Tree-Man

[rowens]

Tree-Man


Bark, limbs, a perfect
simplicity,
dark blue-
green foliage.
Hard rooted,
snow along edges of things.
Sign of stability, long etched.

Love makes a dead dog of men,
a bone growing from earth
stiff and alive.
Never moving, wind makes 
no sound.
Squirrels see no meaning
and dogs leave no urine.

A nude scarecrow of wood,
a heart pulses under the bark.
Rooted in feeling, simple and 
unmoving.
The ground where it was sowed
gives brainless meaning
and on that it stands.
Its own common.

Something to hold.

[Mark A Becker]

Hey rowens, the green comments are here:

Tree-Man

Bark, limbs, a perfect
simplicity,
dark blue-
green foliage.
Hard rooted,
snow along edges of things. I don't need "of things"
Emblem in plain,
sign of stability, long etched.

Love makes a dead dog of men, This line drives my attention away from the tree.
a bone growing from earth
stiff and alive.
Never moving, wind makes
no sound.
Squirrels see no meaning
and dogs leave no urine.

A nude scarecrow of wood, I don't need "of wood"
a heart pulses under the bark.
Rooted in feeling, simple,
unmoving, and unsung.  moved "unsung" up.  Don't think it needs it's own line.
The ground where it was sowed
gives brainless meaning, and on that Not sure that "brainless" works for me
it stands. Its own common.  cool way of saying common ground. You could end with this line.

Something to hold. Interesting last line for a tree hugger like me, but I don't need it.

Hope I didn't vandalize your poem too much- just carving my initials on that tree. 

[rowens]

Dogs show up in my poems to represent shameless, indiscriminate love.
Dead dogs usually represent a failed crossing of the road. A failed seeking.

I wanted emblems and signs and things to represent empty significations. And the short lines to signify unevenness and gnarls, though the stanzas are similarly shaped.
I wanted to keep making reference to ordinary and common features of the tree to have the tree be as simple as possible. Almost obviously simple and generic. And maybe not even a tree.

The busy squirrels see no meaning in my poems. The hunting dogs see nothing worth even pissing on.

The plainness of it even scares away the birds. Even the scavengers. So simple, yet strange.

The tree has heart but no brain. It's clinging to its origins, that's all it has. It knows nothing else. 
Hard, simple and unmoving. The wind's colliding with it doesn't make a sound. Yet it feels and stands stable and strong. It has no choice. There's nothing else to hold on to.

[Mark A Becker]

Hey rowens-
Once you explain it, it makes sense.

But an explanation outside the poem should not be necessary.

If ya want obscure features within yer poems, then who the hell am I to expect different?

[rowens]

I rely on synchronicities and unexpected personal associations (not mine). I like to play roughness and inanity against my better efforts. All of my poems are based on other poems, especially my own. If it wasn't against site rules, I'd put plagiarized sections of other poems in my poems for the jarring effect. I often do that in my notebooks. Sometimes I write poems simply to make stronger of my poems have something to have an allusion too. Sometimes I place dry phrases, or unconnected lines to introduce a flavor of desperation or self-mockery. I like to turn on certain logics, as in dreams, ones I wake from and feel a new clarity on something based in unspoken sensations and connections. I want to risk and perpetuate failure in order to incite new kinds of successes. I want to force myself into an unclearness where I have to strain to make sense of things, and from that strain, break things in me, cracks from which new things ooze and creep out. If not explode. Or implode.
I told you that story to tell you this:
In this poem, I want the subject destroyed in its making. A desperate doomability amongst a questionable stability. The very essence of clinging. As though you were falling to your death, and the only thing to grab hold to is the vise that's crushing you.
My poems don't end at their boundaries. They spread like fungi.
Tree-Man

[Mark A Becker]

... falling to your death, and the only thing to grab hold to is the vise that's crushing you.

That is a whole poem in one line, or you can even make it look like a vise:

falling to your death,
and the only thing
to grab
hold to
is the vise
that's crushing you

[rowens]

You can take things out as of a forest and make a neat bouquet, as I often make a bouquet in my hand from the piles of beer cans that pile up around the neighborhood.

I like to write large Bosch-like paragraphs, those are what my dreams are like. Or landscapes full of extras all doing disparate things like the finale of a Fellini movie.
I only wish to leave it free of the high art of those such things, devoid of signs of education. Something in the woods.

[Mark A Becker]

I like to write large Bosch-like paragraphs, those are what my dreams are like.

I'm pretty sure you've seen that I like to make most of my poems very short. Many of em can start off much longer, but then I start trimming braches off the tree.

If I tried to write what I dreamt, then my poems would barely be a word long, because I have very few dreams that I remember. Which is weird, because I do remember waking up once while I was in the middle of "dream writing" an entire book. Couldn't remember a single word though.

[rowens]

I don't write about my dreams. But I like to use dreams as an example of accessing different overlapping logics.

When I have lucid dreams, I can remember what I read and wrote when I wake up.

One thing I like about dreams is when a song I haven't thought about in over 20 years is playing in the background as clear as if it was on the radio while I was awake.

[rowens]

Mark Becker,

This is one of the most explicit examples of the dog-love trope.
I've been on this site a long, long time.

Forever and ever and ever


Animals Don't Love Each Other

A woman’s crying,
with a sense of shame
that’s only what’s expected.
Only humans are raped.

You don’t hear a dog complain;
a bitch in heat doesn’t lament the smell of her ass,
or bring charges against the mutt that mounts her.

