Hans Holbein Dance of Death
apathy feeds upon itself like an ouroboros
growing fat on mountains of blood
voracious consuming cycle of death
a hunger never satiated
decomposing an elegiac
symphony of suffering
within a necrotic nightmare
desecrating corpses on a
carrion feast day:
sacrosanct ritual
of renewal
Note: This poem is my poem Consuming the Masses from the alternative viewpoint of a detritivore. Written for dVerse Poets Pub.
Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke
I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.
Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.
All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible
Chromapoetica
oh dang… that whole first stanza… really tightly written anna..
apathy is one of the toughest things i can think of…
so how’s life… ? good to see you at dVerse again… good to read you again as well.. smiles
That last line of renewal makes me sad.. Like there is a destiny we can’t avoid.. Like the Phoenix we have to burn and be born again. The pair of your poem with different viewpoints also offer extra details of the event. I wonder if that would work in a longer suite, offering the same story from different viewpoints.. Excellent work and I’m the prompt could pull you back,
Even using mind when being still is apathy..to me.. and being sick this week and not having much choice..but to sit.. reminded me of that necrotic seeping of death in life.. when the sparks of embers are no longer lit…
Apathy to me is giving up.. or not being able to get up…
Have a nice day.. 🙂 with SPARKS!..;)
And thanks for the visit with my OLD ‘friend’ Apathy.
Ever emerging, ever changing, ever evolving as we look for the answers in religion, philosophy or mysticism..the self becomes a culture, the culture joins society, the planet lurches, and what can one person do? Eat, procreate, watch, listen, care, vote perhaps, die, and resume…it’s all here, that which we are and do. Brilliant and succinct as always, my dear friend!
I enjoyed the symphony of suffering created by decomposing — if humans could hear the cycles they have joined and realize they are eating their future. Not that decomposition is un-natural, but when renewal of desecraation is all, well ….