Just A Little Diddy

[NobodyNothing]

Yes, another stolen form. I stole it from Paul Valery's "Song Of the Columns". Very tough, excruciatingly difficult form to work within. I guess I'm an aesthetic masochist.

Anyway...just a feeble poetic attempt to express the ecstatic religious experience in action. Yes, I wink at Shelley at one point. I love his talent. The Jimi Hendrix of poetry. And just because I always leave so much explaining out, the moon is a natural Eucharist, and the poem is the eating of that "silver host", metaphorically speaking, that commingling of the natural and divine into some f*cking crazy relational experience. Or at least that's what I was trying to do (silly me). lol Poetry is fun, fun, fun (except when it's not).


DELIRIUM

Mystic moon, silver host
Shimmering on the sea
Lure me to innermost
Tangled complicity.

Hold me in your knowing,
Redeem me through your art,
Fill to overflowing
The motive in my heart…

Savoring sensations,
Spell of an endless dome,
Twinkling evocations:
Imagination's home.

Arbiter of distance,
Magician in the mind
Summon from existence
Mere consciousness in time.

Timeless aberration,
Abstract affinity,
Seamless correlation
Exuberant to be.

Glory be earth's delight,
Blessed the primal spark
Wild for the skyward flight,
Aria of the lark…

Stream through the dogged urge
Like truths as welcomed guests,
Burn in the stricken words
Defenselessly expressed,

Cleanse the inherent wrath,
Release a valiant trust,
Light an immortal path
Through streets of bones and dust…

Demon of indifference,
Intimate irony
Fixed upon your essence
Pure possibility

Ushering in the fear
Crowding a lonely thought:
No image will appear
To justify your plot.

Sting of the perfect hate,
Emasculate despair,
A fragment of your fate
In awe of what you bear:

Death and grief, time's bequeath,
Beauty's resonant cry
For the love dared beneath
A blazing golden eye…

Empire of survival
History's episode
Lost in your arrival
Deciphering your code.

Cradle of departing,
Ghost in the silent tomb
Patiently imparting
Hope for the weaver's loom.

Soul of the all within,
Delicate mutation
Straining to shed its skin,
Bloom in clear relation.

When-how-where will it cease,
Flavor its final crumb
With its own unending peace
For its own delirium

[ChristopherSea]

This is something Nothing! Moreover, there is nothing feeble about this poem, as you have rendered your experience well. What I like most about this poem is the conservation of words within the confines of your ABAB rhyme scheme. The read is concise and crisp with no sacrifice of image or depth in those tidy stanzas. Well done and thanks for posting this!/Chris

[ellajam]

Hi, NN, I've been enjoying the feeling off completeness here, from the writing to the fullness of the idea. My problem is so far I haven't come across something that will really make this one stick in my mind.

Sidenote: I've recently tried bequeath/beneath myself, , I think you've done a bit better, but I'm not sure you quite get away with beneath a golden eye, unless I as missing something, which is surely possible as I am eucharistically ignorant.

Glad you posted it.

[NobodyNothing]

Hi, NN, I've been enjoying the feeling off completeness here, from the writing to the fullness of the idea. My problem is so far I haven't come across something that will really make this one stick in my mind.

Sidenote: I've recently tried bequeath/beneath myself, , I think you've done a bit better, but I'm not sure you quite get away with beneath a golden eye, unless I as missing something, which is surely possible as I am eucharistically ignorant.

Glad you posted it.

Hi. I've been caught in my own little vortex of pathos for the last week. I did like that poem you wrote, liked that interactive/dual-medium approach between image and the event of the poem (like the protective fish on the border). I thought to myself "what an interesting idea that would be to do a series of poems where the image displayed (could be quite ordinary) served as a real interactive element with the poem that was written." Somewhat Blake-ean in one way, but not in another. I don't know, just a passing thought I had.

