This Juvenile World

I’m haunted in November again
In corridors of time’s fleeting
To be a ghost oneself, to oneself
In the lonesome places
Where age meets security

To be shut up in verse
Like an artist tied and captive
To the abolishment of normalcy
The lives others lead, I’ve been
Placed inside a closet of make-believe

And when I show my head
To the world, I feel absurd
Or else, the world appears absurd to me
But what if I abolished creativity
In separate drawers, art has a smaller possession

Than it once did in dreary youth
But I’m still Nobody, Who have you become?
We’re not a pair of invisible, we’re separated
By digital noise, channels as juvenile
As the potential of a word, the possibility of a voice
There’s nothing the world has,
That I want anymore, it’s a con and a game
With every blossom and on every bush
My route to evanescence is a Saturday hush.

The Last Offering

I come, to the void of myself often
It is the soul of my solitude
It is where all the curtains are drawn

And I am in my own privacy, in touch
With something of the divine
I go there like an escape from the outside world

It is my heart of subjectivity
And I do not find it at all terrifying
It’s a splendour to own such a place

A piece of art, an order of nature
The soul built by spiritual suffering
A palace of mysticism who could understand?

What to an artist is their dream
To the cruel world how futile and juvenile
But we all require a soul to function

* * *

A spirit to push us through those terrible nights
Where the world is truly against us
And we are abandoned by friendship, love, profit

How many days of my life have I slept there
Alone, for that is the self-indulgence of
Risking and of striving illicitly, stubbornly

Against the peer pressure of such a conforming world
That cares for profit, reproduction, tradition
Perhaps we are not all made for that, I do not know?

But friends do leave and a dull pragmatism does
Set in, like the idea of responsibility for ordinary things
As when mates leave us for our idealism

I would have imagined it would be a virtue
But what if in all of this, the world is wrong?
And my soul is right, and I am doing what

I was meant to do all along, how shall I forgive myself then
For squandering my talent in subjectivity
And loving my own doom through it all

* * *

There is no room in this world for poets
So perhaps we shall do it as if in secret revolt
The revolution is always born inside

I need no solace from existence, only
My divine food, my guise of dream, my birthright
Of sacred psychology, that is why I write

It’s not a delusion nor in glowing pink afternoons
A mistake I made in being who I chose to be
It’s my exercise in the cosmos and empathy

It’s my last belonging to simplicity
It’s me mimicking all I thought was beautiful
To be grateful for a moment, together
With silence, whiteness, bareness, authentic authority.

C a n P o e t r y M a t t e r?

There is a proliferation of new poetry
You won’t see it called poetry
It will be called sunrise
Like an anthology of all the sunrises

And it will have ingredients of
Dawns and sunsets and won’t care
Who is the poet laureate in that state

It won’t wake up to be famous
It will be just, words on public loan
For a species going extinct

The will be in denial that
Their world is going extinct
Just as poets are in denial true poetry

Is dying or has died, and nobody will know it
But the hearts will only echo it
And closed groups will try to invent it again

There is a frantic literary ambition
In writers, for they know they
Don’t have many decades in which to make it

Poets like to dream their work
May be discovered posthumously
But the problem with that is
There are too many good writers

And nobody might be around in two hundred years
To discover it, and it goes on
Poetry will be published in the
Hearts of youth, by unknown authors

And we won’t call it poetry
It will just be something that reincarnated
In them, something we inherited
Something in the brain

We didn’t’ have to take credits for it
In some undergraduate program
It will just be innate like speaking
And describing, what really matters.

Further reading:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/gioia/gioia.htm

We A r e What we R e a d

We A r e What we R e a d

To some of us, failed writers
Poetry is the human heart beat of language
Something that vaguely “saved us”
At some point in our destiny

When we maybe had nowhere to turn
No one to see us through our ordeals
Poetry began the telling of all tales
It lived and breathed our history

It immortalized our most grandiose love-affairs
And insulated us from our tragedy
To some of us, word lovers
Poetry is the human heart

On a tree of life where each voice
Is a sacred leaf, each a note
In the immortal prayer of poetry
Back to the nature of language

Odes to evolution, mirrors of our neural states
There is a discourse in the wane of beauty
And when art dies, we lose a bit of our human spirit
And the memory of renaissance

And the reincarnation of golden ages
It’s a failure of society of literacy
That goes from books to computers to cell phones
Not really a cultural apocalypse

But a monopolization of the channels of content
The incorporation & assimilation of our attention
But who I am to say if we are literate
I don’t have time to read seriously
Only enough time to write moderately.

Some things poets seem to have forgotten

Some things poets seem to have forgotten

My Grandmother turned me on
Poetry and philosophy
She used to collect clippings
Of poems from the local newspaper

I read Tennyson, Yeats, Blake
In her book collection
She read those poems often
The pages were old and bent

Years later, I would write
My philosophy in poems
With my own clippings
Of Taoism, Buddhism, Sufism

And transhumanism, but I knew
By the time the singularity reached us
Poetry might have gone extinct
The poetry of the high-bow

Is now so inaccessible, without
Seemingly, any deeper meaning
The trend to write dead things
That passes as coldly as a poor display

Perhaps the future of poetry
Lies in the fringe verse
Of the downtrodden and in the
Privileged academic babble

Of poets who make art without
A true connection to the zeitgeist
I don’t need a Masters in Fine Arts
In poetry or creative writing

To feel entitled, but women like my grandmother
Will die out, millennials are making
Other choices, they don’t need to
Be starving artists to get that poetry is dead

And even the idea of becoming a writer
I once had a roommate who became
A famous journalist, maybe he
Knew something then that I only realize now.