Vulpes
06-25-2007, 07:23 AM
This is a bit long. And a bit ridiculous.
Innocence.
(Fake wet suburban lawns glint moronically in the streetlight outside,
and life is filling up with moths.
Their brown patterned wings lay open everywhere
like elaborate dance hall masks
as my soul rises up into the polluted trench coat of a sky,
careworn and quite dusty as it is,
and devoid of visible stars.
Here I linger hourly like an insomniac
with innumerous other sleepers
as headlights straddle the world below
and urchins lurk in the fissures of walls
and their universe of jack lights beneath
is but an ingenuous autography
of scrawled artificial things.
Yet the dogging head trauma of daylight
will pore itself coffee-like upon the eyes
as the radio heralds the waking up of dawn;
the soul is hosed down
from its alpine air castle
and draped in hot bedclothes
as the sun ails and wretches
on the pane.)
The clean midnight world suffers a heaving metamorphoses
and sickeningly transforms into a universe of neckties and news broadcasts;
rampant red buses boot scoot the highways
with their slow geriatric steps
and beneath their wheels the trains loop and zip
like maniacal canines with overwrought eyes.
As one in bleary-eyed stupor surveys the kingdom
and begs of oneself the meaning of life,
the dullest perception of the world's empty genesis
may flare in one's nostrils like a memory; but
it is fleeting and untrue as a taxi barks interruption,
and one peels oneself from one's chair. Then
one may hum one's personal tragedy on the way to work,
until the whole burping city is but a grinding mechanical
song of dejection and self-pity, utterly lacking in melody or key.
Yet one is lured from the razor by middle-aged holiday getaways -
with their money-coloured fists and pop-star eyes -
and the various greasy gift shops of one's twilight.
One settles the bedclothes about oneself
and dozes off gratefully.
I myself am stringing and tuning my immeasurable woes
in a beaky pile on a winded old bus.
We are stopped at the perpetually obnoxious traffic lights,
like a great sore island slapped meanly amid an ocean of cars.
I daydream anxiously of green horizons as parks and coffee shops
flick on and off over the trim hem of traffic outside.
I feel self-conscious and over-lapping and grieve my limbs.
I wish somehow and vaguely to be ground down to boneless dust,
and to leave behind forever my psychology and pretensions.
Still, this ongoing commentary of malicious words jogs panting
through my brain; on and on it splutters, obsessively
judging and labelling the world.
The interior of the bus is full and humid.
Its persons sit heaped, resembling various musicians
with wan clockwork faces; their
humdrum empty lots regularly auctioning
the innards of their minutes for well-furnished modern
fantasies and moribund childhood snaps;
images of themselves erected peaceably in boyhood shorts
or girlhood sandals, or projected far into the never collapsing future,
rife as it is with many births and marriages,
or with fame perhaps, and usually a tranquil
white-whiskered retirement to a quaint
log cabin or white beach house. Yet still,
there is death;
death that sits black-clad
between their knees, resting its
dog-like head upon their feet; death,
that stamps with the tremor of so many famished hearts,
such as buskers on boiled western nights atone to,
beating the rampant metronome of the cat ever worrying its tail;
death in its many forms, like the sword-tongued viper
of curtain and melodrama;
death as birth, birth as death; theories,
philosophies, material; on and on war they!
They seem ever locked in the premature necessity
of homing's climaxless nut, advancing forward
as the child seeking adventure; retreating again as if burnt.
How we sucklings climb blind
into the eyeless womb of success and warmth!
And how the wan clockwork faces
smother close against the ceiling in despair,
how their teeth prod and gnash,
and how they reap the plumage of vulnerable
blood feathers from their chests;
reaping like clockwork.
Forgive me vacating the congested bus,
that I cannot beg forgiveness of this necktie religion;
the red rusted cogwheels of my inland revolt
against its sneering sad mien, and though I am
but another automaton of dim-eyed regret and fancy -
not above nor below the busload, but
rather of their sort; indeed, one with them,
and sympathetically united in that odd way
by our pathetic collective woe - my ugly trunk
and regrettable person -
for each day I wage the war with death
likewise with myself, spitting in my face
as in the face of one despised -
can bear no longer the feverish conditions,
which, I feel, are partially to blame
for my bizarre
digressions of thought.
Though the bus remains like bloody mattress
flopped dead before unchanging lights,
I rise to exit. As I shuffle, the green horizons
of my earlier daydreams return
fully like a balm;
Away from this city!, I think wishfully,
and, the heat having taken its toll, I proceed in my earlier fashion:
that the sky is tumultuous,
the sun like a blazing seed,
and the earth naught but bouldered rock in comparison,
never so changeful or malleable!
