Without

One final poem to round out the month. We've had Walt we've had some dark and some light. This is a final taste of dark. The final two poems have a common theme of loneliness and belonging I hope you enjoy Without. What is Without for you ?


WITHOUT

There's so many ways to be lonely
Too many
And There's so many ways is only growing
It's empty in the crowd
Shouting loud but only in your head
Deep in your mind shrieking screaming yelling crying
never a break from realization
Never a break from feeling or thinking
No off switch for moods or insanity
Refrain after refrain
Chorus after chorus
Song after song
Of grim desolation and turbulence
But in silent winds that envelope nothing
And in a blank endless desert plain without feeling
Without is what lies within
Without cannot help but phrase itself as a question
Why does this happen
Why the endless banality
Why the never-ending hope
Why hope why think it'll be any different
Wander torn and tear
But beyond the flesh is the rending
The gentle first rip and then the breaking as everything breaks
And the anti-substance spills
Perhaps into the without where it at last rests
the without that I am trapped within.

Left Behind

Hey
I see you smiling laughing
Upon that distant frame
Did I tell you your smile lit up
Rooms
Well it did and still does
I can see you now
Without seeing you
Its odd but somehow
There's traces that what you
Were is still there in that picture
Frame
Remember you cried
Do you remember how much you
Said you'd miss me
Yeah I know it was a different time
And a different you
Yeah you think it sounds odd
But you are different
Which scares me cos i feel the same
Am i the same
And why is that the way
When does it happen
And do you feel it happening
Does something leak out of you
Did it make you sad
Or was it too late by the time
You realized
I heard you don't have much time
Heard your very busy
Yes working hard
And i guess im proud
Or at least I ought to be
I can't say what's changed
It wasn't my choice after all
And how can I know what you thought
Or what you will think of me
Perhaps all I can hope is maybe
You don't forget me entirely
But now I'm sad your lips don't move
Because this isn't you at all
Its just a picture in a frame
But you look happy
So happiness is infectious
So I've been told
I don't know why your smiling sweet girl
But I'll smile too and maybe somewhere your smiling
And maybe just Maybe you might pause
And remember me
And maybe that might join us
But I don't believe in any of that and
Neither do you so I'll just sit here
And you be where ever you need to be
You do what you need live as you like
It's okay I'm absolutely sold on
This and for what it's worth
Part of me is glad of it
Not all of me just part
I am only human
And I do miss you and I do love you
Want you and perhaps imagine I need you
But there's no point I'll look away for now
Goodbye

Channels of Light

Sometimes it's fun to just explore in words. It's funny watching where thoughts lead. Ultimately I'd say this is such a passage an exploration and also a revealing.

Poetry I have always believed is closer to how we actually feel not necessarily think, but feel.

Channels of light
Channels of day
Strands Of light
Rivulets running light
Dewy morning
Dewy wet morning light
The light as it flows
The light as it flows out of the
blue pearls of your eyes
The light of your eyes
The light of fate

The Corridor

I was walking up to work on Friday morning. I walk up this steep wide road called Bridge Street for any Sydney siders, to work and the light was just shining down the street. All I saw ahead of me was this blazing yellow light it was incredibly beautiful and all I thought was one word. Corridor. I wrote it in my notebook instantly and it was only this morning that I thought up a poem to go along with what I saw.

The Corridor

The light whirls down the funnel

down the funnel corridor

like it has before

every day since its human construction

and yet the light

the light trickles here just like

any brook or stream 

just as any in nature

and why is this and what is this

that a corridor of tall skyscrapers

can do this

why on earth should it appear

as a shimmering halo atop the climb

each day and who can tell

who can ever truly know

the source and ways of lights

twisting down these corridors

Biting

 This is something I found floating around that I hadn't posted and I can understand why haha. But I think I'll post it and for the record I'm not disturbed, but I enjoy the very powerful imagery in this. I hope it doesn't offend anyone's tastes (but consider this a warning for the un-initiated). Anyway here is,

Biting

Biting stabbing knives in the dark

Down at the poolside and they dripped

Shiny red blood and they stained those clear waters or maybe

Maybe the biting bitten red hue was all the better to observe the way her limbs

Twitched in the pale moonlight

From Pent up aching Rivers and Spontaneous Me by Walt Whitman

Greetings all readers past and future :)

So the theme of October seems to be Whitman, but I just realised something I haven't shown you any of him yet. Well my introduction as many people's is through the very epic and when I say epic I mean this thing is very, very long, Song of Myself.  I thought it might be interesting to explore something different in his poems, so the two I'm going to share today are very sensual, which at first surprised me it's his style but the subject matter is a lot more different.

