Three of my Most Recent Poems.

[Daltonxi]

Hello, I just registered on this fine forum which I had found on Google. I felt impressed with the discussion on this forum and I wanted to share with you three poems that I recently had written and a poem I written a while ago. I am a poet, I must admit that. I have over 100 poems. Many people enjoy my poems, so I hope you will all enjoy it.
- - - - - - -

“The Life of a Poet”

It is often a confusing life.
The motions we see often contradictory to our own and pass in unremarkable blurs.
My pen had just ceased to record my own idle thoughts.
For I have gone on a long voyage rummaging for just a simple pen.
Nowhere, for so long, have I found one anywhere in the confines I was in so I can write this
poem.

As I glance into the horizon, my hazel eyes pick up many activities and movements that contradict my recumbent mode.
Rackets a-whiffing and the sound of sneakers impacting the ground with fierce eagerness to score.
Balls are bouncing in a predictable movement up and down.
Birdies move unpredictably around the court trying to lend itself to the sweaty floor that scores the person whose arm moves like pistons.
Bodies are thrashing and being pushed to their limits.
Minds like mine are pondering and being forced to its apex of human understanding.

All I watch is the animation of arms and legs, hips and chests.
I look at myself and I countermand any thoughts to shoot the hoops or hit a birdie.
I glance upon the hooped and netted field to perceive the world around me.
Seeing things, the little things, nobody cares to see.
As I hear the minds melting from the insistent stress of the final exams.
Nobody here wishes to have been awoken from sweet sleep today.
My mind is a stream whose delta is the world before me.

Many forms of the human figure flicker before me like sunlight feverishly attempting to beam through storm clouds trying to form a ladder to the darkness which covers the truth.
They juxtapose with the many shapes revolving around them and create an endless collage of sporadic, improvised shapes of humanity as one.
My pen jots down metaphors as I search behind the forces that be.
My eyes make rapid darting motions back and forth, left and right.
Like trains that gone off track, I too undermine the physical conventions.

The world is an undulating sea of art undiscovered.
They live sprinting across this busy room, we live as an observing pedestrian whose legs are ran over by life leaving us crippled and only to solve the pain by relieving the unwritten metaphors of an unrecorded fate.
We live attempting to find the metaphors in the mundane.
The life of a poet is eyes across a busy room filled with life and a pen on paper whose powers are unlimited as I watch some people try the impossible.
I am a poet and I have no excuses but my pen.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“No Exit”

And when I shall embark many worthwhile roads in my time, each of different merit I run into the same inquiry.
A New Jersey man I tell them that is who I am.
And by a curious, misguided remark would they claim, “What Exit?”
I feel a familiar kin with my exit once I say it so, but it does not seem my exit is who I am.

The thrill of New Jersey, life defined by an exit.
Just like marionettes strung to their pull-upon fate, we are bound to our idiosyncrasies and quirks.
Life defined by our attitudes and our places, like we cannot escape.
A destiny bound to our exists; just as they believe in some determinism.
To assume that by my circumstance my community’s actions make me who I am.

Exit 4, Exit 16, Exit 45, Exit 66.
As if my attitude depends on the position of the sign on the road.
To make judgment based on a number as if I can decide where I come from.
As I roll down the turnpike with the headlights trying to illuminate the signs that appear like little stars among many galaxies like starry, beading eyes.
The eyes see into our souls and its worth as if they can see so far into us to assess who we are.
They serve as a spike impaled into my heart, I know who I am; I am not a Tony.

I glance back at the man as my stomach is churning my caustic food for thought.
They think as if I have no exit from my environment’s identity.
I only look back to say that exits are not exits, but truly are entrances.
Entrances are what exits really are; they provide us glimpses of the different nuances of the human soul.

The man does not know that I been around many roads and I seen it all.
Man is like germinating seeds whose growth is parallel to our caring actions in relation to the seed.

