I like to think these are referential rather than plagarism. I rarely used more than a few words or a phrase at a time so I think I'm safe from being sued. I think.]


The Gone World Being Really Gone

pictures of the gone world by lawrence ferlinghetti
was once within my grasp, my caressing possession
the fleeting flutter of beat beat beat images
drifting singing thru my pores and becoming
passion in union with my lazy flesh holding
conference with floating matrices of my mind

soon i will sell even allen ginsberg's empty mirror
and it will be gone gone gone into the past and shot
apart by infidels who cannot dig the importance
of eating to the beat beat beat language of poets
who understood and practiced another modal scale

i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging their
fear-ridden bodies through alleys ill-lit in search
of love lost ten years ago before they even knew
what they were looking for with their angry minds

too precious for words and savaged by thoughts of
selling their bodies just to make the bread to buy
a meal on the neon streets in some burgerking or
another allnite joint selling an american dream
very cheaply to satisfy a grasping hand reaching

sweetheart, have you seen them running wild as
they pushed safetypins into already bloodshot eyes
to show how little they care for the world they
love so strongly they must take downs to insulate
them from the ironhard embrace it offers seductively

space invaders and punks reeling in the streets
in the hope of realization of the glory of it all
waiting for something clean to come their strange way
hurting and hungry as they reach for the throats
of the controllers manipulating them in pure wonder

who sneered with passion at all who showed any
passion and ripped their guts out in bars to
spill the heavy beat emotion out in a form real
and solid in the silence encased in the city
in waves of pristine feeling and ultimate understanding

can you hear them full of grace in the nighthome
beat beat beating drums and hearts full of cynical
thought because of the dreams forced upon them
with many complications and neverelevant decisions
do you hear them lawrence they call you father

February, 1980
© 2006, wordlackey for php

Whine of the Wordlackey

If I had better CSS skills, I'm sure I could adjust the indenting. I'm having a little trouble figuring out which paragraph bits apply to the blockquotes and which to the main paragraph styles. There's definitely a "margin" setting I'm missing somewhere. I'm just pissed that there's no easy or obvious method of creating a poetry format I can use. It severely limits my ability to reproduce the poems in their original form. Bah!

If you have any tips for solving this quandry, please leave me a comment.

Napoleon's Russian Offensive

[The following is undated but was probably originally written in the spring of 1980. A cheery little thing about miscommunication between lovers. It's certainly not based on personal experience and my two and a half years of celibacy following the alleged incident, uh, the writing of the poem is purely coincidental.

Once again, I am unable to reproduce the formatting of the original. When I orginally composed on an electric typewriter, the visual impression of the indents for different lines in relation to each other was an integral part of the poem. I tried putting in repeated &nbs-p (without the hyphen) to approximate the tabular effect but apparently Blogger doesn't really like that and gets rid of them. It could be that Blogger just doesn't like the form of my poetry unless I alter the basic template in some way. I'll poke around to see if there is something I can do about it.]

[Update: I've managed to jigger the blockquote to work to indent lines without it looking horrible. However I'm still left with the problem of needing to indent several different levels (approximately four) to satisfy my formatting requirements. The template pretty much only has two paragraph styles I can apply within a post: a normal paragraph and a blockquote paragraph. As far as I can tell, this is a limitation within Blogger's built-in editor. I've tried posting from MS Word (it's a little Blogger program) and the formatting worked briefly but then Blogger's editor stripped out the indents. 'tis a puzzlement. This is all maddenly kludgy. I may leave it alone for the moment.]

Napoleon's Russian Offensive

you wanna hear the objective view?
got a few weeks of spare time?'

transmission garbled by the negligent receiver
don't want to hear it coming
through cold air loud and clear
such a wretched action
hit by a truck, alone at the intersection
I’m just fucked over
and stuck with the groans evoked
veins bulging within my head
blackmailed by sad emotional movements
my honest travesty
the whine of self-castigation
half undressed and pitiful
in the darkness on my soul
i am that

watching for some form of self-respect
certainly not developing in the near future
don't whimper it again
i heard you before in feedback
kick back the hurt and stop sobbing
before i convulse with revulsion
there's no winning in this
parasitic situation growing strong
feeding on the feelings, tumorous
shut my eyes and lose all grace
as i lie to myself with
soapopera sentimental gestures
in guilt and negation of the previous
stupidity so contemptuous

i once called it trust but
it has changed to mere fumbling
in the dark, wanting to appear special
how trite we aspire to be
snowflakes fluttering
sleep in almost intimate happiness
only to become fools dreaming
of the stars in the sky
i don't want to see what you mean
because it oppresses me
when i grasp the actual meaning
I’ll never feel as if i know
exactly what you're saying
the night obscuring the winter brightness

I’m sickened in the violent moment,
consumed totally by the strict demands

© 2005, wordlackey for php