07-12-2011, 05:25 AM
I am bored of great novels.
Virginia Woolf with her myriad leaves,
browning, dying as the ladies do lunch.
Charles Dickens and his broad grotesques
pouting like pantomime dames,
sentences longer than a fisherman's yarn,
signifying nothing. Of the Brontes only Emily
was worth the paper she defaced,
and I still haven't finished Wuthering Heights.
Henry James is tedium defined
and given its own plaque.
I want to read. I want to sit and read
and be taken by a book. Something with -
dare I say it? - soul. Passion, grit, life
and death. Raskolnikov cleaving
the pawnbroker's head, Ahab stabbing
from hell's heart, Bukowski drowning
in whiskey and whores, Larkin laughing
at family men, Highsmith mocking
everyone.
Virginia Woolf with her myriad leaves,
browning, dying as the ladies do lunch.
Charles Dickens and his broad grotesques
pouting like pantomime dames,
sentences longer than a fisherman's yarn,
signifying nothing. Of the Brontes only Emily
was worth the paper she defaced,
and I still haven't finished Wuthering Heights.
Henry James is tedium defined
and given its own plaque.
I want to read. I want to sit and read
and be taken by a book. Something with -
dare I say it? - soul. Passion, grit, life
and death. Raskolnikov cleaving
the pawnbroker's head, Ahab stabbing
from hell's heart, Bukowski drowning
in whiskey and whores, Larkin laughing
at family men, Highsmith mocking
everyone.
"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." - Gene Wolfe