Man is free and so am I.
I stare at the synonymous figure and say I don’t believe in these exits and that I am a real man an individualist.
Exits succeeds existence.
Before thy tongue shall writ an error, be forewarned of your ignorance.
Never ask of what exit I abide my frame, I am just a Jersey man doing the best I can amidst the toxic air.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

“Everyday Man”

Their footsteps plod against the concrete sidewalk continuum ad infinitum.
Briefcases full of their contribution to the grind as they persistently check their watches.
Time has its burdensome weights which press against the egg shell conscience as it presses on.
The wait is so long as the sun acts in illusory ways and feigns an eastward progression.
Minutes insinuate they are merely an appearance in itself --- they are really hours.
And as the seasons wander shall our anguish ponder what exacerbates the wait.
As the summers roll the sweat from a forehead beaten down by diabolic sunrays that drip to the sidewalk as they wait for the bus as they cough from the insolent fumes emitted from cars.
As the winters the feel of the brutality of a frigid chill that nips the fingers with frostbite as they wait for the bus with innocent white snow accumulating on their heads.

Strolling through my car watching their mutual endeavor.
They are all strangers, but they are all in the grind together.
To look at all these men and women and know that within their minds they captivate a different sense of self.
To look at all these men and women and see them all glued together in a quest to meet the end painlessly and gracefully.

But for a second I make a mistake many drifters dare to make.
I could have sworn I saw everybody wearing black and white pinstripe suits and all of the same pale disposition as they stand next to beautiful golden flowers.
They do not feign an appearance of ingenuity, but they blend into each other seamlessly.
They all wait for the same bus, go to work for money, and return home to repeat the same sick cycle sadly.
Their stories may vary, but the sticks that shall break their fragile glass homes don’t fall far from the same tree.
The same azure sky canvas, beading stars, cheese moon, and garish sun like everybody sees; they are ordinary.

All try to make ends meet in a dead end life.
I see them all waiting for a bus everyday reading a newspaper or drinking some coffee.
The sweat and fears are all each other’s.
Through them runs the course of time that brings them all together.
Everybody is related, but they are so far as if some line separates them.
As an idealist, I would hope they at least feign to remove that line and come together.
All the same as we could relate to them, but all of them have different masks.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

This is an old one:

“This Is The Art”

I see the poem in the paper, it was always there.
A flowing river of the imagination, I see.
Words come out, they sleep a lot, but over time I see more firm of an appreciation.
I see the words on the paper; I knew it was always there.
It must exist.
For the sculpture carved out of rock, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder first.
That same eye will always see the beauty not created yet.

Am I not a poet who writes poems?
Or am I just a person who sees everything that could be already there?
Is it just that reality serves its purpose to be perceived if it’s in there already?
Is it absolute that we perceive things that others cannot see?

But do we dare not to free imagination from the chains of oppressing bodies of the bruised unlimited bounties of artistic archetypes?
For everything is the artistic archetype, everything is an art.
Art is from the heart, and if you were to hit me with a dart
I would resurrect from out of the frame and into the lights of unlimited.
For I cannot be stopped from perceiving and being.
For it doesn't kill me, for I am becoming stronger.

For I am a part of everything, for I am an art too.
It cannot die if there is nothing you can kill except the brush.
For all the world is a stage for art, and artistic mediums are just the players.
Art would live on, for the brush is not the only means of enlightenment.
For the sun always shines another day, it shines again.
For both is a three letter word concept.
For the art means the vision and the sun means the life.
It is all connected, life is everywhere and it is all hand in hand.
But what is everything if it is so relative?
And by relative, that is questionable.
Knowledge is questionable and it doesn't completely free you from being a second-hand person.
If you know, then you know.
If you don't know, then you perceive not and let others perceive for you.
But knowledge is unlimited, so that is why it questionable.

Is art questionable?
Only in the eyes of the perceiver and not in the eye of the beholder.
If only the eye of the beholder beholds proudly and doesn't care.
For I am the renegade against conformity, for I know because I just know and knowing is knowledge.
I might be wrong, but at least I'm wrong honorably if I know it's possible.
Cogito Ergo Sum, Esse Is Percicpi.
These are the questions philosophers try to answer, but others dare not.
It is liberty that you as a free person should be honored to attempt to dare.
In a meaningless, perception deception through the hole which we are fed life.
I dare to and to be.

