12-09-2018, 04:32 AM
The one I posted here, I left the first part out, and it's bugged me ever-since. I'm an obsessive person. I know somebody who was sensitive about the first part, but I've realized that it was me being sensitive that caused me to leave the first part out. And I don't like that, because it's dishonest. Because honestly, I don't give a shit about that person's sensitivity anymore, if ever I did.
And I definitely can't stand mutilating my writing.
Marigold
“pictures all in a row”
To Katelyn Nicole Davis
for T.R. Moore
You weren't insane, you were young;
it made me happy the way you were climbing a tree,
it made me remember trying to make a treehouse,
those people I don't talk to anymore.
A lot has changed since I was 12 years old,
the people I knew, the situations.
I wonder if you were insane,
a psychopath in masochiovision;
but I have to wonder that, being older and realistic.
If I was your age I would just have WONDERED.
I'm writing this because I'm alive,
and partly because you're dead. . . .
If you'd not died, and I'd never heard about it,
I'd be writing anyway about something else;
maybe it's that I'm drunk that I'm writing.
Why else would I take a 12 year old to heart
(who's dead?)
Have I ever been known to do such a thing?
So what? You're dead.
If you weren't I wouldn't know that you existed.
I think you were beautiful, I didn't
thought about you at all,
while you were alive
I would have thought you were very animated
and passed over you never to return,
a girl swimming, not drowning, on our human suffering;
but you made the point to drown;
and I came across you not knowing of you
like I would a movie actress, of course
not alive like Olivia de Havilland,
and maybe would have remembered you for what you did
and not being dead,
—and climbing a tree, like you were doing something fun,
and seemed so fun to me.
If I could have been there to climb
and fallen down just in time to
knock you off your it's-this-way narrative,
see how I didn't say pedestal?
[No. You're dead.]
I would have said
there is a line you must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
And would have just been quoting a poem that
you wouldn't understand.
But that's just because this is a poem.
In real life I would have grabbed you and pulled you down
and made you stop.
I wouldn't have even had time to think about it.
"I Must Have Died Alone, A Long, Long Time Ago"
Kurt Cobain (David Bowie)
Women are wicked, but a man has drugs
or skills. Put the Weird Sisters record on pause,
they'll be there,
you run out and they'll know where to get it,
where the red fern, the sidewalk,
the weather suits, the proverbial
predicates they've had all along
in the back of their good-natured eyes.
The two things a man needs, she can provide.
Your parents have their own lives,
like everybody,
each is a clone of two
in one, and all was.
We're never alone,
even when we die.
That must be why you couldn't just retire,
bring the parents with you, all the stomachs
and corporate magazines. And your daughter,
you and her all over again.
A Lady Macbeth who just wanted celebrity
can get it on her own.
Though there's small profit in comparisons.
That legendary suicide is such a bore.
"I'm an Ignorant Man"
I don't know you,
your first defense is your best,
and each who come back
to recharge on your angst
and penultimate miseries,
a tourist running the bulls
in a suit of armor,
and now play you over and over
like the man who's had enough
at a live press conference
removing his life from an envelope,
receive their inspiration from a ghoul
now rotten or charred
like any victim of their own ignorant fate.
For each individual hope is different,
what couldn't be prevented can't be changed, and
each new instance is a new instance
without the slightest resemblance, despite outcome.
Death is the least Romantic thing,
it's immortality through tragedy
and people who are remembered,
a whole world in a scene, a realm
that becomes this world forever.
Your trailer looked more
like a yardsale nobody wanted.
Nobody learnt their lesson but you
in your last moment;
if they had no time for you in life,
how much more they have now.
You swung in the ignoble gloaming
for 20 minutes
with no one except indifferent crickets
if some joker hadn't called you;
not a dog, if you climbed up there
a cat trying to get away,
to sniff round the base of that resolute tree.
You're not the first or the last,
barely an iota;
though you earned full name status
with us, like Lee Harvey Oswald,
you didn’t kill a president,
only yourself;
any precedent you set
is nothing to speak of.
Though, things have grown
quiet, nor Cassandra nor adolescent Sibyl,
you remain only you
as if no higher self was possible,
now no dilettante idol in fields of rye need
eye your dancing steps too close to the edge;
in your eyes there was play, then this.
Not famous for doing nothing
in your off hours, a sister-mother to your siblings,
then this.
Parts Unknown
The snake was not a rope
and wouldn't bite you,
it was your way out.
But you wanted the Garden.
For the cruel world to go away,
but you only wanted reality;
not a god to watch you like a mirror
in your anxious moments
getting ready to go out on your bike
or catch the bus.
Louise, you had nothing already,
why did you need more
to prove you there is nothing in the dark
but a body just as gorgeous empty
and our beauty empty,
and your love just another memory
that must be more and more forgotten
over the years if one's expected to go on.
I also took the 'come' out of the "become" of the penultimate line because it too was bugging me.
