Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)

The spirit

  likes to dress up like this:

   ten fingers,

   ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest

  at night

   in the black branches,

     in the morning

in the blue branches

  of the world.

   It could float, of course,

     but would rather

plumb rough matter.

  Airy and shapeless thing,

   it needs

     the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,

  the oceanic fluids;

   it needs the body's world,

     instinct

and imagination

  and the dark hug of time,

   sweetness

     and tangibility,

to be understood,

  to be more than pure light

   that burns

     where no one is --

so it enters us --

  in the morning

   shines from brute comfort

     like a stitch of lightning;

and at night

  lights up the deep and wondrous

   drownings of the body

     like a star.

-Mary Oliver

Of the first week

So I started my first semester at UC Berkeley this week, and while it makes no sense for me to be blogging right now, the time sensitive nature of my opening means that I must post. Here are a few of the lessons I learned, in varying levels of detail...

I don't know what this means but I mean it

I cannot seem to say exactly
what I mean
or what I want to mean
I think
It's like delirium came
and whisked me into it's
happy caravan
though really it's neither happy or sad
That analog was bad
I am slowly unraveling into
a pile of non-poetic brown yarn
woven of a strange lack of basic knowing

Friends, or the people who ruined facebook

I originally signed up on facebook because it seemed a clever little time-suck. Over time, I've kept it because it provides a useful way for me to keep up with friends/family, and it still helps me kill time. I'm generally not one to post inflammatory statuses, or to make critical comments (I don't do it nearly as much as I could). But recently, I've been utterly disgusted by it.

It started last month, when I saw the "change your profile pic to a cartoon" thing start popping up on friends' statuses. The idea was that by changing your pic to some cartoon from your youth, you were helping in the fight against child abuse. This bothered me for a few reasons. First, the ridiculous idea that changing your picture to a cartoon will, by itself, raise awareness of child abuse. Second, the meme's obvious lack of connection to any organization, which is likely because it didn't begin as any kind of movement, but just someone asking their friends to change their profile pictures for no reason, like congress passing a boring bill by attaching it to something noone can disagree with. The most important reason it irked me, is that it caught on among my friends very quickly, which suggests that they didn't think the whole thing through as thoroughly or as quickly as I did. In the long run, I suppose that this was not an entirely unexpected course of action, as I tend to take a more critical approach to life than most people, but still it was just so silly, that it made me reevaluate the nature of facebook, and my relationship with it.

Facebook is by nature, a place for people to show you who they are, with all that that entails. If a person is somewhat private, then their profile will be somewhat sparse. Now, I have never been a normal person. I hold on to somewhat obscure interests, I tend to analyze things long past the point where most people stop, and because of this I tend to expect people to be more accountable for their actions than they are usually willing to be. So, I am newly aware that my friends are not like me for the most part, and that Facebook is not made for me. I'm very measured in my speech, and I don't deign to think that my opinion is of great portent to anyone, (strange, since I have a blog) so I am planning to simply use it less in favor of Twitter, a place where I can rain down my ponderings on an expanding darkness of cyberspace. I wish there was a better way to wrap that all up but it's winter break and I don't write well when I don't have school, so that is all.

The impressive e.e. cummings

One of the things I really like about poetry is that it allows you to use words in a way that shouldn't make sense. By nature, this is a huge departure from my incredibly logical brain, so I occasionally have a considerable bit of difficulty with the practice of it. However, I still love to read it, (which is probably one of the reasons I didn't mind reading the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury, one of the most bizarre snippets of writing on the planet) which is why I thoroughly enjoy e.e. cummings(for the uninitiated, the name is not supposed to be capitalized). He had a way of playing with language that I find amazing, because he put words together that shouldn't logically belong and made them make sense in my head. In a way, his writing serves as a clinic on how the structure of a poem is as important as the diction, because his line breaks add to the message as does his syntax, (or lack thereof). Anyway, enough of my useless jawing about how awesome he was, see for yourself:

ITEM

this man is o so

Waiter  

this;woman is

please shut that

the pout And affectionate leer

interminable pyramidal, napkins

(this man is oh so tired of this

a door opens by itself

woman.)they so to speak were in

Love once?

now

                                           her mouth opens too far

and:she attacks her Lobster without

feet mingle under the

mercy.