That had I green horizons where a moon or sun was ever,
I would offer myself as the sea;
I would prostrate myself at their roots,
and thus become field, acre, or length of ocean;
for I cannot, I think, wilt and perish forever
under artificial eyes; I cannot forever linger before these faces,
curling always inward like the timid legs of spiders,
yet truly seeing not --
and so on and on.
The sentence of time I am charged in reaching the exit
seems interminable, yet truly
cannot be long; for, now, I brush the ticket collector,
guarding, it would seem, the door; an indifferent youth,
lazy-eyed and shave-headed,
and seeming initially to pay me no heed;
yet the next moment I am half-surprised
to hear him bark loudly, "Missis!" -
no doubt in indication of myself -
as I finally step down onto the road.
For on the road a chink has been made;
some wayward lumberjack has beat into its middle,
or some haughty seamstress unraveled its strings,
and, all of a sudden,
with timing too profound,
the traffic is unclogged!
The movement is deft; almost expert.
With a clamor of horns
seeming to reach me from years off,
I am conscious of little but collision;
I see the car hardly from my periphery;
I feel only a sudden pressure
blooming unexpectedly in my hip,
and an otherworldly jerk of the neck.
That is all. It is not complex.
I am presently soaring. I am dead.
I can consign no greater description to the event,
defeating, as it does, description.
I am no longer bodily nor psychologically existent.
I do not soar a winged or limbed thing, furnished with draperies of skin;
I do not move astride a vessel, nor sit within one's well;
I am without separation from the air.
Though I may soar, I do not move actually.
I do not say to myself, "I soar", for I
am not here.
I can be seen laving the riverbanks, for I am water;
yet also I am the riverbanks, and also the roots of trees,
winding deeper and deeper in arches and knots
into the guilless many-coloured earth.
And as I am the riverbanks, likewise I am the oceans,
and the square red crabs
scuttling among the rocks, and
the multitudinous fish
rattling silent in the depths.
Yet still I do not say, "I soar", and nor do I,
with dogmatism,
lavish dissatisfied monikers upon the world, nor
categorise and judge, but seem laughingly -
an adjective used lightly, for language drops meaningless -
content, and not angered
by the obsessive waves of human heads
plummeting ceaselessly into frowns,
nor upset, nor anything remotely conveyable,
for as I am the ocean,
riverbanks,
animals,
mountains,
similarly I am each human, and each human is I,
in the purest selfless sense.
Being everything and knowing nothing
and existing in no society
where man's clocks do not jigsaw hours,
I move in no physical nor psychological way,
with no ambition or instinct,
and yet
will here take the form of a tree,
seemingly apportioned from its fellows, but truly
as inseparate as is water from itself. I do not
rationalise nor analyse this;
I do not think;
I have no thought.
And, as I am here bark;
there ant; there leaf,
I am now a child, now the ocean,
now the dolphin; now the fish, unaware of being such,
for such does not exist;
yet fish I glide in my gargantuan anemone,
its curious appendages stroking my sides,
moving as do leafy branches in the breeze; and
so I am these branches; the knobbed branches, the smooth branches,
the brown and the white;
I am the branches of every tree; I am the breeze
which, moist, envelopes them, and the leaves
which shudder excitedly at life.
Again I am human:
I am a man with a walking cane.
I walk to my house -
my small house which I like to keep neat -
and I open the door. I enter.
I lock the door behind me and throw off my jacket.
Now I am a cat, pawing in agitation at a window, whilst
a child with too many hands
berates me humourously. Now I am a song,
existing for less than a second - indeed, in a moment alone -
issuing dryly from chapped brown lips.
Now the fly, now the grass,
now the spittle of rain on a windscreen.
Now a child asleep;
now striding unalert
through pretty ivied forest dreams;
now a weevil,
my large nose quivering, and now
a big moth plunging, and now
an empty space. Now a rock in hard mute slumber,
and now a tittering rivulet of water, wetting
sandy toes. Now light,
now thunder, now the smallest minutest speck;
now a cow craning its neck;
now a deer in fright;
now a falcon. Now an idea, caught in
perpetual frenzy; now a wheel
of penetrable thought. I do not flit
from thing to thing
as bee from bud to bud, but rather I am
all this at once; the artificiality of man's
measured peppered time does not exist,
leaving but the present, and that
not as man's conception. And, indeed, I am man;
a fragmentary warship; a nugget in the brain;
a self! But throughout all I am dead; I
am innocence unnamed.
And now I descend,
vanishing down the milk-white street
like an oblong stain in a
succession of stairs;
I am the joint and knee-cap,
and the light which falls on angles in
motion;
I am the cork
set aloft a grainy heath of sea;
I do not tangle as I drop to lightless beds;
I do not say, "Good night! Good night!"
I am dead. Yet!
Yet how ideas rise like bubbles from the depths;
and how I am now conscious of a stone in my
chest, emptying and gushing, and
breath and breath
and breath, and I rise too with skin
of pewter, and am not dead, not
yet.
