knowledge

Knowledge. I use the word to invert it
knowing now it lost you 
and what good
is between us, 
though nothing, finds me
many quiet deaths

termination

And I can't be with you

even as friends

waiting for you

to release me

Of Arthur Rimbaud

These appetites: Shapes, 
Run fingers 
       through dimension;
And Rimbaud’s regret? 

To sprawl oneself bare 
On dynamic growth, youth did not have 
Depth, 
Age grows too brittle and arthritic

There are worse things than inexperience!

The measure is what one has not –yet what 
Was charming of African earth? 
-Consistency in the predator’s gaze
-A delicate (simple) joy bending to the sun

Libertineflesh sheathed its poet’s death;
With no remorse in the seasons’ passage 
This dead poet’s footnotes trailed 
To find art living as concubine

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Clouds over Hanoi

Hanoi, for you, I without family come 8,000 miles
I, the flâneur, walk between your glass gods and carapace-husks
take in electric smoke, petrol fume
welcoming Sodom where I go 

here our dreaming Gautama stuck in never-black night 
the very dead patriarch greeting eternal a fleeting sun
and why shouldn't the world (this flesh monopoly) 
also reel a crusted cheek out of its starry hole? Nonetheless

a woman bentback on stool 
cooks her luncheon patties, smiles to me
waves the broth-drip noodle, mint sprigs, with a tong
I not unwelcoming sit

The Market

the gusts, the pasture quakes 
bovines yelling in the wheatgrass  
the stink of flesh, stink of bile
irises crushed, crackle of tiny bone 
colourful pulp 
flows down the grate drain

the human shapes 
in pockets of dark 
in dust silhouette

clouds hang over the Occident
and a pangolin is roasted

Reconciliation

The hills of Gondwana did not bear your hatred 
and split thereby. Nor did the species spread 
to your design, nor the arc of planets your geometry 
nor does your brain pump its heart for you, nor is a crimson skyline, 
the burning juniper, great canyon
and the depth of wilderness perfect for your poem, your picture 

Those tears can never wet the desert, even the sun 
nukes skin. Even life is a metaphor for death 
and all written words, the colours on blank,
a secret reconciliation with that death 

Yet still

Peregrination

The sun is a bastard 
Whom I love. Moon does not understand 
I am cheating with soil. The mossbeds rise like breath
The crows do not observe, they do not know I cheat
With worms. Locked in leaves, green juice. Find me 
Polaris burning in a hovel

We knew the world was dark and feral
Many heads and fangs, as I, pink tongue
Cup rainwater in my milksoft skull. Assail wheat and tawny oat
The sprucebranch I hold bending forever

The engagement with art and beauty

What are we looking for when we view art? 

If a child were in a gallery and two walls were covered by paintings. One side has the works of Rothko, Mitchell, Miró. The other Eyck, Veronese, Rembrandt.
Which side would they be attracted to?  

The engagement to art results the valuation. 
Each genre requires its own engagement, which can be regarded as a mode of experience. And experience is unbearably rich. 

What I find enjoyable in abstract paintings is meaninglessness. I hope the work tells me nothing; I want free-quality of colour and shape; aesthetics without reference. 
But I know the beauty of a Rembrandt is not in Rembrandt. It is in the source- the viewing person. The Rembrandt is a stimulus which evokes. Proof: many are indifferent to paintings. 

Now think of nature. It has a similar engagement-requirement. 

"Nature...is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest."
- Baudelaire 

One can extract aesthetic sense from a mountain, a beach, a Pollock, while another cannot and will not because they're not able to affirm, or do not even have, a secret to play with. 

Imagine you could form one sentence to communicate the reality of beauty experienced.

“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts...”
- Nietzsche 

And why do people buy millions worth of paint hazardly splattered on a canvas? 
It's an investment like real estate. Don't think too much of it. 

   




        


Top
Mark Rothko - Blue, Orange, Red - 1961 
Joan Mitchell - City Landscape - 1955
Joan Miró - Ciphers and Constellations in Love with a Woman - 1941

Bottom
Jan van Eyck - Madonna at the Fountain- 1439
Paolo Veronese - The Wedding at Cana - 1563
Rembrandt van Rijn - The Storm on The Sea of Galilee - 1633

on writing

I am wondering how to write. 

I'm reminded of Nietzsche. In The Gay Science his prose was, in comparison to his later works, boring. I think he had a distaste for writing so practically. His thoughts changed; to read what he had had wrote made him cringe. And so, he later wrote as to make the text ambiguous. The perspectives were welcomed. And he was made more than what he was.  


Reading someone's blog posts, the same person I've silently ridiculed because of how detailed and verbose and well-done they write, I'm inspired. There exists what I want in this person; to write, and do it with conviction. Their writing looks like worship. 


I'm hateful of stereotypical writing techniques when trying to write a blog. I'm agitated at having a model of a 
blog post when I am writing. It kills creativity and motivation. 

I want to write more. My life feels over-saturated with meaning and I want to express it. I have grown a nightmare out of silence. 


It is hard to translate floating thoughts into syntax and grammar. Intimidating, when you've always done it with your most buoyant ones. Words are like cages.


When I was younger I admired long and tangled sentences. Sentences like garden hoses. I considered them signs of high ability, and I emulated them. Now, I'm over it. I like simplicity, minimalism. Emily Dickinson is right for me. 


I want my thoughts to be fatty. My writing like a razor. The process: to trim and make lean.


I think of how I appear to others through my writing. A thing I've naturally learned by writing short stories is that there is an amateurish engagement where one is trying to convey to the reader who and what one is through the story. 
This is noticeable to nearly anyone, and lame. 
The writer is an epigram-generator. They are trying to translate the drama of movie scenes, abusing tropes, ending every paragraph with a closure, placing pointless references. Trying too hard, hoping and begging for the reader to see them through the words. I've written like this. I don't, or I'd like to think so, write like this anymore. 

Writing is vulnerable; I have to be okay with how others view me. Not uncaring, but okay. I dislike this audience in my head, especially because I like to think they're not there. Notice I did not say hate.

 

Poetry in the 21st

Speed disciplined the mind. 

The mode: time translated to purpose.

I've considered poetry to be in-conducive, a fight with memory, shuttled through a black box.

What information do you need? 
You are experiencing through words- What? 

To sit alone and read was once strange. One had to speak the word, or sing, to an audience. Augustine appeared other-worldy in his chair, reading silently. 



Is there contempt for inner music?