Tant01

My longing for you -
too strong to keep
At least no one can blame me,
when I go to you at night,
along the road of dreams

Ono no Komachi



Any poets in the house? I find traditional Japanese Haiku and Tanka are very pleasing and melodic.

I wish I could hear them in the original language... Or better yet speak the words myself.

__________________

"In all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms - and these the best and the sharpest - for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur."

James Paterson

aseepish

I know well the June rains just fall.
-Onitsura

Satsuki-ame tada furu mono to oboekeri.

__________________
"It was about that time I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses." -Cortázar

Tant01

Lumpkinji found me!

__________________

"In all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms - and these the best and the sharpest - for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur."

James Paterson

Garland

I'm reciting this from memory so it may be off...

frailer far than the tender leaves
easily swept away by the wind
must I now bid a last farewell
and leave the gentle spring behind?

-a samurai that was head of the chushingura, who flipped out, and because of his foppa (sp?) had to committ sepukku, this was the poem he wrote before his death...his retainers took care of the son of a bitch who provoked him about 2 years later...and were in turn ordered to off themselves as well.

__________________
homo homini lupus

Garland

My A.P. English teacher tried to get me to write linked verse with haiku at the end of highschool...some of it is okay, but the rest is hackneyed and cliche...here goes; tell me what you think...




"A Hell's Day Haiku"



I try to sleep, waiting patiently for something I doubt will happen. And the waiting is the story of my life.

the ceiling stares back
soul searching in dim twilight
of unconscious thought

images pollute
and assail the mind’s eye
blind rational thought

the cold wind gusts away
and the rain pours over my window only
dreams come alive at night

tiny white tabs
help Morpheus tug eyelids
with a cutting taste

my head starts sinking
into a soft and pleasant void
afforded by my bed
When I rouse, I rouse lazily. One eye flaps open, followed by another to greet the burning light with an uncomfortable uncertainty.

stolen images
once vivid and lucid dreams
race through my head

A loud ring fills my ears
the dreams manage to escape
saved by the bell

It’s this girl I’ve been seeing. I’ve been seeing her around...even when I don’t want to. She keeps calling me, and I keep calling her things behind her back.

the girl always needs
what I do not have to give
not to her, at least

I’m not ready to wake,
still restless for lack of dreams,
to a crude reality (check)
The girl shows up, her friend drives her because she is too young to have a license. When we met, she told me she was sixteen. A week after we met, she told me she was more than a year younger. Her friend honks the horn anxiously as I stumble to put on my clothes.

black on white on black
the sports jacket with boots
clothes that speak loudly

just because I feel ugly
doesn’t mean I should look it
turn to face the cold

I enter the car and gasp slightly but still audibly, my lungs assailed by the thick and caustic mist of cheap cigarettes and the cold air from outside. The radio is playing some depressing "emo" band that I can’t quite place. Bands with names of fall months, things like Perpendicular to September, or Autumn Rain. I never really cared for the stuff, whiny and sophomoric pseudo art that’s been done . Oddly enough, it’s raining lightly as I slam the car door shut.


When we finally get to the first destination on our rounds of the town, I look around for hint’s of the driver’s name in her car. I’m positive she told me, but nothing seems to register today. It’s like the sock monster joke, right? You toss all of your laundry into the washing machine and dryer and somewhere in the cycle something always gets lost.

The boy who lives in the apartment calls out to us as we enter his room. Clothes litter the floor and posters of Baz Lurman films adorn the walls. He breaks from his old black and white film to greet us with a smile. He tells me he likes my outfit.

hints of May West
suggestive noir-ish charm...
sophisticated

few girls can match the
classical feminism
of a gay boy

We leave after a bit of small talk. Talk so small and trivial it’s washed away easily in the rain. I walk back and take my rightful place in the back seat of the car.
Our nest stop is the home of some porn star chick and her boyfriend, who are both around my age...barely legal and living alone in a shabby rundown apartment building. We enter through an alley and I kick down a fence that barricades us from entering the stairwell. I can’t help but wonder what it was doing there in the first place.

buck naked half-cocked
hides himself with one hand
smiles and offers the other

The degree of modesty the boy shows me as he opens the door is astounding, and I smile back and take his offer, taking note also of the looks on my soon to be ex-girlfriend’s and her friend’s faces. The girl whose been driving us around is a lesbian, and she shows more repugnance toward the barely covered genitals than anyone else in our small and motley crew. I try to suppress a chuckle.

no facade but pure
unkempt and unwanted
the girl turns in bed

She eventually stands up and slips on some clothes when she realizes that we have nothing better to do but lounge around and chat. The girl complains about the cold while the boy is showing us his backside and his new tattoo, two tribal bands running parallel to his spine on the small of his back. The lesbian girl counters by exposing her new nipple rings. None of this is new or interesting to me.

she stretches out
like a bare in torpor
kicking sheets of the floor

stained and slashed
the mattress lays quietly
have I a witness?

A knife sits on the table next to the computer monitor, it looks sharp and intimidating, especially in context to the Sid Vicious poster on the wall. I can’t help but think of this couple like Sid and Nancy.

supple unmarked flesh
nancy shows us her work
at the meat market

She goes to a site she’s been contacted to pose for. Moralists argue that there is a fine line between art and pornography, couldn’t there be pornography so explicit and obscene that it forces the viewer to look at it as if it were art. Think Maplethorpe, art that seems so seedy and inhumane, perhaps it forces us to look under the surface of what makes us tick. Nancy is Mapplethorpe through a looking glass...darkly.

awful acts flash quick
eyes glued to the screen
nancy smiles-job prospects.

I black out for a second, and out of nowhere everyone in the room starts to sing along to a song on the radio. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Bohemian...? I get it. Artisans of the brave new world, cultural renaissance of the emerging generation. I remember what the hippy and beatnik generations became when they took power over their greedy forefathers, and I wonder what my generation will do to the world.

most fear confrontation
apathy is an easier road
than angst and anger

We finally stop for coffee. The girl makes an excuse for us to go back to the car, we have to talk.

sorrowful clouds spring tears
and in their melancholy
breathe life into cold feet

I turn to her warm gaze, and my heart shatters. I open my mind to her honestly and without the compassion I had when I didn’t care as much about her. I rip and tear with my words, trying to soften blows with the use of fluffy diction, in the end, I’m just blunting the sword.

tears flood childish eyes
she tells me she loves me,
I tell her I’ve never.

I fail at easing tears
my words are like water
catalyst and lye.



I never loved you
I never tried to misguide
I was just alone

We get back to the coffee shop. She keeps her composure until she leaves, when she breaks down momentarily and starts to say something like, “when you think you’ve found somebody you could be with...”.
The rest trails off, lost in the rain.

I sit and sip my coffee, alone, empty, and unburdened.






thoughts???

__________________
homo homini lupus

Garland

Some more random poetry shit I wrote in highschool...

Wretchedness

ever moving
never sleeping
a cog or wheel
in a machine that never stops


Fatigue

battered body
heart pumping pistons
of battery acid blood
lungs like sieves
and muscles of lead


Attraction

heart swoons with
a rhythm erratic
my mouth becomes dry
with a loss of words
bumbling hands
and faltering eyes
betray their intentions



Agitation

grit teeth clamp down and grind
enough force to crack enamel and shave bone
fingers grip tightly into themselves
imprinting their wrath upon calloused palms
adrenaline races up the spine and over shoulders
like lightening that charges the hair on the back of ones neck
to an intolerable point, causing them to stand attentively.
eyebrows rise and fall and brows wrinkle
like draw bridges atop a lake
of warm and dreadful sweat




.............


Mushin*

pink sand underfoot
outnumber the blazing stars overhead

thousands of people rally
a maniac mob
weaving patterns
x’s of orange
streams of violet and blue

a single pyre fills my gaze
i take a seat at my botti tree

suddenly the mechanisms, with which keep the sphere in it’s cyclical movement
halt their orbit and relax from their reigns
all is stillness

the multitude around me fades into periphery
an entire people lost in a genocide of the mind

they leave their shadow behind in the rythm of their movements
and the strain of their song on the night sky
a hymn that tugs and pulls celestial bodies to attention

with a gust of cold air comes a roaring quiet
deafening silence that pulls me farther into myself

i am filled, and overflow with a singular and omnipresent emptiness
a postcognitive voice and vision that transcends it’s vessel

i become aware of my being in it’s ultimate state
and commit and bequeth myself to the matter around me

i let slip my hand, and am pulled through the fire
whose garnet caress leaves me in waves of color
that mimic the microcosm that surrounds my meditative body

deep breaths suck and quiver perception
an intimate expression of the universe
one song, one word, on utterance or syllable
a lullaby for existence

the sun gods of a thousand different cultures
bless me with an evergrowing illumination of the empty plains
of salt and water

i bid the moon farewell and remove the embrace of night
and it’s over with an audible pop
like a swimmer clearing his ears of the pressure
the last remaining drops of an alien world