:):lol: :)
Innocence.
(Fake wet suburban lawns glint moronically in the streetlight outside,
and life is filling up with moths.
Their brown patterned wings lay open everywhere
like elaborate dance hall masks
as my soul rises up into the polluted trench coat of a sky,
careworn and quite dusty as it is,
and devoid of visible stars.
Here I linger hourly like an insomniac
with innumerous other sleepers
as headlights straddle the world below
and urchins lurk in the fissures of walls
and their universe of jack lights beneath
is but an ingenuous autography
of scrawled artificial things.
Yet the dogging head trauma of daylight
will pore itself coffee-like upon the eyes
as the radio heralds the waking up of dawn;
the soul is hosed down
from its alpine air castle
and draped in hot bedclothes
as the sun ails and wretches
on the pane.)
The clean midnight world suffers a heaving metamorphoses
and sickeningly transforms into a universe of neckties and news broadcasts;
rampant red buses boot scoot the highways
with their slow geriatric steps
and beneath their wheels the trains loop and zip
like maniacal canines with overwrought eyes.
As one in bleary-eyed stupor surveys the kingdom
and begs of oneself the meaning of life,
the dullest perception of the world's empty genesis
may flare in one's nostrils like a memory; but
it is fleeting and untrue as a taxi barks interruption,
and one peels oneself from one's chair. Then
one may hum one's personal tragedy on the way to work,
until the whole burping city is but a grinding mechanical
song of dejection and self-pity, utterly lacking in melody or key.
Yet one is lured from the razor by middle-aged holiday getaways -
with their money-coloured fists and pop-star eyes -
and the various greasy gift shops of one's twilight.
One settles the bedclothes about oneself
and dozes off gratefully.
I myself am stringing and tuning my immeasurable woes
in a beaky pile on a winded old bus.
We are stopped at the perpetually obnoxious traffic lights,
like a great sore island slapped meanly amid an ocean of cars.
I daydream anxiously of green horizons as parks and coffee shops
flick on and off over the trim hem of traffic outside.
I feel self-conscious and over-lapping and grieve my limbs.
I wish somehow and vaguely to be ground down to boneless dust,
and to leave behind forever my psychology and pretensions.
Still, this ongoing commentary of malicious words jogs panting
through my brain; on and on it splutters, obsessively
judging and labelling the world.
The interior of the bus is full and humid.
Its persons sit heaped, resembling various musicians
with wan clockwork faces; their
humdrum empty lots regularly auctioning
the innards of their minutes for well-furnished modern
fantasies and moribund childhood snaps;
images of themselves erected peaceably in boyhood shorts
or girlhood sandals, or projected far into the never collapsing future,
rife as it is with many births and marriages,
or with fame perhaps, and usually a tranquil
white-whiskered retirement to a quaint
log cabin or white beach house. Yet still,
there is death;
death that sits black-clad
between their knees, resting its
dog-like head upon their feet; death,
that stamps with the tremor of so many famished hearts,
such as buskers on boiled western nights atone to,
beating the rampant metronome of the cat ever worrying its tail;
death in its many forms, like the sword-tongued viper
of curtain and melodrama;
death as birth, birth as death; theories,
philosophies, material; on and on war they!
They seem ever locked in the premature necessity
of homing's climaxless nut, advancing forward
as the child seeking adventure; retreating again as if burnt.
How we sucklings climb blind
into the eyeless womb of success and warmth!
And how the wan clockwork faces
smother close against the ceiling in despair,
how their teeth prod and gnash,
and how they reap the plumage of vulnerable
blood feathers from their chests;
reaping like clockwork.
Forgive me vacating the congested bus,
that I cannot beg forgiveness of this necktie religion;
the red rusted cogwheels of my inland revolt
against its sneering sad mien, and though I am
but another automaton of dim-eyed regret and fancy -
not above nor below the busload, but
rather of their sort; indeed, one with them,
and sympathetically united in that odd way
by our pathetic collective woe - my ugly trunk
and regrettable person -
for each day I wage the war with death
likewise with myself, spitting in my face
as in the face of one despised -
can bear no longer the feverish conditions,
which, I feel, are partially to blame
for my bizarre
digressions of thought.
Though the bus remains like bloody mattress
flopped dead before unchanging lights,
I rise to exit. As I shuffle, the green horizons
of my earlier daydreams return
fully like a balm;
Away from this city!, I think wishfully,
and, the heat having taken its toll, I proceed in my earlier fashion:
that the sky is tumultuous,
the sun like a blazing seed,
and the earth naught but bouldered rock in comparison,
never so changeful or malleable!
That had I green horizons where a moon or sun was ever,
I would offer myself as the sea;
I would prostrate myself at their roots,
and thus become field, acre, or length of ocean;
for I cannot, I think, wilt and perish forever
under artificial eyes; I cannot forever linger before these faces,
curling always inward like the timid legs of spiders,
yet truly seeing not --
and so on and on.