By the way, when I mentioned that 2nd half of the 2nd stanza of that poem, I honestly could have been wrong; but if what I said had any aesthetic merit at all, I was talking about a little *tweak* or two there. That's all. I was thinking like a hangnail clipper, not a machete. lol

Anyway...this is one of the only poems I've ever written that I still like, that doesn't make me nauseous. What was hard about it for me was that it was a poem of youth, meaning I had to go back years and years in my mind to find that energy again, to write it from that place. It was a poem of spiritual ecstasy, to express how it actually happens in the mind, the full manic range of such a thing. I wanted to do it like a flat smooth stone being hurled from the water's edge, and each stanza was like a skip of the stone on the water, until the delirium ended and the stone sunk at last below. I wanted to be fair in my poetic logic, but also not over-write it, leave a lot of room for the reader's own imagination. I do know exactly what I intended with every word/stanza. That's the best one can do, methinks.

Yeah...

Death and grief, time's bequeath,
Beauty's resonant cry
For the love dared beneath
A blazing golden eye...

was the culminating stanza. The last four were meant to be fading out snapshots...*poof* *poof* *poof* *poof*. Things break up and unravel, don't they? The beneath a golden eye...that was just the sun, but a metaphor for that totally conscious, immaculate eye that sees things precisely for what they are. In this case, those acts of love that are truly dared in a life or death kind of way. Love and vulnerability are always inseparable to me in this life. To give in such a way fulling knowing that loss awaits, whether it strikes quick and fierce, or bides its time. That demon of indifference is certainly a bitch.

Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. Grateful. I've read some real good things here recently, but haven't had the mind and the time to say something just and appreciative of them as yet.

Cheers and best wishes.

[ellajam]

Ray has a bunch of great image poems, here's a list of his threads.
rayheinrich

Okay, maybe your beneath does work. I'm going to keep reading.

Love and vulnerability are always inseparable to me in this life. To give in such a way fulling knowing that loss awaits, whether it strikes quick and fierce, or bides its time.

I hear you there, bud. I've got a pile of not very good poems written on just that.

In the workshop threads we really need to stick to the poem at hand, but since we're in Misc., a quick comment on nailclipper vs machete editing on the poem you mentioned: The lines I cut were details I thought might be interesting only to me, too much info without any real weight. But I love to edit and I can restore it if I decide to. I'd love your comments on that thread, it helps me with each edit to review them. Maybe better punctuation might help it.....

Back to your poem, I had a problem following the punctuation here:

Demon of indifference,
Intimate irony
Fixed upon your essence
Pure possibility

Ushering in the fear
Crowding a lonely thought:
No image will appear
To justify your plot.

I might have an easier time if you didn't capitalize each line. Why do you do that?

[NobodyNothing]

Honestly, I don't know. Probably just saw it done that way, and somewhat unquestionably mimicked. No good answer, really.

PS> Thanks for the *link*. And be easier on yourself. Your poems are your babies. They end up telling you when they're done, methinks, as in "quit touching me; I like myself as I am."

[ellajam]

Honestly, I don't know. Probably just saw it done that way, and somewhat unquestionably mimicked. No good answer, really.

I do know exactly what I intended with every word/stanza.

And I can see you've thought about the punctuation. I love to see you give some thought to the capitalization.

[NobodyNothing]

I'm definitely open to that. Why did the elder ones usually do it that way, even Yeats and Wallace Stevens? Was that just the way it was done? I'm not really much of an historian of poetry. I wonder when it really started to change in this way? Never really gave that much of any thought.

Sun is out in Seattle today. It's a good thing.

Best to you.

[ellajam]

I'm definitely open to that. Why did the elder ones usually do it that way, even Yeats and Wallace Stevens? Was that just the way it was done? I'm not really much of an historian of poetry. I wonder when it really started to change in this way? Never really gave that much of any thought.

Sun is out in Seattle today. It's a good thing.

Best to you.

Maybe someone who's studied poetry will stop by, I think I read something about it here.

Go outside.

[NobodyNothing]

It's funny, but I was just plucking around this site tonight, and then wondered what I had "put out there".  This is one of the only things I ever wrote that I still stand by. There's like 4 four of them (to me).  That's it.  That's all.  And even that's in question.