                                              (exit the hors d'oeuvres)

Now, I have my own interpretation of this whole thing, but I would like to hear what you guys think this means. Don't worry, it's not an assignment, I just wanna know what you think.

I'm a failure...

..or at least, I have failed. This month I was planning to participate in National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), in an effort to push myself to explore non-poetic avenues. Things were going swimmingly, in spite of an oddly busy month of school/work/preparing for my first semester at Cal, I had a word count of about 13,000, and was planning to kick it up a notch, as I had felt like I was hitting my stride...
   ...Until about ten days ago, when I tried to open the file with my manuscript on it, and could not find the file. Regardless of the circumstances, my book was gone, every single, divinely-inspired word had disappeared. As things happened to fall, I needed to install a new version of Office on my computer, and that was a job that would cost me at least a day,(I had to find the torrent and whatnot). I then looked to see what my new pace needed to be, as I would not be defeated so easily, and discovered it was a healthy 2700+ words, tough but not impossible.
   Alas, I sat down to begin again (three days later, due to the busy month), and I was completely uninspired. Worse, actually, as I was repulsed by the idea of having to retread all the brilliance I spewed during the first ten days at a less leisurely pace. So, here I sit telling you that I quit. Not writing, or even that particular story, I still want to tell it, and I plan to finish it before next November, when I plan to participate again, I'm just admitting that life and November have beaten me this time. But rest assured, that next year, I shall wreak a fiery vengeance, the likes of which they have never seen!!! Though I have no idea how I would attack a month, but in a world where the Jersey Shore "kids" are famous anything's possible.

Entrance

Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let go. . . .

                   -Rainer Maria Rilke

Whimper, Pt. 1

The following is a short story I wrote a few months ago. 

I saw a magician end the world once.  That sounds like it’s going to be a weird story to tell, and it kind of is. I should clarify that when I say magician I mean someone who was capable of doing something which defies my knowledge of natural laws. According to him, it was science, but I couldn’t tell the difference. Now, when I say ‘end the world’, the question comes up, “How are you and I here then?” The answer to that is that I didn’t mean apocalyptic, I just meant such a significant change, that no one can say anything is the same. Like, imagine an ice age instead of a giant comet crashing into Earth. So that’s what happened, a scientist started an ice age, metaphorically of course.

                It was about a month ago, and I was walking downtown to get some donuts. I was listening to my iPod in an effort to avoid all the havoc around me, the occasional ramblings of crazy people strewn in the air like so much confetti, the usual hum of a city’s commerce, plus all the visual flotsam of men and women in suits trying to get somewhere warm like mice in a flood. I heard a woman, whom I had dismissed as being schizophrenic or on some terrible drug, singing, “In the city is a great biggening beast, be afraid for when it wakes from sleep.” I heard this because my iPod had stopped playing for some reason. Amid all the havoc I looked down at my iPod and accidentally bumped smack into a guy.

                I apologized profusely, though I could tell I had taken the worst of the hit, he had continued to look at the device he was looking at which I thought must be some new kind of phone. Ordinarily, I would not be prompted to ask questions, but something about the way he stood transfixed to that spot made me curious. It was in stark contrast with the bustling fluid animal of the downtown which surrounded him, and it seemed for a moment, as though he were a skyscraper and all else was a field of grass brushed by the wind. To be clear, it is not that he was an especially handsome man, or that he had any other grand physical characteristic, but that he was possessed of a unique amount of focus.

