Blink, Blink

Blink, Blink
Blink, Blink

53 per minute
In 4/4
I’ve measured the blinking, cursed, cursor
Beating to the rhythm of a
Bradycardia heart
At rest
(Almost alive, not quite dead)
It should be beating to this unrest
But who can blame a thing that can’t see past
The blank walls we’ve constructed?

This blank page was like that wall
Austere, complete, implacable, vast
A great terrain to scroll from top to bottom
To infinity
Unsoiled with thoughts excreted from their origins
It’s so much easier to offer that to others
For their critical consideration
Who can judge nothing?
Declare it better or worse than that that’s something?
Surely it even must be better
Like the fresh fell snow before your dog
Decided to mark his territory

It’s not as if this ‘writing’ requires skill
A child with a chisel can
Hammer on some stump or stone
The meaning’s not the matter
The deaf man can whistle the day away
Puncturing perfect silence he still hears
The tune needs not be in tune or time to be
The blind man can turn a camera’s eye on life
Writing light on film or binary sensors
He’ll see the art much better than we do
As absence appreciates it’s anti-self the more

But blind Mr. Milton dictated ten lines or so a day
And we call that mess of text a ‘masterpiece’
And not a dicktated, master(baited)piece(ofsh!t)
That pretentious pricks lap up like loyal dogs
Grateful that their manipulative masters
Threw them scraps

They chop down some things great to print a piece of nothing
Worse than that
These lesser nothing words
Defile the greater nothing of the page
Like an airplane writing “fnck” upon the canvass
Of nature’s virgin skies
Ordered sound and images own pathetic words
That which has meaning without meaning
That needs must be assigned and accepted
Has more of that by virtue of it being
Complete unto itself

Who’s to say a chosen word imprisons our intention?
Readings are misreadings
And truth’s not known but felt
A word is just the lie we rationalize
A cover up the naked carcass
The irony’s that words can scald
Like irons on our unpressed minds
While we would know more alone
By being all along
Like Pierre who found life’s secret bliss in
Waking, walking, eating, sleep
Contented when not thinking
Restless when in wondering

I’m imagining you reading this
I imagine you imagining
The things you know
That I don’t know
While I, like a child playing skeeball,
Throw these words up your mind’s lane
Attempting to land them in
The topmost, tiny, neural hole
Composed of all your
deepest, darkest, happiest, profound parts
That’s 50 points!
Yet I can’t map your neural categories
And I have poetic Parkinson’s
And management has shut off all the lights
So my ball sails well wide of the hole

I’m sure you’re kind enough
You’ll give me a few small tokens of praise
I’ll take them to the checkout counter
Exchange them for a moment
Of self-deluding
Self-worth
When yet I would have won a better prize
By never playing
And simply learning to measure
How you tick
Alas! What boots it with incessant care
To strictly meditate the thankless muse?
When I can simply get to know the yous
Whose words and thoughts I write for first

The nihilist in me thinks success is just
A click away
That red, resounding X
Save?
Don’t Save?
It’s all it takes
To bring me back
To nothing

Blink, blink
Blink, blink

Hmmm, you seem to have said all before I had a chance to think!... and I can't even be kind, you anticipated all the options! I wish your words landed
"... in
The topmost, tiny, neural hole
Composed of all your
deepest, darkest, happiest, profound parts"

but to my distress I'm not sure my brain is endowed with that precise neural hole that gets to my very depth... (if I have any depth... - oy vey, woe is me!)

"A word is just the lie we rationalize
A cover up the naked carcass
The irony’s that words can scald
Like irons on our unpressed minds"

meets me armed and I wouldn't hurry to generalize about words' value, for we have the knowledge of that great Word owing to which Life is (if it is)... so there are words and words.

Your poem smells strongly of satire, but I'm not enough of an intellectual to grasp all in its dense texture. I understand Milton is not your best pal (but who knows, perhaps his - not necessarily well educated - daughters, in their eagerness to "improve" daddy's style, betrayed exactness and favoured what seemed to them saving dad's honour?); I understand writing is an easy temptation, while rarely a lasting accomplishment (even when it lasts...). Humans' arteries are clogged and brain irrigation feeble...
So, is your poem a lament for truth and genuine artistic expression that would show that truth? Or do I have it all wrong?

Your poem leaves me with questions, but since I too tend to feel nothing in the world has a real existence, these questions also may simply not be.

Help!

But before you do, I must thank you for having caused quite a stir in my rusted brain! :smile5:

What an adventure! Thanks for it.

And best, Bar

I’m sure you’re kind enough
You’ll give me a few small tokens of praise
I’ll take them to the checkout counter
Exchange them for a moment
Of self-deluding
Self-worth
When yet I would have won a better prize
By never playing
And simply learning to measure
How you tick
Alas! What boots it with incessant care
To strictly meditate the thankless muse?
When I can simply get to know the yous
Whose words and thoughts I write for first


I just scanned your piece at my checkout. beep, beep - hey! credit check needed here at aisle number four...

You captured the frustration and wonder of writing in a mixture of satirical honesty.

Simon Armitage once said that writing poetry today is like shouting down a toilet. I'm reminded of that reading this, as it sounds exactly what the narrator is doing; and it's hard to sympathise with someone so self-absorbed and always trying to second-guess any responses from the reader, perhaps wanting to neutralize criticism before it can be given.

I hope this is a 'get it out of the system' piece that will lead to some better poetry in future, Morpheus, as I'm struggling to find any in this... :)

The poem never answers the interesting question

When yet I would have won a better prize
By never playing

or questions it raises: 1) what might that better prize have been, and 2) why did you choose to write?

As for the 2nd question, the relevance it has for me is that I experienced no joy anywhere in this very long piece: neither the joy of a particular insight nor that of using language in an idiosyncratic way.

Wow. Step AWAY from the computer, Morpheus, before you SMASH it!

@Bar: I'm glad I could "cause quite a stir in your rusted brain", as this piece was, more or less, a cobbled expression of my own recently rusty brain! I think it is mostly satirical, a messy mixture of my own genuine thoughts, frustrations, and some others taken to silly extremes that I don't really believe. You might say it's me both trolling in poetry, and trolling poetry. I think most of it's meant to be ironic; a censuring of words and poetry through words and poetry. Hell, I attack one of my absolute favorite poets (Milton) and then go on to quote him as evidence for my rant!

@Delta: Hehe, thanks! "Credit check" was particularly apt! How many ways should I read that? :smilewinkgrin:

@BV: Ouch! I think you're being a bit too harsh here. If anything, it's about the opposite of being self-absorbed, or that's where it concludes. At least, it's a self-absorbed piece about how it's better to be NOT self-absorbed.

@Prince: Awww, you too? Actually, it probably would've been better if I DIDN'T say what the better prize was, yet the last two lines of that same stanza rather explicitly state what the prize is. As for your second question, that's part of the irony, no? How would one express frustration with poetry and language but through language and even poetry?

Perhaps it's telling this got a better reception by several of my friends on EvaGeeks, who are well acquainted with Evangelion, a work that was very much about the paradox of using escapist fiction as a criticism against escapist fiction, and those who escape into it. The writer/director, Hideaki Anno, certainly recognized the paradox that his work was simultaneously his escape from reality and his reality that he couldn't escape, the very thing the expressed those two things through.

So, I guess that's why I wrote; words mean and matter and affect even if they don't mean and matter and affect by themselves. As universal as images and sounds may be, nothing can last as long and have as pervasive an affect as words. Yet it's easy to recognize their failings and shortcomings too. Call this my ironic satirical rant against two subjects (words and poetry) I have as much a passion for as a cynicism towards.

@everyadventure: Hehe, thanks for the advice, but I don't plan on smashing my PC any time soon!

This is a delightful (read: not depressing) illustration of self-defeat in writing. You've deconstructed it and made it interesting in the same stroke, I think. I'm not a fan of poetry about poetry, but I think you've opened more windows and doors with this than you have closed.

Don't go confusing credit with credibility MS. I know ALOT of people with a pack of credit cards but they're mostly Jokers....You're not one of them!

@deryk: Thanks. I think it's healthy to occasionally reflect on what we do and why we do it, looking for the positives and negatives. I guess I'm usually so positive towards language and poetry I felt I needed to listen to the devil on my shoulder for at least one piece.

@Delta: Hehe, thanks. I guess I was thinking more that there's a lot in this piece that isn't credible, ie, genuine.