Kevin Young - Early Show

[natelyswhore.livejournal.com]

Early Show

Here even the darkness
is watered down --

Shades drawn
won't keep out dawn,

Won't bring me sleep
or us any closer --

The gap in our pushed-together
twin beds grows wider.

Regret a green thing
all morning I been

Watering -- not that
it needs it --

Even untended my mind
weed-filled, wild.

Nothing wakes him --
not the truck's hum

Backing up, or the woman
who knocks loud, trading

The hotel's ghostly towels
but letting the sheets

Stay unchanged.

Lunchtime,
the adultery hour --

The flophouse fills
with couples telling

Work they need
an extra hour

For the doctor --
you can hear them in the hall

Practicing coughs
& examining each

Other's tonsils. Ah --

If despair had a sound
it would be: DO NOT DISTURB.

If despair has a sound
it's the muffled, raised

Voices of the pair next door
who've lived here

In One-Star Manor forever
yet still pay by the week

-- Love's an iffy lease --

Or worse may be
the sharp silence

That follows every fight.
While the secretaries

& files clerks & junior
execs undress --

Trade their shorthand kisses --

I run what HOT
is left (though hard

To know, marked COLD)
till I steam the mirrors

Like car windows
in a prom's parking lot

& I can't see myself.

Despair,
I know, is the ham radio

On low, crackling
like rain & announcing

Today's game
has been called -- a first --

On account of too much sun.

(no subject)

[redheartleaf.livejournal.com]

Come, My Celia

Come, my Celia, let us prove
While we may, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever;
He at length our good will sever.
Spend not then his gifts in vain.
Suns that set may rise again;
But if once we lose this light,
'Tis with us perpetual night.
Why should we defer our joys?
Fame and rumor are but toys.
Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a few poor household spies,
Or his easier ears beguile,
So removed by our wile?
'Tis no sin love's fruit to steal;
But the sweet theft to reveal.
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.

Jonson, Ben. The Forest. 1616.

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was an English Jacobean dramatist, lyric poet, and literary critic who is generally regarded as the second most influential English dramatist behind William Shakespeare. Surprisingly, Jonson's formal education was brief. He worked as a bricklayer and a soldier in Netherlands before returning to England, where he wrote for Philip Henslowe -- the leading impresario for the public theater. Jonson's reputation was established with the successful presentation of "The Masque of Blackness" at court in 1605. Jonson's major comedies expressed a cynicism toward his current way of life, often by pointing out its follies and vices. Jonson is credited with transforming character dramatization in the comedy of the Restoration, and for influencing the scores of playwrights who would follow him. He served as the first Poet Laureate of England from 1619 to 1637.

Kevin Meaux - Myths of Electricity: A Letter to Nikola Tesla

[natelyswhore.livejournal.com]

Myths of Electricity: A Letter to Nikola Tesla

For John Wood

My cousin once claimed
he saw a tractor's axle
magnetized by lightning; I've heard too
of field hands found scorched,
the coins and keys fused in their pockets --
heard how splintered bolts
can burn a person's silhouette into the wall
or sizzle through miles of pipe and powerline
to set whole towns ablaze.

No wonder you bowed to such a god,
believing clouds housed fires brighter than Christ --
but what terrible and radiant angel did you invoke
when voltage arced from the spinning coil?

Jehovah gorged Himself on holy madmen
until their limbs went thin as kindling sticks.
How were you different from them? -- penniless,
half-starved in your apartment and talking to phantoms.

You often said the soul, like breathing,
is a function of the flesh,
said the body's mysteries veil mere machinery.
Yet you bent to the shimmering scripture of science,
saw a heaven that crackled with static and starlight --
and you paid, just like all those raving saints,
the cost of conjuring your insatiate god.

(no subject)

[ann-septimus.livejournal.com]

Linguist

If we lived in a world where bells
truly say ‘ding-dong’ and where ‘moo’
is a rather neat thing
said by a cow,
I could believe you could believe
that these sounds I make in the air
and these shapes with which I blacken white paper
have some reference
to the thoughts in my mind
and the feelings in the thoughts.

As things are,
if I were to gaze in your eyes and say
‘bow-wow’ or ‘quack’, you must take that to be
a despairing anthology of praises,
a concentration of all the opposites
of reticence, a capsule
of my meaning of meaning
that I can no more write down
than I could spell the sound of the sigh
I would then utter, before
dingdonging and mooing my way
through all the lexicons and languages
of imprecision.

~Norman MacCaig

(no subject)

[parasitus.livejournal.com]

( flophouse : bukowski )

(no subject)

[ann-septimus.livejournal.com]

Homer

Seven cities contend to have harboured his cradle:
Smyrna, Chios, Kollophon,
Ithake, Pylos, Argos,
Athenai.

Like a lamb he strolls
through marine pastures,
unseen, unburied,
unexcavated, casting no
biographical shadow.

Did he never have trouble with the authorities?
Did he never get drunk? Was he never bugged,
not even when singing?
Did he never love fox terriers, cats,
or young boys?

How much better the Iliad would be
if Agamemnon could be proved to bear
his features or if Helen's biology
reflected contemporary facts.

How much better the Odyssey would be
if he had two heads,
one leg,
or shared one woman
with his publisher.

Somehow he neglected all that
in his blindness.
And thus he towers
in literary history
as a cautionary example
of an author so unsuccessful
that maybe he didn't exist at all.

~Miroslav Holub

Circulation by Raymond Carver

[butathinsilence.livejournal.com]

"And all at length are gathered in."
--LOUISE BOGAN

By the time I came around to feeling pain
and woke up, moonlight
flooded the room. My arm lay paralyzed,
propped up like an old anchor under
your back. You were in a dream,
you said later, where you'd arrived
early for the dance. But after
a moment's anxiety you were okay
because it was really a sidewalk
sale, and the shoes you were wearing,
or not wearing, were fine for that.

*

"Help me," I said. And tried to hoist
my arm. But it just lay there, aching,
unable to rise on its own. Even after
you said, "What is it? What's wrong?"
it stayed put -- deaf, unmoved
by any expression of fear or amazement.
We shouted at it, and grew afraid
when it didn't answer. "It's gone to sleep,"
I said, and hearing those words
knew how absurd this was. But
I couldn't laugh. Somehow,
between the two of us, we managed
to raise it. This can't be my arm
is what I kept thinking as
we thumped it, squeezed it, and
prodded it back to life. Shook it
until that stinging went away.

We said a few words to each other.
I don't remember what. Whatever
reassuring things people
who love each other say to each other
given the hour and such odd
circumstance. I do remember
you remarked how it was light
enough in the room that you could see
circles under my eyes.
You said I needed more regular sleep,
and I agreed. Each of us went
to the bathroom, and climbed back into bed
on our respective sides.
Pulled the covers up. "Good night,"
you said, for the second time that night.
And fell asleep. Maybe
into that same dream, or else another.

*

I lay until daybreak, holding
both arms fast across my chest.
Working my fingers now and then.
While my thoughts kept circling
around and around, but always going back
where they'd started from.
That one inescapable fact: even while
we undertake this trip,
there's another, far more bizarre,
we still have to make.