                I asked him what he was doing, and he answered me thusly: “I am looking for the heart of the city; I believe I have found it”. Slightly perplexed, I told him that the exact middle of the city was somewhere in the city hall, having discovered this fact some years prior on a class trip. “Ah, I see where you are mistaken, you misunderstand me. You see, I am not looking for the center of the city, I was looking for its heart, and I have found it.” At this point, I was too intrigued not to follow up. “It is relatively simple,” he said, still not looking up, “Just as you and I have a muscle which pumps blood through our bodies and keeps us alive, so do cities.” Not willing to believe such a ridiculous statement, I posited a few reasons why he was wrong. “I don’t see why it is so difficult to believe, after all, Rio de Janeiro feels different from San Francisco, which feels different than London, et cetera.” I agreed. “Would it be a stretch then to believe that these are different beings?” I remembered a few things I had read, from Shakespeare to Neil Gaiman, realized that I might see something amazing, and pressed him for more information. “The answer to your earlier questions, and the reason I am here, is that the cities of the Earth have been asleep, this is why they do not respond to us in any way we would understand, though we have felt their nightmares and recorded the deaths of more than a few of them, Carthage, Pompeii, Hiroshima. I and the people I work with are trying to wake them from their sleep, and what better way than to- move to the left please- shock them in the heart?”

For M.W.

There is no transcience of twilight in
The beauty of your soft dusk-dimpled face,
No flicker of a slender flame in space,
In crucibles, fragility crystalline.
There is no fragrance of the jessamine
About you, no pathos of some old place
At dusk, that crumbles like moth-eaten lace
Beneath the touch. Nor has there ever been.

Your love is like the folk-song's flaming rise
In cane-lipped southern people, like their soul
Which burst its bondage in a bold travail;
Your voice is like them singing, soft and wise,
Your face, sweetly effulgent of the whole,
Inviolate of ways that would fail.
                 -Jean Toomer

Devastation

I am awake for months now
It is too painful for me to sleep
For love in all its subtleties
Has gutted me and left me breathless
upon your altar

A poem and a strategy

So, I've recently been a bit torn about posting my poetry here, as I am getting more serious about getting published. What I have decided to do is to post only those pieces that I feel wouldn't fit anywhere else. To be clear, this does not mean that I'm only going to post my 'bad' poetry here, but rather that I will simply be posting poems that don't feel to me like they belong in any journal for one reason or another. So without further ado, here's a poem on the Drake Equation:

The math is simple
The number of possible civilizations in the galaxy
is the number of new stars per year (big)
divided by the number that have planets(small)
then the number that could have life(just the possibility)
then the number that will actually have life(the reality of it)
then of those, the few that gain sentience (we are aware)
of these, the ones that can transmit
and last, multiply by their lifespan.
The universe is at least 14 billion years old.
There are billions of new stars every year.
We have been sentient for a million years.
We have been listening for 60.
But in all this numerical babble,
I learned something greater than science;
something as important as the knowledge that the soul
is infinite and immeasurable, and applied over all universes.
the point of the equation is not that the universe is very big
the point is that we are not
that life as we know it-
self-defining, self-organizing life-
is rare and significant.
The point is not to waste it.

To keep going

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

-Kurt Vonnegut

Of the Simpsons, and why I'm conflicted about it

I am, like most Americans and many people around the world, a Simpsons fan. Have been for a long time. I am however , fully aware of the shift that the show seems to have taken from being edgy, cutting comedy to being rather wholesome fare. I was relatively sure of this feeling until last night when I saw this:



In case you couldn't tell, that was the opening couch gag for last night's episode. Dark, huh? Also, it was storyboarded and directed by Banksy, marking the first time that an outside artist has designed the couch gag.

This causes conflict for me largely because, I had just been having a conversation about how the Simpsons was no longer as daring as Family Guy, but also because the episode which followed it was still pretty non-outrageous fare.

Now, it's not that I don't like shows like the one last night, (Professor Frink's line about baseball only being understood by the Poin-dexterous was great), and I do like having my heart warmed occasionally by ep's like last season's "The Squirt and The Whale", but I find it hard to hold them in the same esteem as Family Guy, largely because the shock value that standalone jokes provide is missing. The Simpsons still puts out 26 new well-crafted episodes a year, which is an accomplishment, but maybe the show has failed to shift with society. Maybe The Simpsons becoming a global icon, meant that they couldn't shock us anymore, because now we have the sensibilities of their writing staff. The Simpsons is preaching to the choir, which sadly means that Family Guy is on it's way there too. Oh well, things could be worse, and I'll always remember lines like this one from Family Guy's season premiere:

Carl: So in the bear world, are pandas like your version of interracial children?
Bear: Yeah Pandas are something I don't agree with.
Carl: They're cute though right?
Bear: Just when they're babies.