Now let's face it this has been expressed so many times, in so many times and places, which speaking of which I should post some Catullus up here sometime. Haha. The fact is though I think Walt brings something entirely his own to the always increasing abundance of love and poetry that explores intimacy. Anyway don't let me tell you read it for yourself. The beauty as I keep saying again about Walt's poetry is that it's power often comes from his melodies and rhythms. His words are very plain, but very powerful. Anyway introductions aside. Have a read of From Pent-up Aching Rivers and Spontaneous Me.

Check out this link if you want to see more poems by Walt Whitman and thank you to Bartleby.com and www.poemhunter.com for being brilliant enough to keep Mr Whitman's poetry alive and well onto the internet and also for allowing me to use the text on your sites.

From Pent-Up Aching Rivers


FROM pent-up, aching rivers;
From that of myself, without which I were nothing;
From what I am determin'd to make illustrious, even if I stand sole
among men;
From my own voice resonant--singing the phallus,
Singing the song of procreation,
Singing the need of superb children, and therein superb grown people,
Singing the muscular urge and the blending,
Singing the bedfellow's song, (O resistless yearning!
O for any and each, the body correlative attracting!
O for you, whoever you are, your correlative body! O it, more than
all else, you delighting!) 10
--From the hungry gnaw that eats me night and day;
From native moments--from bashful pains--singing them;
Singing something yet unfound, though I have diligently sought it,
many a long year;
Singing the true song of the Soul, fitful, at random;
Singing what, to the Soul, entirely redeem'd her, the faithful one,
even the prostitute, who detain'd me when I went to the city;
Singing the song of prostitutes;
Renascent with grossest Nature, or among animals;
Of that--of them, and what goes with them, my poems informing;
Of the smell of apples and lemons--of the pairing of birds,
Of the wet of woods--of the lapping of waves, 20
Of the mad pushes of waves upon the land--I them chanting;
The overture lightly sounding--the strain anticipating;
The welcome nearness--the sight of the perfect body;
The swimmer swimming naked in the bath, or motionless on his back
lying and floating;
The female form approaching--I, pensive, love-flesh tremulous,
aching;
The divine list, for myself or you, or for any one, making;
The face--the limbs--the index from head to foot, and what it
arouses;
The mystic deliria--the madness amorous--the utter abandonment;
(Hark close, and still, what I now whisper to you,
I love you---O you entirely possess me, 30
O I wish that you and I escape from the rest, and go utterly off--O
free and lawless,
Two hawks in the air--two fishes swimming in the sea not more lawless
than we;)
--The furious storm through me careering--I passionately trembling;
The oath of the inseparableness of two together--of the woman that
loves me, and whom I love more than my life--that oath
swearing;
(O I willingly stake all, for you!
O let me be lost, if it must be so!
O you and I--what is it to us what the rest do or think?
What is all else to us? only that we enjoy each other, and exhaust
each other, if it must be so:)
--From the master--the pilot I yield the vessel to;
The general commanding me, commanding all--from him permission
taking; 40
From time the programme hastening, (I have loiter'd too long, as it
is;)
From sex--From the warp and from the woof;
(To talk to the perfect girl who understands me,
To waft to her these from my own lips--to effuse them from my own
body;)
From privacy--from frequent repinings alone;
From plenty of persons near, and yet the right person not near;
From the soft sliding of hands over me, and thrusting of fingers
through my hair and beard;
From the long sustain'd kiss upon the mouth or bosom;
From the close pressure that makes me or any man drunk, fainting with
excess;
From what the divine husband knows--from the workof fatherhood; 50
From exultation, victory, and relief--from the bedfellow's embrace in
the night;
From the act-poems of eyes, hands, hips, and bosoms,
From the cling of the trembling arm,
From the bending curve and the clinch,
From side by side, the pliant coverlid off-throwing,
From the one so unwilling to have me leave--and me just as unwilling
to leave,
(Yet a moment, O tender waiter, and I return;)
--From the hour of shining stars and dropping dews,
From the night, a moment, I, emerging, flitting out,
Celebrate you, act divine--and you, children prepared for, 60
And you, stalwart loins. 


