Poetry Thread

[Avaia]

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

- Charles Bukowski
- The Genius Of The Crowd

[Avaia]

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

- Ada Limon
- Instructions on Not Giving Up

[Avaia]

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the
challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds
apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain,
you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda
and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-
American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]

[Astray]

cringe.jpg

[Methais]

Shart shart
A shart is fart art

Shart art was invented
By a shartist named Bart

Bart has the gift
Of the Art of the Shart

The Art of the Shart
Can’t be found at Wal Mart

Not in sports by the darts
Or by the fat people karts

The Art of the Shart
Cannot be bought or taught

It’s a gift you are born with
Like our good shartist Bart

Stand up tall
In the room or the hall

Give your bowels a heave
And shart art on the wall

Always remember
If your shart has no lumps

Then your shart was a fart
And you’ve taken no dumps

[Fortybox]

It's only when it's visible
as water vapor aerosol,
from hot breath indivisible,
you even know it's there.

When condensation takes the gas
and liquefies its errant mass,
to show you how much heat I have,
it's then it's called a shart.

-Anonymous

[Avaia]

That was the souls’ weird mine.
Like silent silver ores they penetrated
as veins its dark expanses. Between roots
welled up the blood that flows on to mankind,
and in the dark looked hard as porphyry.
Else nothing red.

But rock was there
and woods that had no nature. Bridges spanned the void
and that great gray blind pond
suspended over its far distant depth
as rainy skies above a landscape.
And between meadows, soft and full of patience,
appeared the ashen streak of the one way
as a long pallor that has been stretched out.

And it was on this one way that they came.

In front, the slender man in the blue mantle
who looked ahead in silence and impatience.
His paces, without chewing, gulped the way
in outsized swallows; and his hands were hanging
heavy and sullen from the fall of folds,
knowing no longer of the weightless lyre
grown deep into his left as rambler roses
into the branches of an olive tree.
His senses were as if they had been parted:
and while his glances, doglike, ran ahead,
turned back, and came, and always stood again
as waiting at the next turn of the way –
his hearing stayed behind him as a smell.
Sometimes it seemed to him as if it reached
back to the walking of those other two
who were to follow him this whole ascent.
Then it was but the echo of his climbing
and his own mantle’s wind that was behind him.
Yet he said to himself that they would come;
said it out loud and heard it fade away.
They would come yet, only were two
walking most silently. And if he might
turn only once (and if his looking back
were not destruction of this whole endeavor
still to be ended), he would surely see them,
the quiet two who followed him in silence:

the god of going and of the wide message,
the travel hood shading his brilliant eyes,
bearing the slender staff before his body,
the beat of wings around his ankle bones;
and given over to his left hand: she.

The one so loved that from a single lyre
wails came surpassing any wailing women;
that out of wails a world arose in which
all things were there again: the wood and valley
and way and village, field and brook and beast;
and that around this wailing-world, just as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a vast sky, containing stars and stillness,
a wailing-sky full of disfigured stars*
this one so loved.

But she walked at the hand of this great god,
her striding straightened by the grave’s long wraps,
uncertain, soft, and void of all impatience.
She was in herself as one high in hope,
not thinking of the man who went ahead,
nor of the way ascending into life.
She was in herself. And her having died
filled her as fullness.
And as a fruit is full of dark and sweetness,
the greatness of her death was filling her
and was so new, she comprehended nothing.

She was wrapped up in a new maidenhood
and one not touchable; her sex was closed
as a young flower is toward evening,
and her hands had become so unaccustomed
to matrimony, even the light god’s
immeasurably lightly leading touch
offended her as something intimate.

She was not any longer this blond woman
who in the poet’s songs would sometimes echo,
not any more the broad bed’s scent and island,
and the possession of this man no more.

She was already loosed as flowing hair
and long relinquished as the fallen rain
and meted out as hundredfold provisions.

She was become a root.

And when with sudden force
the god stopped her and with pain in his cry
pronounced the words: He has turned back*
she comprehended nothing and said softly: Who?

But far off, dark beyond the clear egress,
stood someone, anyone, whose countenance
could not be recognized. He stood and saw
how on the pale streak of a meadow path,
with sorrow in his eyes, the god of message
turned silently to follow back the form
that even then returned this very way,
her striding straitened by the grave’s long wraps,
uncertain, soft, and void of all impatience.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.

[Methais]

Women are sweet
And girls are honey

But beat your meat
And save your money

[Gelston]

Tavern-Floor Tina, thou fen-sucking whore,
With a mouth to be damned and a tongue to abhor.
When your meat meets her mouth, well, it's meat-mouth galore.
Oh, Tavern-Floor Tina, there's a worm in your core.

She'll give you a wink and she'll drag you upstairs
And before you can think, you'll be caught unawares
Elbow-deep in the pink, with two thumbs up your rear.
Oh, Tavern-Floor Tina, your sink's full of hair.

She'll give your poor bone ev'ry pound that she's got,
Then she'll slather your dome till your tonsils are hot.
You'll need time all alone just to burp up the clot.
Oh, Tavern-Floor Tina, I'd just as soon not.

--Arthur Greenleaf Holmes

[Methais]