On the difficulties of blogging

The longer I persist, against all reason, to blog, the more apparent certain things about me become. Things such as my fundamental laziness. You see, this post was going to be in list form, because everybody loves a good list, but me being genuinely distressed by the idea of having to reach the five inches from my laptop to my mouse, decided I should just go paragraph. Sadly, I also know the html tags for lists, but again, in an effort to avoid superfluous typing, (made all the more ridiculous by my use of words like "superfluous") I figured I'd stick with the basic structure. So here is a minor gripe session about why I blog, and what I've learned so far.

Complementarity Pt. 13 (the end)

I just realized that I didn't post the end to my magniloquent beast of a poem, so here it is, the final piece of Complementarity. Comment, let me know what you think:

As I sit under the burning kerosene star

                Of my inspiring voice

Your face begins to be transfixed

Your slender hand, limply like a grain of wheat

Is moved by some unseen spirit

A touch then!

An inciting of the asphodel to blooming!

A word escapes you...!

I have gone ahead to light the torches West

I have lit out for the frontier which we have set no thought on.

For you the day has begun anew;

For you the river has opened itself.

The greed of the first mile from town lights upon you

Here is a diner by the side of the road

I will stop for a moment, have a burger, cross the street

Reserve a room, lay my hat on the chair,

Lengthen my skeleton and sinews upon the bed

And be patient until I hear you ambling into town.

Complementarity Pt. 12

It occurred to me that large portions of this work almost solely as a part of the whole, which is why it's sort of odd that I'm posting it in pieces like this. Anyway, the penultimate piece of Complementarity:

Farther away I begin to run from you!

Farther stretching myself into my work

Playing more as I am limbered

I am unfit for such a game

I do not compete

I do not measure myself against any man

I am the perfect thing

I am the proof that the next thing will be greater

If I am the meter

Then he who outstrips me proves me great

He who measures his lyric against mine renews my growth

I stretch and extend myself eternally

All poetry then‽

Walt Whitman, a kosmos!

 Leonnie Dickens, a nebulous singularity then!

The moon then! and the sun, its self-obviating spheroid!

This is the game of it

To make of oneself a dense and spinning thing

An expanding, energy creating, self-sustained system

A ball of matter, a ball of life, the water of the heavens

A wave of a man

A particle of woman

A whole human of starry effluvia

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son! 

 -Rudyard Kipling

a name change

So I have decided to change the name of the blog to, wait for it... Of Myself and the Universe. This is an advance warning so that people don't look at their Google Reader and get confused. The change will be official as of next Tuesday. that is all.

Complementarity Pt. 11

I shall explain myself in brief
I shall give you the key to unlock yourself
If you will hear it
I am a poet
   I transcend myself
If I am wholesome, can I decline to write of vileness
With as much warmth, and more volume?
Can I speak of the known more than the unknown?
Can I choose half the universe as good?
And not surveil the remainder?

But none are evil among the grand unity of the kosmos!
The singularity good, and the swaddling star good
The lightning is good, and the thunder is good
And neither is less than its other
The sequence good, and the chaos is good
The logic good, and the passion good
These are for me to know nascently
These are for me to find out anew
These are the form and bones of poetry
That nothing is irreconciled to any other

I am no less the singer of epodes
Than the odes themselves
I am Homeric, Byronic, Epic
I desire poems, I desire prose
I desire the cause of languages
As though I need to speak anymore!

Complementarity Pt. 10

O! of odors! O! of perfumes!

The musky yellow of houses at dawn is mine
The creeping synesthesia that accompanies a living
I love too the vacuity of the fresh atmospheric scent after lightning

the emptiness which is a purity
the purity which fills the sky with virtue
I am excessively pleased with these

Even my own smell after I sweat

I feel it and am not reviled by it

For it is mine

As much as language in my mouth is mine

As much as water is mine

I, the child of futures

The father of pasts

The circuitous nephew of presence

I stretch myself against the day and measure

My voice against its voice

Being both taller and shorter

I will survive it

It does not fit me like a suit that is not mine

I shall not be a guest of death today

I shall be a companion of the dying, and the forever-living, they are the same