 Spontaneous Me

SPONTANEOUS me, Nature,
The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,
The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,
The hill-side whiten’d with blossoms of the mountain ash,
The same, late in autumn—the hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and light and dark green,	5
The rich coverlid of the grass—animals and birds—the private untrimm’d bank—the primitive apples—the pebble-stones,
Beautiful dripping fragments—the negligent list of one after another, as I happen to call them to me, or think of them,
The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,
This poem, drooping shy and unseen, that I always carry, and that all men carry,	10
(Know, once for all, avow’d on purpose, wherever are men like me, are our lusty, lurking, masculine poems;)
Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers, and the climbing sap,
Arms and hands of love—lips of love—phallic thumb of love—breasts of love—bellies press’d and glued together with love,
Earth of chaste love—life that is only life after love,
The body of my love—the body of the woman I love—the body of the man—the body of the earth,	15
Soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west,
The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down—that gripes the full-grown lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs, takes his will of her, and holds himself tremulous and tight till he is satisfied,
The wet of woods through the early hours,
Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep, one with an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other,
The smell of apples, aromas from crush’d sage-plant, mint, birch-bark,	20
The boy’s longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what he was dreaming,
The dead leaf whirling its spiral whirl, and falling still and content to the ground,
The no-form’d stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with,
The hubb’d sting of myself, stinging me as much as it ever can any one,
The sensitive, orbic, underlapp’d brothers, that only privileged feelers may be intimate where they are,	25
The curious roamer, the hand, roaming all over the body—the bashful withdrawing of flesh where the fingers soothingly pause and edge themselves,
The limpid liquid within the young man,
The vexed corrosion, so pensive and so painful,
The torment—the irritable tide that will not be at rest,
The like of the same I feel—the like of the same in others,	30
The young man that flushes and flushes, and the young woman that flushes and flushes,
The young man that wakes, deep at night, the hot hand seeking to repress what would master him;
The mystic amorous night—the strange half-welcome pangs, visions, sweats,
The pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers—the young man all color’d, red, ashamed, angry;
The souse upon me of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked,	35
The merriment of the twin-babes that crawl over the grass in the sun, the mother never turning her vigilant eyes from them,
The walnut-trunk, the walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripen’d long-round walnuts;
The continence of vegetables, birds, animals,
The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent, while birds and animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent;
The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity,	40
The oath of procreation I have sworn—my Adamic and fresh daughters,
The greed that eats me day and night with hungry gnaw, till I saturate what shall produce boys to fill my place when I am through,
The wholesome relief, repose, content;
And this bunch, pluck’d at random from myself;
It has done its work—I tossed it carelessly to fall where it may.

Ode to a Burrito

I realize this is a bit unusual and a little silly. Well i just had a burrito at lunch as i do and by god it was good and I know why I continue buying them and adoring them and eating them. In that order haha. Anyway this is my loving ode to the highlight of my Friday and I dare say it's a good substitute for a woman....(for the time being).


Ode to a Burrito

Gentle darling burrito
How I love your lettuce that on
Occasion tickles the back of my throat and so playfully catches in my teeth
With gorgeous ltomatoes infused with the passion and flavors of the blood red earth from which you were born
My juicy companions
And your sensual guacamole
How do I love thee
Devilishly creamy body and something hidden something so fresh so sensual that you transport me back to your majestic tropical
Home and indeed those other lesser praised of the condiments
The sour cream cheese and last of all you sweet pearls of corn how your sweet yellow juices fill my
Mouth and pass so sneakily over my tongue such joy such subtly
Oh my charming burrito now we are one you and I
Alas that our relationship should end so horrificly and abruptly as you are ejected so violently after my consumption
But i shall always cherish these moments and thoughts thank you my dear friend

Caterpillars

It seems listening to Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman is having a very copy cat effect on my own writing. I like trying to imitate his style which is as I explained in previous posts always sounds to me like someone ruminating. It's the sort of poetry that when I read it I imagine how it sounds. Alot of that how it sounds, has worked it's way into this poem.

