The Donkey's Lament For Months Without Matilda


I hear him in the distance;
he knows what I'm thinking,
wretched,
like D. H. Lawrence said,
 . . . more feeling than thought.

At least for him.
As for me, I think a good
deal more about this girl,
this dark, pale lovely in glasses;
the wine is always better when she bags it,
the music, as I eat my cheese and sardines
dinner.
How easy a gentle love
when all your lust is deeply, deeply
hidden
in the conversation of the moment.

Or far fields and forests,
between,
an erotic mourning rising
only a moronic animal clamor,
concentrated as the rooster at night
that cocked in dusk and darkness
as I awaited that one who would never come.

My girls keep getting thinner,
but
there's weight in all the places
to pound against my heart like the braying of a donkey.
Matilda, you will never be old enough to understand
how a young girl makes an old man
stubbornly, alive again, as a donkey.
Foolish as a donkey. And like a donkey,
I protect my cows
from wolves and coyotes.
As foul and silly to you,
as another species.

I love the immediate juxtaposition of “dark, pale” as well as lines 13-16. I think it would be nice if you could incorporate perhaps just one instance of animal symbolism in the second stanza. And maybe because you write “...more feeling than thought” in line 5, you could mirror that by replacing “think” with “feel” in line 7. Really beautiful overall.

Of my pantheon of muses, I can't rest until each one gets a few solid songs, and even then.

If any of these girls would let me talk to them without having a conniption or running for the local authority or store manager or school administer, I'd be able to actually write something about them.

See this is what I mean. This is exactly what I'm saying. 

Beauty to the side. This poem isn't here to be pretty. 

"the wine is always better when she bags it,
the music, as I eat my cheese and sardines
dinner."

I think this is really funny, honestly. 

"an erotic mourning rising
only a moronic animal clamor,
concentrated as the rooster at night
that cocked in dusk and darkness"

Or this:

"an erotic mourning rising
only a moronic animal clamor,
concentrated as the rooster at night
that cocked in dusk and darkness"

We all know what that rooster is up to. Nice use of double entendre and tying in the night to the morning/mourning.

"My girls keep getting thinner,
but
there's weight in all the places
to pound against my heart like the braying of a donkey."

Just stop now.

"As foul and silly to you,
as another species."

Ouch.

This poem is funny, this poem is sad. This poem is a donkey in love. Or really, a lustful donkey.

Maybe the others in the group are going to enable this alter ego to go creeping around store checkout girls and driving slowly past high schools, but I'm not having it, rowens. I'm not having it at all.

On a more serious note, does this poem need more animal symbolism in the first stanza? It would give the poem more uniformity for sure. The way it is it reads to me a bit like thesis/antithesis/synthesis. So you get the idea of the man being aware of the donkey being aware of the man. And then you get the man. And then you get the donkey. And then you get the man giving in to his ridiculous donkey nature. Which I think is fine.

(08-08-2020, 02:12 AM)rowens Wrote:  Of my pantheon of muses, I can't rest until each one gets a few solid songs, and even then.

If any of these girls would let me talk to them without having a conniption or running for the local authority or store manager or school administer, I'd be able to actually write something about them.

The problem with girls is they get older but I stay the same age.

I know the moral plaint. Young people have no personalities, and so no one could possibly have any real affection for them.
But I find it equally true that people I grew up with are now barely articulate worryworts who haven't spoken a fresh and vital syllable since they were 23 years old.

This is beautiful. Yeats would’ve been proud.
Profound at some level, irreverent, and allusional. This would be your best

If this is my best, it might be down mountain from here. It's from my book, Strange Lines to Matilda. Matilda is my earth muse. She's my faraway limitation as I scale my own Purgatory.
It was hard to write until the virus came. Before that, she was there. Now, I'm not there.
But I'm here right NOW.

Happily Matilda has graduated high school; so we no longer have to deal with that barrier to our education.

(08-09-2020, 01:57 AM)rowens Wrote:  If this is my best, it might be down mountain from here. It's from my book, Strange Lines to Matilda. Matilda is my earth muse. She's my faraway limitation as I scale my own Purgatory.
It was hard to write until the virus came. Before that, she was there. Now, I'm not there.
But I'm here right NOW.