Months ago, my friend came over, and whilst drunk convinced me to watch the video of this young girl killing herself. Which I found abhorrent, but he seemed to get a spiritual inspiration. He said he was so inspired that he tried to write a poem about the matter. Me, being me, said I'm the one who wears the poetry writing pants in the family, and wrote this to outdo him. And, in effect, as I do, made it all about me.
And I definitely can't stand mutilating my writing.
Marigold
“pictures all in a row”
To Katelyn Nicole Davis
for T.R. Moore
You weren't insane, you were young;
it made me happy the way you were climbing a tree,
it made me remember trying to make a treehouse,
those people I don't talk to anymore.
A lot has changed since I was 12 years old,
the people I knew, the situations.
I wonder if you were insane,
a psychopath in masochiovision;
but I have to wonder that, being older and realistic.
If I was your age I would just have WONDERED.
I'm writing this because I'm alive,
and partly because you're dead. . . .
If you'd not died, and I'd never heard about it,
I'd be writing anyway about something else;
maybe it's that I'm drunk that I'm writing.
Why else would I take a 12 year old to heart
(who's dead?)
Have I ever been known to do such a thing?
So what? You're dead.
If you weren't I wouldn't know that you existed.
I think you were beautiful, I didn't
thought about you at all,
while you were alive
I would have thought you were very animated
and passed over you never to return,
a girl swimming, not drowning, on our human suffering;
but you made the point to drown;
and I came across you not knowing of you
like I would a movie actress, of course
not alive like Olivia de Havilland,
and maybe would have remembered you for what you did
and not being dead,
—and climbing a tree, like you were doing something fun,
and seemed so fun to me.
If I could have been there to climb
and fallen down just in time to
knock you off your it's-this-way narrative,
see how I didn't say pedestal?
[No. You're dead.]
I would have said
there is a line you must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
And would have just been quoting a poem that
you wouldn't understand.
But that's just because this is a poem.
In real life I would have grabbed you and pulled you down
and made you stop.
I wouldn't have even had time to think about it.
"I Must Have Died Alone, A Long, Long Time Ago"
Kurt Cobain (David Bowie)
Women are wicked, but a man has drugs
or skills. Put the Weird Sisters record on pause,
they'll be there,
you run out and they'll know where to get it,
where the red fern, the sidewalk,
the weather suits, the proverbial
predicates they've had all along
in the back of their good-natured eyes.
The two things a man needs, she can provide.
Your parents have their own lives,
like everybody,
each is a clone of two
in one, and all was.
We're never alone,
even when we die.
That must be why you couldn't just retire,
bring the parents with you, all the stomachs
and corporate magazines. And your daughter,
you and her all over again.
A Lady Macbeth who just wanted celebrity
can get it on her own.
Though there's small profit in comparisons.
That legendary suicide is such a bore.
"I'm an Ignorant Man"
I don't know you,
your first defense is your best,
and each who come back
to recharge on your angst
and penultimate miseries,
a tourist running the bulls
in a suit of armor,
and now play you over and over
like the man who's had enough
at a live press conference
removing his life from an envelope,
receive their inspiration from a ghoul
now rotten or charred
like any victim of their own ignorant fate.
For each individual hope is different,
what couldn't be prevented can't be changed, and
each new instance is a new instance
without the slightest resemblance, despite outcome.
Death is the least Romantic thing,
it's immortality through tragedy
and people who are remembered,
a whole world in a scene, a realm
that becomes this world forever.
Your trailer looked more
like a yardsale nobody wanted.
Nobody learnt their lesson but you
in your last moment;
if they had no time for you in life,
how much more they have now.
You swung in the ignoble gloaming
for 20 minutes
with no one except indifferent crickets
if some joker hadn't called you;
not a dog, if you climbed up there
a cat trying to get away,
to sniff round the base of that resolute tree.
You're not the first or the last,
barely an iota;
though you earned full name status
with us, like Lee Harvey Oswald,
you didn’t kill a president,
only yourself;
any precedent you set
is nothing to speak of.
Though, things have grown
quiet, nor Cassandra nor adolescent Sibyl,
you remain only you
as if no higher self was possible,
now no dilettante idol in fields of rye need
eye your dancing steps too close to the edge;
in your eyes there was play, then this.
Not famous for doing nothing
in your off hours, a sister-mother to your siblings,
then this.
Parts Unknown
The snake was not a rope
and wouldn't bite you,
it was your way out.
But you wanted the Garden.
For the cruel world to go away,
but you only wanted reality;
not a god to watch you like a mirror
in your anxious moments
getting ready to go out on your bike
or catch the bus.
Louise, you had nothing already,
why did you need more
to prove you there is nothing in the dark
but a body just as gorgeous empty
and our beauty empty,
and your love just another memory
that must be more and more forgotten
over the years if one's expected to go on.
I also took the 'come' out of the "become" of the penultimate line because it too was bugging me.
Months ago, my friend came over, and whilst drunk convinced me to watch the video of this young girl killing herself. Which I found abhorrent, but he seemed to get a spiritual inspiration. He said he was so inspired that he tried to write a poem about the matter. Me, being me, said I'm the one who wears the poetry writing pants in the family, and wrote this to outdo him. And, in effect, as I do, made it all about me.