[PrinceMyshkin]

There are interesting thoughts in these and the evidence of a restless, inquiring mind, but... they are somewhat long-winded, lack music or images that can stand up (or out) on their own. It's deadly to write about oneself writing...

[blank|verse]

Yeah, I'm in agreement with Prince. I would like to know how you justify your writing as being poetry and not prose. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, and there's clearly some thoughtful stuff being expressed in your writing, but maybe you'd be better off writing short stories?

[Daltonxi]

Well, with these poems I have done actually more experimenting rather than anything. I mean, I was trying to learn how to do something new through my writing. I will post some of my older ones. But what do you mean it in by form that it seems more like "prose"?

[MorpheusSandman]

By it reading like prose we mean it reads more like an excerpt from a novel or short story. Poetry is usually marked by brevity and density and a tendency towards form, meter, imagery, metaphors, plays with language, etc. which there is little of that here. It's not bad and considering how personal much of it it's quite engaging but it does read much more like prose. Maybe it would be better to work these into a series of short stories instead of poetry.

[Daltonxi]

I won't lie to you, I love my words. I mean, I like to be long-winded that is just my style. I am more of somebody who likes to think hard and engage in whatever I am almost like it is an extension of myself. I mean, I see my style might contrast some of your notions. But nobody got anywhere in poetry by playing by all the rules. I have considered the hint of going toward short stories which I am interested in. People have told me I should because I know how to write. However, short stories have plots. Right? I do not see these "poems" as really having some sort of structure at all like a story. I am not butthurt or anything, but I am just attempting to understand the criticism. I do appreciate your comments by the way. I do not believe in meter and form as much, I believe so much more about the message. I believe in the aesthetic beauty of words playing with each other than having a specific form.

[MorpheusSandman]

But nobody got anywhere in poetry by playing by all the rules.

Before Joyce and Eliot the greats pretty much did just that. Even after Joyce and Eliot there have been plenty of neo-classicists who are intent to see that poetry doesn't drown in an ocean of relative ambiguity. It's always best to learn and play by the rules before deciding to break them, because then you can not only discern what the rules offer in terms of expressive possibilities you can learn to break them to expand those expressive possibilities.

However, short stories have plots. Right?

No, they don't HAVE to have plots. In fact, they can remain thoroughly rooted in the mind of a character just contemplating an event or a room or a memory or an object or an idea or... anything, really.

I do not believe in meter and form as much, I believe so much more about the message. I believe in the aesthetic beauty of words playing with each other than having a specific form.

There is no poetry without form. Even a lack of definite form just forces one's attention to that lack of definite form (the way free verse and choice of line breaks do). Form in poetry is like rhythm in music; you just can't really do away with it or it ceases to become poetry (or music). Believing in the message is fine but poetry (and, indeed, all art) is about form and how something is said infinitely more than about what is said. The simple way to explain this is to say that everything that can be said has already been said; "there is nothing new under the sun". The only thing new that remains is finding new ways to say the same things. That's why all those poetic tools are so important because within them are an infinite amount of ways to say that same message and your task as a poet is to find the best one (the most striking, provocative, potent, poignant, rhetorical, etc.).

[blank|verse]

Ok, you're obviously a thoughtful writer and know what you're doing, so I'll play devil's advocate and say I don't think what you're writing is poetry.

I would be grateful if you could explain to us why you consider what you're writing to be poetry. (And if you're going to say its free verse then please describe or explain your use of such poetic techniques as rhythm, cadence, lineation, etc.)

If you can explain that to us, then maybe we'd have a better appreciation of your writing.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I won't lie to you, I love my words. I mean, I like to be long-winded that is just my style.

But surely if you are "long-winded" when you are with friends, you risk turning them off, losing their interest. That you love your words is to your credit but you need to listen for whatever music there might be in them, whatever relationship one thought has to the preceding or the next. Bear in mind Yeats' invaluable observation: "Out of our quarrels with others, we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry."