Turning and turning in the widening gyre

[progmom]

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
===============================================================

Any poetry on your mind lately?

[Beware the Beast Man]

1. Drop out of Life with Bong in Hand....

Follow the Smoke toward the Riff filled Land
Drop out of Life with Bong in Hand
Follow the Smoke toward the Riff filled Land
Proceeds the Weedian, Nazareth
Proceeds the Weedian, Nazareth
Creedsmen roll out Across The Dying Down
Sacred Israel Holy Mount Zion
Sun Beams Down onto the SAndcean Reigns
Caravan Migrates Through deep SandScape
Lungsmen Unearth the creed of Hasheeshian
LeBaNon
Desert Legion Smoke Covenant is Complete
HerB Bails Retied onto Backs of Beasts
Stoner Caravan Emerge from Sandsea
Earthling Inserts to Chalice the Green Cutchie
GRoundation Soul Finds Trust Upon Smoking Hose
Assemble Creedsmen Rises Prayerfilled Smoke
GolGoTha
Judgement Soon Come To Mankind
Green Herbsmen SErve Rightful King
HEMp SeeD Caravan CArries
Rides out Believer with the spliff Aflame
MAriJuanAut Escapes earth To Cultivate
Grow Room Is Church TEmple of the new Stoner Breed
Chants Loud RObeD Priest Down onto the Freedomseed
Burnt Offering rEdeeMs Completes Smoked Deliverance
Caravan StoneD Deliverants
The CARAvan Holds to Eastern Creed
NOw sMokEs Believer
The Chronicle of the Sinsemillian
Drop out of Life with Bong in Hand
Follow the Smoke toward the Riff filled Land
Drop out of Life with Bong in Hand
Follow the Smoke JERUSALEM....

[progmom]

16. sigh

Next thing I know you'll be doing heroin. :shakeshead:

[SteppingRazor]

2. I'm a big Yeats fan, so nicely done!

And in response, here's some Bukowski:

so you want to be a writer

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.


if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.



On edit: One more, cause I'm in a mood for Charley B.

To The Whore Who Took My Poems

Some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there'll always be money and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

[progmom]

14. SR - very cool

I really dig Bukowski, and I love this line:
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

Thanks for sharing! :hi:

[Sugar Smack]

3. "In my shoes my toes are busted

My kitchen says my bread is molded
Got a good job at the dollar store
One foot in the hole
One foot gettin' deeper
With a broken mirror
And a blown out speaker
I ain't got much else to lose
I'm faded, flat busted
Been jaded, I been dusted
I know that I've seen better days

One foot in the hole
One foot gettin' deeper crank it to eleven
And blow another speaker
And I ain't got, I ain't got much to lose

Cuz I've seen better days
Been the star of many plays
I've seen better days
And the bottom drops out

My cup's filled up with five buck wine
Find myself here all the time
Another rip in the glass
Another chip in my tooth
Rained on, I've been stained on
Found another goat I put the blame on
Now I'm steppin' on all the cracks
But I guess there ain't no use
I'm bent like glass second hand like glory
Missed the bus but I'm in no hurry
Molasses fast, no business born

One foot in the hole
One foot gettin' deeper crank it to eleven
Blow another speaker
And I ain't got, I ain't got much to lose

Cuz I've seen better days
Been the star of many plays
I've seen better days
And the bottom drops out

I've seen better days
Been the star of many plays
I've seen better days
And the bottom drops out"

[progmom]

15. I had to google that one.

And now I will have to check it out via iTunes tonight. :hi:

[Sugar Smack]

22. You should.

It's a cute song! :hi:

[miss_american_pie]

4. Yeats! I love Yeats.

And there's always poetry on my mind.

Ontological
Maggie Anderson

This is going to cost you.
If you really want to hear a
country fiddle, you have to listen
hard, high up in its twang and needle.
You can't be running off like this,
all knotted up with yearning,
following some train whistle,
can't hang onto anything that way.
When you're looking for what's lost,
everything's a sign,
but you have to stay right up next to
the drawl and pull of the thing
you thought you wanted, had to
have it, could not live without it.
Honey, you will lose your beauty
and your handsome sweetie, this whine,
this agitation, the one you sent for
with your leather boots and your guitar.
The lonesome snag of barbed wire you have
wrapped around your heart is cash money,
honey, you will have to pay.

[RetroLounge]

17. Ooh, another new poet for me to read

Self-Portrait

I was far outside the frame, beyond
the pale, lost in the margins, smudged
like a fingerprint and frankly, nervous
about holding my own. I knew what was coming:
you, toward me, your arms open,
preparing to wrap them around my neck
with the clear determination some people
bring to learning anthropology. I was not
about to be moved, to be swept off my feet
by your exotic bracelets. I’ll admit
I sometimes incline toward
the minute particulars of a scene
but never have I been undone by a woman
on account of her accessories. Until now,
when I come into the picture, captivated
by black coral beads, the gold wire of an earring,
the rustle of red scarf against a neckline,
as this pull, this great tug at my heart,
forklifts me into the foreground
at the center of a photograph
of empty beach, empty that is except for
you, and pine and manzanita,
the silver rings and necklaces of white surf.

Maggie Anderson

:hi:

RL

[progmom]

21. very cool - thanks!

:hi:

[swag]

5. Like your Yeats. Parts of this Brion Gysin thing have been in my head:

the hallucinated have come to tell you that yr utilities
are being shut off      dreams monitored      thought directed
sex is shutting down everywhere      you are being sent

all words are taped      agents everywhere
marking down the live ones      to exterminate

they are turning out the lights

no      they are not evil      nor the devil      but men
on a mission      with a spot of work to do

this      dear friends      they intend to do on you

you have been offered a choice      between liberty and 
freedom      and      No!      you cannot have both

 . . . 

[progmom]

13. I love you, swag.

:loveya:

That's excellent.

[dolo amber]

6. Dark and lonely on a summer's night

Kill my landlord
Kill my landlord
Watchdog barking
Do he bite?
Kill my landlord
Kill my landlord
Slip in his window
Break his neck
Then his house
I start to wreck
Got no reason
What the heck
Kill my Landlord
Kill my landlord
C-I-L-L
my landlord

:grr:

[progmom]

7. uh oh...

Did he ever arrive?

[dolo amber]

8. No!

Fucker didn't even CALL. :grr:

[tigereye]

12. here's a snippet from a band of long ago

I think I wanna kill my landlord
He ain't nothing but a slumlord!
I think I wanna kill my landlord
Makin me pay rent that I can't afford.

I can't believe I still remember that.

(note that the people who wrote this are all intelligent and well-off professionals now.) ;)

[Magrittes Pipe]

18. Tyrone Greene really speaks to me, for some reason.

:thumbsup:

[Blue-Jay]

23. I love Tyrone Green.

I hate White People by Tyrone Green

I hate the sunlight and I hate the night.
I hate white people because they is white.
Their hair is wavy, their lips is thin,
But worse than white women, I hate white men.
Walking around with briefcase and money,
Bust they head open, my ain't that funny?
Not out of anger and not out of spite.
I just hate whitey because they is white.
W-I-T-E people

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. WH Auden - 'September 1, 1939'

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.


________________________________________________________________

And another by Auden - 'August 1968'

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.


(Written about, I think, Mayor Daley of Chicago, but it seems to fit Bush rather well, too)

[progmom]

11. oh...those are good.

Thank you!

[Spider Jerusalem]

25. You're welcome...

you know, Ezra Pound said poetry was 'news that stays news' (the Yeats you posted has been running through my head, off and on, for about the past five years or so...)

[1gobluedem]

10. One of my favorites by Dorothy Parker

Comment

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.

[progmom]

20. and back to you:

Ballade at Thirty-five

This, no song of an ingénue,
This, no ballad of innocence;
This, the rhyme of a lady who
Followed ever her natural bents.
This, a solo of sapience,
This, a chantey of sophistry,
This, the sum of experiments, --
I loved them until they loved me.

Decked in garments of sable hue,
Daubed with ashes of myriad Lents,
Wearing shower bouquets of rue,
Walk I ever in penitence.
Oft I roam, as my heart repents,
Through God's acre of memory,
Marking stones, in my reverence,
"I loved them until they loved me."

Pictures pass me in long review,--
Marching columns of dead events.
I was tender, and, often, true;
Ever a prey to coincidence.
Always knew I the consequence;
Always saw what the end would be.
We're as Nature has made us -- hence
I loved them until they loved me.

[Theres-a]

19. Rumi

"Elephant in the Dark" by Coleman Barks
(Published in The Essential Rumi. Harper Collins, 1995.)

Some Hindus have an elephant to show.
No one here has ever seen an elephant.
They bring it at night to a dark room.

One by one, we go in the dark and come out
saying how we experience the animal.

One of us happens to touch the trunk.
"A water-pipe kind of creature."

Another, the ear. "A very strong, always moving
back and forth, fan-animal."

Another, the leg. "I find it still,
like a column on a temple."

Another touches the curved back.
"A leathery throne."

Another, the cleverest, feels the tusk.
"A rounded sword made of porcelain."
He's proud of his description.

Each of us touches one place
and understands the whole in that way.

The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark are
how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.

If each of us held a candle there,
and if we went in together,
we could see it.

[progmom]

24. ahhh...Rumi

Thanks for sharing! :hug:

[Theres-a]

26. Mary Oliver "The Journey"

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

[LouisianaLiberal]

27. I can't let a Yeats post go by without a comment!

My favorites are the Byzantium poems, but below is a shorter poem about unrequited love (written with Maud Gonne in mind):

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

[miss_american_pie]

28. More Yeats, in that vein

Politics

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

[LouisianaLiberal]

30. When I first read that poem many years ago,

I thought I understood it. But now, three years away from 50, it has a poignancy that I can't put into words. I'm glad Yeats could, and so well.

I almost posted Politics instead of When You Are Old and Gray, but I remembered an evening fifteen years or so ago when I recited When You Are Old over wine and candlelight, and it brought back pleasant memories.

[Mutley]

29. Blake...

from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell



The Argument.
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow.
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river, and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.

Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.

Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility.
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.



As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah XXXIV & XXXV Chap:
Without Contraries is no progression.
Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason.
Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.