*Mushin is a state of being as referred to in Miyamotto’s “Book of the Five Rings” as a state of void, or nothingness. Being without thought, while at the same time being illuminated to the universe or the nature of an intangible all encompasing force that all things flow with or into. All epiphany’s are short lived, this was as close as I’ve been to a mystical experience, but for a few precious hours, I was soaring, unburdened and one with my surroundings, without a single care, or thought to cloud my perception.
.............................

Stupidity is Combustable
Golden embers spark
fountains of light spring forth
from the lit fuze of a cheaply bought
grocery store firework

my friend lowers his punk
takes a drag
and eyes the street with great intensity

cars pass through open windows
a continuious stream of yellow and red blinkers, blue florescents
rush past us like candy colored bugs scurrying from the light

time is running out
the fuze burns fingers
and sends waves of excitement throughout
the car
an echo of anxiety and nervous mischief that reverberates
in the chattering of teeth and the twitching of muscles

Too close!
Toss the bomb!

it erupts into a shining pyramid
spinning and circling
leaving black and white ash
the heat merging with the red paint
of an occupied fire marshall’s truck

it takes a mute minute
the driver clicks on his sirens
awed by the audacity of the affront
he pulls out of his driveway and gives chase

we realize our mistake too late
but are given time to meditate the impecible timing of irony
............................................

“Go tell at Sparta, traveler passing by,
That here obedient to her laws we lie.” This one's not mine....it's a plaque at Thermopylae in Greece...makes me weep.
...............................


JACK JOHNSON DAY
“Traffic in the sky”
five kids packed in a white truck
a Jack Johnson day


“12/31-2002”
i remember the cries of the small girl
curled up against your door like a newborn baby
beautiful black hair covering her face, arms holding her chest
as if her poisoned heart was breaking, i felt it too
and her lying boyfriend trying to explain himself
i remember the cold wall
the air that night had a special thickness to it
i know you felt it too
my footing was awkward and uneven rising up your back steps
we lost the keys to your house when we needed it most
..........................

and wht the hell...here's a short story too....


