Sunday, January 27, 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
catharsis
(trying something new...)
The last number I see is 9:33. That is the last number to light up the bars of the cage, before the locks fail. The locks on my clock fail and time escapes, and then it shoots to my computer and breaks the little clock in there too. The numbers on the display turn to ash and fade. Time pulls itself out of the big wall clock downstairs, and the clock's hands droop pathetically, deprived of their stolen spark. Time is springing itself free from our prisons.
Your childhood bites you in the face, and your future melts like ice in the sun. The separation between events is failing. Your plans for tomorrow become your memories of yesterday and all the neat little boxes in your day planner turn to soup. All events and all possibilities occur at once, blurred together in a single tiny moment that never ends. There are no more ends and no more beginnings. Time has escaped our grasp and now hides in the shadows, recovering from the million tiny cuts left by the gears and hands of the ticking clocks. Time hides in the shadows and watches our stolen plastic world crumble under its own weight. Our deathgrip on reality is failing.
The last number I see is 9:33. That is the last number to light up the bars of the cage, before the locks fail. The locks on my clock fail and time escapes, and then it shoots to my computer and breaks the little clock in there too. The numbers on the display turn to ash and fade. Time pulls itself out of the big wall clock downstairs, and the clock's hands droop pathetically, deprived of their stolen spark. Time is springing itself free from our prisons.
Your childhood bites you in the face, and your future melts like ice in the sun. The separation between events is failing. Your plans for tomorrow become your memories of yesterday and all the neat little boxes in your day planner turn to soup. All events and all possibilities occur at once, blurred together in a single tiny moment that never ends. There are no more ends and no more beginnings. Time has escaped our grasp and now hides in the shadows, recovering from the million tiny cuts left by the gears and hands of the ticking clocks. Time hides in the shadows and watches our stolen plastic world crumble under its own weight. Our deathgrip on reality is failing.
Friday, January 4, 2008
scoles's long windy poem about nothing
(for the record, let's say this is a parody piece)
You know sometimes,
when I'm sitting in a particularly bad lecture, and the professor is stumbling all around,
confusing himself, getting trapped in his own semantics,
I stop listening to the words
and listen instead to the silence between them.
When the professor stops for a moment, his voice switched off
I listen to the hum of the ventilation fan
the building breathing.
I listen as the silence
and the gentle hums
say everything the professor cannot.
I am the inconvenient light.
I am the inconvenient ray of brilliant, beautiful, golden sunlight crossing the page of your glossy magazine and making it hard to read.
you're welcome.
I am the inconvenient light falling on your pretense,
your self-consciousness, your fear of failure.
I am the ender of illusions and the ender of words.
I am the heat of every. individual. molecule. humming and swarming
around your
fearful
face.
because YOU are clinging to your clutter and your routines and your mirrors and your past so tightly that I don't think you can even see tomorrow.
YOU, who can't get over yourself, YOU, who writes the same poem every day, lives the same pattern every day,
because the idea of letting go,
of being -
here?
and now?
you can't stand on your toes like that.
you back away from the precipice, the challenge, the pregnant promise of the unknown.
I am the light, baby, I'm here to melt your little ice kingdom.
It's all over. Your shitty ego-walls, your plastic ideology, your habits,
they are all MELTING now, right now, there they go,
they're gone.
Oh, my god. What's left of you?
Anything?
When I, the sun, when the SUN turns his eyes on you and the plastic pretenses burn off and melt away, what is left inside?
When I, the sun, when the SUN immolates yesterday and outlaws tomorrow, when you stand before me, naked, your whole being, in one moment -
When I, the sun, when the SUN shatters your mirrors and makes introspection an impossibility, when you turned inside-out and your deepest secrets fly out to meet the stars, what do those stars see?
I hope they see something new. Something worth remembering.
I hope the stars DON'T see a Facebook photo album. I hope they DON'T see a list of favorite TV shows and a pithy quote from Henry David Thoreau. I hope they DON'T see a list of New Year's resolutions that never got filled. I hope they don't see a college transcript. I hope, hope, hope that these are not the things that define you.
I am here to unlock you, to melt the prison walls,
to cut away the stones that you have been laying DAY by DAY to protect you
from yourself.