For me I wrote this from a place of hope and condemnation. In a sense I was condemning the same attitudes I had when I wrote Lillies.

I think perhaps my thoughts are colored now with the notion that yes, we may lose relationships but there is something we never lose and it's not just the memories.

That connection is there like a power point before you switch it on all the potential is still all there. It doesn't magically change and go one day things develop but that part of a person you may have shared in days or years past is still part of them as much as it is part of you.

I don't know about you readers, but I kinda love that thought and I'm going to hold onto it for a while longer.

So now you know what the inspiration was you can use it when reading Caterpillars or honestly just enjoy the flow of words from line to line. Poetry is like a relationship it's different every single time and with every single person, but that I reckon is what makes it interesting!

CATERPILLARS

What is more fickle than the wind
What writhes and Exists floating
Dull in the shadows of dreams
And which the consensus of the masses sound?
it's tune that ugliness in the pale dark that mirthless sound similiar to bones snapping and breaking
Ashes to ashes dust to dirt and then to the worms
A wheel of broken unbroken and then rebroken
but imagine instead a
Line connecting hearts running through memories and branching off like caterillars crawling through arteries leaving behind their mucus which stays thick on the arterial walls long after it passes
I tell you this
there is no cycle no wheels just one mode of being along the paths the caterpillars weave and along the spans of ages times thoughts and memories.

To Beginnings

Good day all!

I'm just listening to Walt Whitmans leaves of grass in an audio book format. It's surprisingly good to listen to actually and it inspired me to do a Whitman inspired poem.

for anyone who doesn't know Whitman i love how accessible his writing is. It's deceptively simple, and by that I mean he writes in a way that is so familiar to me. It's the language of our thoughts that whimsical human optimism is in every word of his. His poetry embodies that powerful stream of consciousness I'm sure is in all of us. Whitmans meaning is often plain and I think that's what allows his poetry to be do easily digested but it also has such depth. I encourage anyone to read Whitmans poetry.

Anyway here is my small attempt at replicating his own style.

P.S Oh and to a certain someone that may be reading this yes, this is the poem I was telling you about. You know who you are :)

to beginnings

wherever this path bends
wherever the curves
the meandering
Lengths of this untold and overtrodden road leads us
Where paths extend over oceans and in realms untold
Where the seams of reality open up give way and spread
Or perhaps fade to null
And who can say what lies
ahead in the unknown futures and pasts
These opening and closings of possibilities finite and infinite
these crossroads forever winding and reborn every second
and every instance forever retraced and forever our own.

Blind Eyes

Hey little gal with
the cute child heart
I love your hair
Your cute smile and
the way your nostrils
frown and rise in
between your soft cheeks
which lead to your round
blue eyes that hold
me and spit me
out so much bigger
than my own blind
eyes and they'll hold
you tender they'll hold
your silly girl heart.

Dinner

Sorry it's been so long since my last post, this is a short poem, but of all the little scribbles I've made over the last few weeks this is probably my favourite. The reason I think it works so well is the subtext. Now I was listening to this podcast today and to any aspiring writers particularly people who write genre fiction I highly recommend Writing Excuses. It's a very entertaining and informative show about how to write and about the experiences of three big time writers (although now I think it's four), but they mentioned a poem, "My Last Duchess". I'll provide a link, but this is a poem that also excels in creating a fascinating subtext.

It's an interesting conversation and its interesting how the two characters in the poem's musing on the painting of The Duchess are ultimately underlying the narrator of the poem's own insecurities about the woman he is with. In any case, I think you should give it a read and like all poems that usually means glancing over it pondering then looking at it again. I think that's another thing that even I need to get used to, how do you read a poem? Because I think the way we read nowdays is not too suited to poetry in the most pure sense.

Anyway, I digress. See if you can see what's really going on between these two over dinner.

Dinner

Amber light flickering
off the bone-white 
pale of her wrist


ghosts are more
present and more
sure the awkard
chink of knife and 
fork the traces of blood 
on her plump lips


the lonely togetherness
of the moon on 
the patio at the 
end as she whispers
"goodbye"