Happily Matilda has graduated high school; so we no longer have to deal with that barrier to our education.

I doubt that Matilda exists. It's a made up name. No one knows anyone named Matilda. Even in Australia, the only Matilda we know was last heard waltzing with a swagman and a jumbuck 100+ years ago.

---

I find it fascinating that you have all these books upon books of poems, all unpublished. Like the one about ronnie's asshole.

The Late Show is published. Strange Lines to Matilda is still being added to. In the Deep Woods is half on this site and half in untyped notebooks. Explanations is in a folder of typingpaper, a long poem, and not finished. The Windmill Factories is another not yet finished long poem, and is guided mostly by a disinterested Daphne. Then there's the Danmark book, my fiction and essays, my book of urban legends, my books of general engaging and adventures. And more. When you refuse to work a real job, you get plenty of work done. Being denounced, discredited or ignored by editors and publishers, I have to do it all myself. And prefer the writing, the reading and the adventuring over the curating chumpwork that I save for the desperate moments.

---

The Ronnie poems were in a book called sans blasphemies, which had two sections, pseudointelligentia and pseudophilosophica.

---

Matilda is a real person, she's also called Dark Laura in my books, because she reminds me a little of tv's Madeleine Ferguson, and for other reasons. I accidentally saw her two weeks ago, and made a poem about it called I Don't Wear a Mask, which can be typed up and posted.

I got it mixed up. Pseudointelligentsia and sans blasphemies are two different books. And one section is called Pseudopsychedelia. I haven't located those notebooks. The only two poems from them that I have on hand are Psychonaut and Malcolm at Mecca.

And there are my books of literary criticism. And like all good criticism, they are full of subtle hints toward justification of my own poetry.

Oh, this one..

https://www.bookdepository.com/Late-Show-R-Owens/9781387656660?ref=grid-view&qid=1597018392597&sr=1-31

Almost all the poems are already on this site.

---

In that book, I mean.

The season in hell is addictive. You want to see how deep you can bury yourself and triumphantly climb out, or better yet, proudly stay there without the burden of pride and onlookers. And there's The Path of the Moon, a few weeks of the intense introspective and waking day and nightmares, and hours of not knowing who you are, or who or what being a concept. But I've learned to find the Ariadne's thread sooner each time, and come right back, bringing everything with the hard and hanging bundles between my legs. You get a dream erection, like Freddy Krueger said. And I dream all the time. Even when time is being dismayed by the 'pataphysicist  hacks. Me, I like to feel heavy. No floating with my opiates, me. I like to feel my testicles dragging the coarse earth. But when I try the Apollonian routine, I'm smothered in Daphne's silence. Now Matilda leads me through Purgatory in Ignorance.
Strange Lines to Matilda is a book of quiet resignation, but not quiet desperation. People tell me I can't write poems that are prose, and I do it. People say I can't write love poems among a heap of cliches and the objectification of women, and I do it. People say a beautiful young woman like that don't want to have anything to do with an unemployed hack like me, and I do it in a sock. And wear it. The quiet thing about it is Matilda herself. All my muses are silent. I do the singing for them. And they aren't impressed. More like, distressed.
But I sing, like H. M. says, a little out of tune perhaps. But there needs to be a music for the tonedead and the illiterate. Our children are too smug with all their intelligence. "Would you break my heart whilst the women watch, half hoping that I shall weaken? . . . Oh no, dear child, I could not bow to a machine; I am, after all, human. Let others open new doors to history . . . " R. Edson. In my house, we worship the Lord. The Psalms are a great source of poetic power. The Lord is the living self. The enemies are the internal enemies that distract from the self. The living vital self that is singing. Be it Waltzing Matilda or Tom Traubert's Blues or Hallelujah. Even if she doesn't really care for my music.
My harsh nostalgia and violent sentimentality aren't hipsterish; though if they come for me, I insist upon a vintage gallows, and a soft violin. I am the night, color me black despite all protests. I didn't create the blues, but I am it. 
My muses are the glory of this world, not despite, but right along with this foul liminal year of our lord, 2020. . . .