I am a prophet.
Human words and human worlds crumple
before my eyes like paper, ladies and gentlemen.
that's all they are, cheap illusions printed on paper,
clumsily imagined.
i use Tolstoy for tissues
and I wipe my ass with the Book of Revelations, ladies and gentlemen.
They're all the same, shitty words,
and anything that can be put in words,
anything that be written out on paper,
this is what I really what you to understand, ladies and gentlemen,
anything that can be put in words on paper
deserves to BURN.
because Truth, ladies and gentlemen,
I mean the kind with a capital T,
can never be forced onto paper.
No, Truth with a capital T is laughing, LAUGHING at us as we try to pin its shadows to a page with our pens.
Truth with a capital T is the fire that destroys paper,
destroys our paper ideologies and our pretentious false metaphors.
Truth is the ashes left from your last failed poetry project.
Truth is the silence that reigns supreme once you shut your stupid obnoxious mouth
and show a little respect
for everything
you will never know.
You know sometimes,
when I'm sitting in a particularly bad lecture, and the professor is stumbling all around,
confusing himself, getting trapped in his own semantics,
I stop listening to the words
and listen instead to the silence between them.
When the professor stops for a moment, his voice switched off
I listen to the hum of the ventilation fan
the building breathing.
I listen as the silence
and the gentle hums
say everything the professor cannot.
I am the inconvenient light.
I am the inconvenient ray of brilliant, beautiful, golden sunlight crossing the page of your glossy magazine and making it hard to read.
you're welcome.
I am the inconvenient light falling on your pretense,
your self-consciousness, your fear of failure.
I am the ender of illusions and the ender of words.
I am the heat of every. individual. molecule. humming and swarming
around your
fearful
face.
because YOU are clinging to your clutter and your routines and your mirrors and your past so tightly that I don't think you can even see tomorrow.
YOU, who can't get over yourself, YOU, who writes the same poem every day, lives the same pattern every day,
because the idea of letting go,
of being -
here?
and now?
you can't stand on your toes like that.
you back away from the precipice, the challenge, the pregnant promise of the unknown.
I am the light, baby, I'm here to melt your little ice kingdom.
It's all over. Your shitty ego-walls, your plastic ideology, your habits,
they are all MELTING now, right now, there they go,
they're gone.
Oh, my god. What's left of you?
Anything?
When I, the sun, when the SUN turns his eyes on you and the plastic pretenses burn off and melt away, what is left inside?
When I, the sun, when the SUN immolates yesterday and outlaws tomorrow, when you stand before me, naked, your whole being, in one moment -
When I, the sun, when the SUN shatters your mirrors and makes introspection an impossibility, when you turned inside-out and your deepest secrets fly out to meet the stars, what do those stars see?
I hope they see something new. Something worth remembering.
I hope the stars DON'T see a Facebook photo album. I hope they DON'T see a list of favorite TV shows and a pithy quote from Henry David Thoreau. I hope they DON'T see a list of New Year's resolutions that never got filled. I hope they don't see a college transcript. I hope, hope, hope that these are not the things that define you.
I am here to unlock you, to melt the prison walls,
to cut away the stones that you have been laying DAY by DAY to protect you
from yourself.
I am a prophet.
Human words and human worlds crumple
before my eyes like paper, ladies and gentlemen.
that's all they are, cheap illusions printed on paper,
clumsily imagined.
i use Tolstoy for tissues
and I wipe my ass with the Book of Revelations, ladies and gentlemen.
They're all the same, shitty words,
and anything that can be put in words,
anything that be written out on paper,
this is what I really what you to understand, ladies and gentlemen,
anything that can be put in words on paper
deserves to BURN.
because Truth, ladies and gentlemen,
I mean the kind with a capital T,
can never be forced onto paper.
No, Truth with a capital T is laughing, LAUGHING at us as we try to pin its shadows to a page with our pens.
Truth with a capital T is the fire that destroys paper,
destroys our paper ideologies and our pretentious false metaphors.
Truth is the ashes left from your last failed poetry project.
Truth is the silence that reigns supreme once you shut your stupid obnoxious mouth
and show a little respect
for everything
you will never know.
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