It’s not that animals have no sense;
they’re nothing but sense.
They don’t miss anything for long,
or run in front of cars because they’re stupid.

A beast has somewhere to go,
and other kinds of places it just needs to be.
People put up chains and fences because they love so intensely;
and a lone man dead by the side of the road is no tragedy but a reward.





There were two other poems, unknown and He got bit by a snake and also poisoned on this site. I don't find them, now.

Setting up the animal-sex drive, and the Cynic-dog world. 

The dog/love trope.

[Mark A Becker]

Hey rowens-

I guess you singled me out because I struck this line in Tree Man when I commented on it:
Love makes a dead dog of men

At least I can see that line's relationship to Animals Don't Love Each Other, in this line :
and a lone man dead by the side of the road is no tragedy but a reward

That said, Animals Don't Love Each Other is definitely explicit, and raw.

I'm sorta glad you can't find the other two: probably best to let sleeping dogs lie.

[rowens]

The going beyond love is going two ways. There's down into the animal passions, and there's upward to selfless love. Both are selfless in ways.
The tree is going up and down. 
In my short stories and novels, the demon scenes are full of gratuitous sex and violence. Demons are often depicted as animal hybrids. Animals are seen as natural, and natural things doing unnatural things disturbs people.

Dying from love or dying into love. Love is the most wonderful thing and the most terrifying thing. Devouring and saving.

I've written my demonic books. I'm writing my abyss books now. My Purgatory. 

But will I ever make it to Paradiso? Do I want to? Or do I want to continue chucking around muck?

I live in the South, and blow through books by Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor and James Dickey, mix in horror movies, folklore and magic, blue comedy, and a touch of Jean Genet and William Burroughs, and I'm waking up in the middle of the night with localized versions of those Bosch scenes I mentioned before.

Lately I've been transfiguring up through the ethical vulgarity of the Cynic. 
Drukpa Kunley also has a dog with him that hunts down dualistic thinking.

And with the thelemic allusions I've been using, it becomes closer to why they celebrate the whore of babylon as the Holy of Holies.

I'm going from mundane social horrors to spiritual horrors to cosmic horrors, and doing my best to pass through the Black Lodge. 

My poems are spells and signposts.

There are gnarly tangled things to smooth out and weave into that immanent Conscientious Light I keep blabbering on about.

---

The Dog-Man, the Tree-Man? What next?

Oannes, the fish-man?

N in tarot is the Death card. And the hebrew letter is Fish. Noah is an N-name. Water is chaos. Noah is the fish swimming through chaos with his Ark, arc, ark.
Then he grows a vineyard and gets drunk. Wine symbolizes Clarity. Jesus turns water to wine. Jesus walks on/above chaos.

Jesus invokes Dionysus. Lords over Chaos. Dark Wisdom.

---

You can see the evolution of the dog-love

And in the last one here, you get the meditation and the tree. More, perhaps?, foolish consistency:


Two William Blake Demon quotes: 

"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."
"The fool who persists in his folly will become wise."

I'm certainly persistent:



He Got Bit By a Snake and also Poisoned
This is not the time to talk
about the three dogs that knocked on my door that night.
Another dog followed me around a few days.
He had a limp, it looked funny.
He wasn't embarrassed.

The other dogs didn't mess around with him.
What I thought was that he got hit by a car;
those other dogs knew more than me
about how he'd actually been bit by a snake and poisoned.

Though he had the reputation of having eaten that newborn
hedge of kittens that time,
that didn't happen.
My dad put them in a blanket with rocks.

The mother cat ate herself from the outside in,
like that dog with razor blades in his steak,
that kid, Jessy, had.
Jessy always had his pecker hanging out.
He's dead now.

When the dog stopped showing up
to follow me around,
nobody noticed;
but I figured he did what Jessy's brother did
after he accidentally broke his brother's neck
in a backyard wrestling match:

He went off in the woods to die alone,
like a dog.



unknown
When I was in rural Maryland,
I lived next door to a Buddhist diagnosed
with obsessive compulsive disorder
and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Each afternoon I'd see him out my back window,
sitting under my dead pear tree,
blinking his eyes and shifting his tilted head
from shoulder to shoulder in a diagonal motion.

He had food stamps but when they ran out,
he'd walk all over town asking for offerings.
There were a few people he could always count on.

He had to eat a lot,
because in his mind it would be a true test of will
for him to form an extreme eating habit
and gain enough weight to have to lose it.

He realized he would never be able to meditate
with his mental and physical tics;
so he only sat under the tree for effect,
and tried other means of self-mastery.

Drugs, drink, sloth, tv and internet gluttony;
he tried them all, and wrote of them in notebooks.
I sometimes found balled up paper strewn through my yard
where the rotten pears used to be.

Finally his doctor convinced him it would be a good idea
if he took some medication,
to see how well he could overcome
the side effects that might occur.

Months later, I noticed he'd be sitting under the tree
from morning to night,
in rain, in thunderstorms, in snow,
in all temperatures.

I'd bring him a blanket or food or water;
no matter what I said, he never spoke to me.
I just read his balled up notes he sometimes left.

I didn't live there very much longer,
and when I was about to be evicted,
I got my stuff together and took off
long before sunrise.

I left him my dog,
which was the reason I was being evicted in the first place.

He always liked my dog, I could tell.
I don't know what became of either of them;
but for reasons not altogether clear to me,
I've come to feel that he was going about things in the wrong way.