The sentence of time I am charged in reaching the exit
seems interminable, yet truly
cannot be long; for, now, I brush the ticket collector,
guarding, it would seem, the door; an indifferent youth,
lazy-eyed and shave-headed,
and seeming initially to pay me no heed;
yet the next moment I am half-surprised
to hear him bark loudly, "Missis!" -
no doubt in indication of myself -
as I finally step down onto the road.
For on the road a chink has been made;
some wayward lumberjack has beat into its middle,
or some haughty seamstress unraveled its strings,
and, all of a sudden,
with timing too profound,
the traffic is unclogged!
The movement is deft; almost expert.
With a clamor of horns
seeming to reach me from years off,
I am conscious of little but collision;
I see the car hardly from my periphery;
I feel only a sudden pressure
blooming unexpectedly in my hip,
and an otherworldly jerk of the neck.
That is all. It is not complex.
I am presently soaring. I am dead.
I can consign no greater description to the event,
defeating, as it does, description.
I am no longer bodily nor psychologically existent.
I do not soar a winged or limbed thing, furnished with draperies of skin;
I do not move astride a vessel, nor sit within one's well;
I am without separation from the air.
Though I may soar, I do not move actually.
I do not say to myself, "I soar", for I
am not here.
I can be seen laving the riverbanks, for I am water;
yet also I am the riverbanks, and also the roots of trees,
winding deeper and deeper in arches and knots
into the guilless many-coloured earth.
And as I am the riverbanks, likewise I am the oceans,
and the square red crabs
scuttling among the rocks, and
the multitudinous fish
rattling silent in the depths.
Yet still I do not say, "I soar", and nor do I,
with dogmatism,
lavish dissatisfied monikers upon the world, nor
categorise and judge, but seem laughingly -
an adjective used lightly, for language drops meaningless -
content, and not angered
by the obsessive waves of human heads
plummeting ceaselessly into frowns,
nor upset, nor anything remotely conveyable,
for as I am the ocean,
riverbanks,
animals,
mountains,
similarly I am each human, and each human is I,
in the purest selfless sense.
Being everything and knowing nothing
and existing in no society
where man's clocks do not jigsaw hours,
I move in no physical nor psychological way,
with no ambition or instinct,
and yet
will here take the form of a tree,
seemingly apportioned from its fellows, but truly
as inseparate as is water from itself. I do not
rationalise nor analyse this;
I do not think;
I have no thought.
And, as I am here bark;
there ant; there leaf,
I am now a child, now the ocean,
now the dolphin; now the fish, unaware of being such,
for such does not exist;
yet fish I glide in my gargantuan anemone,
its curious appendages stroking my sides,
moving as do leafy branches in the breeze; and
so I am these branches; the knobbed branches, the smooth branches,
the brown and the white;
I am the branches of every tree; I am the breeze
which, moist, envelopes them, and the leaves
which shudder excitedly at life.
Again I am human:
I am a man with a walking cane.
I walk to my house -
my small house which I like to keep neat -
and I open the door. I enter.
I lock the door behind me and throw off my jacket.
Now I am a cat, pawing in agitation at a window, whilst
a child with too many hands
berates me humourously. Now I am a song,
existing for less than a second - indeed, in a moment alone -
issuing dryly from chapped brown lips.
Now the fly, now the grass,
now the spittle of rain on a windscreen.
Now a child asleep;
now striding unalert
through pretty ivied forest dreams;
now a weevil,
my large nose quivering, and now
a big moth plunging, and now
an empty space. Now a rock in hard mute slumber,
and now a tittering rivulet of water, wetting
sandy toes. Now light,
now thunder, now the smallest minutest speck;
now a cow craning its neck;
now a deer in fright;
now a falcon. Now an idea, caught in
perpetual frenzy; now a wheel
of penetrable thought. I do not flit
from thing to thing
as bee from bud to bud, but rather I am
all this at once; the artificiality of man's
measured peppered time does not exist,
leaving but the present, and that
not as man's conception. And, indeed, I am man;
a fragmentary warship; a nugget in the brain;
a self! But throughout all I am dead; I
am innocence unnamed.
And now I descend,
vanishing down the milk-white street
like an oblong stain in a
succession of stairs;
I am the joint and knee-cap,
and the light which falls on angles in
motion;
I am the cork
set aloft a grainy heath of sea;
I do not tangle as I drop to lightless beds;
I do not say, "Good night! Good night!"
I am dead. Yet!
Yet how ideas rise like bubbles from the depths;
and how I am now conscious of a stone in my
chest, emptying and gushing, and
breath and breath
and breath, and I rise too with skin
of pewter, and am not dead, not
yet.
:):lol: :)