The Parable
I remember quite clearly a story my best friend shared with me almost a year ago. My friend Nick and I had just left one of our friend’s apartments, and were walking around by the University for over an hour waiting for a ride and killing time.
I can remember most of the night, as a matter of fact. The run-down apartment that our friend had been forced into as a result of her turning eighteen. Her parent’s had “had enough” of her recreational cocaine and marijuana use, and were willing to discard her as easily as tossing out disheveled wrapping paper after Christmas, and now that she was of legal age to live on her own, did just that without even a second thought. The apartment was only one room, and about the size of a rich persons closet. The only additional fixture was a sink, placed awkwardly against the wall in the front of the room. The room was lit with a low output florescent light...the landlord had to get rid of normal light bulbs due to the fact that the tweakers who sought sanctuary in the apartment complex would steal them to use as “glass-dicks” for smoking meth. You’d run into them on the porches or when you’d try to go to the shower or the restroom, as all of these things were communal, one for each of the four floors. They seemed to try to be civil, I remember one of them babbling something to me that sounded like a story, and asking one of my friends for a light for his cigarette, some shitty generic brand that reeked of sulfur and tar. Despite all of that, there was something about them that you just couldn’t place that left me with an unnerving and cautious feeling that smoldered like an ember in the pit of my stomach.
Our friend had tried to liven her little home up with a small fridge and a decent cd player that seemed out of place against the off-white walls from years of smoke and neglect, and her bed, a stained mattress covered with two blankets and her friend’s sleeping bag, which all laid open and unmade. Her walls were decorated with single sheets of Salvador Dali paintings torn or cut out of a magazine probably borrowed from a library or bought at a second-hand shop somewhere. Somehow the abstract symbols and the extreme artistry of Dali’s work, naked women with missing pieces, wild animals, and surreal dreamscapes, all seemed in poor taste for her current environment. Almost as if it would be more comforting to me to see dirty clothes and drugs littering the room, than these symbols that seemed to stand as an ironic depiction of her current plight; somehow she seemed naked and missing certain skills or benefits that would help her to cope with or better her surroundings, wandering a dreamlike limbo amongst wild people whose own problems had turned them into animalistic beings whose sole purpose was to get messed up enough that they would forget about their problems and pain enough to smile at strangers, and maybe even tell their story, if there was one willing to listen.
I left the place with little emotional attachment to its occupants or its layout, I only hoped that our friend would find a better home for herself, and soon.
As I walked past the restaurants and stores, who were just now shutting off their lights and signs, my best friend said something to me that I hope I never forget.
“Okay, so there’s this guy, right? And he’s driving home from getting a new car. He’s been dreaming of this day for a long time, and he knows that his new expensive red BMW will win over his girlfriend, who he’s been fighting with, and impress his friends at work. And, I mean it should too, he’s just spent several months wages on it. But he knows its worth it, and he loves it. So he’s driving along and suddenly he hears a loud bang. Somebody threw a rock at his car and completely totaled the side of it. The paint wasn’t just chipped, there was a dent the size of a small dog on the passenger side door.
So he flips a bitch and goes back to where the rock was thrown, and he sees this little kid about thirteen years old, cradling a whole bunch of rocks in his arms.
And he’s pissed, so he gets out of the car and walks over to the kid, and he’s screaming at the kid and pointing his fingers and the kid looks up at him and tries to speak. The guys not having it, though, and he throws the kid up against the wall and holds him by his throat, and the kid is calm, still, and stares up at him and the guys shouting ‘Why’d you do it, you little bastard?! What’s your problem?’ finally he stops screaming and lets the kid provide an answer.
The kid stares up and looks into the guys face and his lips curl over his teeth and his jaw begins to tremble. He clenches his fist and looks into the guys eyes as tears well up in his, and he doesn’t say a thing. He points with his free arm, as the man has him pinned against the wall. In the corner, curled up against the wall of one of the empty and faceless buildings that surrounds the neighborhood their in, is this retarded kid, whose so skinny that you can see his ribs through his skin which is bruised and pale from being in the cold, and he’s laying there with a single blanket pulled over him.
The guy lets go of the kid and his jaw drops. He stops talking and stands there looking at the poor mentally challenged youth whose whining and whimpering faintly through cracked and bloodied lips.
The kid who threw the rock finally starts to speak, his words are broken up by sobs, ‘Listen you asshole, I’ve been standing here for thirty minutes and watched maybe eighty cars pass by, and I’ve tried waving people down, and yelling for help, but nobody even gave me a second glance. So I threw a rock at your car to get your attention.”
I stop walking and I start to cry, I can’t help myself. And my friend pats me on the back and helps me to get my footing on the sidewalk.

__________________
homo homini lupus

osopardo

Ha!

Tough, macho, neck-kickin' Garland exposes his more sensitive side!



Lissen, I'm usually too lazy to read long posts but so much of what I just read has touched me...

God bless you, ya big dumb atheist!

I'm gettin' misty-eyed here...

__________________
Le Bear Extraordinaire!
Mike Brewer's 2008 Athleticon Challenge!!!
Pushups Completed: 5 1/2
Situps Completed: Does using my hands count?

Tant01

A few of my favorite poems...

Although my feet
Never cease running to you
On the path of dreams,
Such nights of love are never worth
One glimpse of you in reality.


--Ono no Komachi Translated by; Earl Miner


Kisses kept are wasted;
Love is to be tasted.
There are some you love, I know;
Be not loathe to tell them so.
Lips go dry and eyes grow wet
Waiting to be warmly met,
Keep them not in waiting yet;
Kisses kept are wasted.

--Edmund Vance Cooke (1866-1932)


And a quote on a similar subject by the late President A. Lincoln;


Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented; and there is nothing I can imagine that would make me more unhappy than to fail in the effort.

--Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

__________________

"In all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms - and these the best and the sharpest - for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur."

James Paterson