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Chromapoetica

Category: Personal

Eros & Psyche: Profound Entanglement

Filed under: Allegory, Art, Epic, Love, Mythology, Personal — 12 Comments

December 27, 2014

Psyche Revived by Eros’ Kiss by Antonio Canova

Eros falls from a sunlit chariot
into a sea of destruction
adrift in the salt-sting
of an inner exile

golden wings beating
swift as the whirlwinds
of a tempest roaring
melancholic around him

loosing breath and bearing
his desire broken upon
the craggy shore
he pines for her
transforming love

butterfly wings alight
liberate her longing
she dreams of moonlit nights
the salt-sting of his kiss
ravaging tempest of bliss

transformational encounter
a consummate release
his true nature
centers her in the
splendor of their love

reunited after trials
wounded and contrite
she is awareness
wed to his glory

enlightened cosmic sight
immortal soul revealed

she breathes life into the circle
he lights the internal flames
forever entwined in flight
iridescent wings lift lovers
to yet unknowable heights

Tags: poetry

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Cenotaph

Filed under: Art, Love, Metamodern, Mythology, Personal, Philosophy, Tribute — 15 Comments

August 8, 2014

Willem De Kooning

poems like Snyder’s lost ponies
gallop down shining sand dunes
all heat and sweat and neighing
great stallions of imagination
humbled in embodiment
in motion, huffing, striving
toward the blue-dark horizon

frenetic birds flit at the edge of sky
stencils against the thread of clouds
unable to escape the picture
painting landscapes of loss
singing songs of lament
at the walls of the white monastery

within the hobbled monk chants
breaks the night with his strange descant
there is nothing to accept
prostrate surrender of an endless ritual
rhythm chime of an inner bell

words cascade, an avalanche of lost meaning
roaring down the scarred mountain
felling ancient trees, thundering echoes
through fire-kissed meadows
gods hover at Duncan’s margins of thought
here in the hinterlands of a long forgotten tale

Tags: experimental poetry; poetry

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Daedalus & His Muse

Filed under: Art, Love, Mythology, Personal, Tribute — 29 Comments

October 15, 2013

Olivier de Sagazan

for David Chamberlain, Jr.
(inspired by his series of
Labyrinth poems)

here in the wilderness
encountering my fierce nature
thoughts lignify into woodcuts
thousands of barren landscapes
inculcating a melancholic picture

odd trees with finger thin branches
veiled in snow, grasping at the sky
painting blue stars in an empty heaven
I mourn what is irretrievably lost
something raw and enigmatic
written in my cathexis of longing

awash in an inaccessibility of meaning
I writhe sideways like an angry cobra
forming chalk outlines of the labyrinth
liquid mind streaming in slumber
an emulsion of ether, untethered

sands around me shift, amnesiac
creating fragments of identity masks
that reveal dreamtime spent in a desert
chasing my Minotaur shadow

there in the darkness I meet a Seer
who prophesizes my true nature
chained, I walk with two spirits
sorrow and pain expressing
nightshades of unborn ruin

I am merely the center-point
King Theseus of this lost tribe
ragged wanderer in exile
painting symbols in blood
a sediment of iconography
upon the walls of history

until Ariadne arrives like a mirage
finds me in the dreamworld maze
haunting the zero hour, engaged
in games of ritualistic sacrifice
and deftly cauterizes my wound

her sacred arts of magic
secure my inerasable love
offering an orgiastic thread,
triune passport to paradise
a string of beautiful words
creating an utterly pure tale
to reconstruct the mythic life
of my glorious and terrible wings

Tags: poetry

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The Lost Chapters (written in a room of my own)

Filed under: Mythology, Personal, Philosophy, Postmodern, Tribute — 19 Comments

October 10, 2013

Wikipedia Commons

In memoriam for Dave King

‘I am writing a novel
in which no one speaks . . .
every one of my characters
moves like a shadow . . .
As of now, chapters ten,
and to a lesser extent,
maybe, eleven,
seem quite unpenable.’
written by Dave King, excerpts
from WAR AND PEACEfulness

I. Alasdair MacIntyre and Isaiah Berlin will engage in a civilized debate of moral philosophy and value pluralism in the divinely lit library of the hereafter

while it seems improbable
that the two will ever
arrive at the Answer,
hidden within the firestick,

their agreeable natures
ensure a kind exchange
and mutual respect
(as ours did)

II. Postmodern experimentalism encounters a fine intellect and a dashing wit

not only did he meet the bar
he vaulted it rather spryly

III. Anything can happen

unfortunately, it often does
cancerously and suddenly

IV. Stendal, Joyce, Hypatia, Riker, and Woolf toast his life by writing an eternity of allusions

words are like magic,
scintilla, igniting the soul’s spark
Plato’s divine spark longing
to unite with ever more
transcendent forms of beauty

Hypatia approaches the door
only those who’ve transitioned
may enter, opening a gateway,
releasing the fiery cries of seraphs

(I will meet you in the liminal
threshold between your faith
and my fractured metaphysics)

her radical eye encounters his pneuma
perhaps a whisper of which
will live a little here in the poem
as an act of remembrance

V. The consummate performance artist mourns the poet

you walked alongside us
desiring a dream of arctic skies
and ice floes captured in verse

now silk enrobed traces of your artistry
float by, a music, ever passing
as your gentle voice is lost to the wind

Tags: experimental poetry, poetry

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Sun Feast

Filed under: Love, Mythology, Personal — 16 Comments

September 17, 2013

Jade werejaguar mask of the Olmecs

mercurial volcanic ash
disintegrates the constructs
of permanence,
scarring the landscape

wind collides with the world tree
marking the cardinal directions
we are shaken about
beaten by life and one another

untethered from identity
in the borderlands of cyberspace
I became a shape shifting supernatural,
an apparitional avatar

arboreal hunter, spirit guide,
constellations imprinted upon my pelage
I prowl the numinous threshold
to the home of the spirits

ravens guard the branches
draw the edges of death
scream warnings and watch me
bloody my pelt on thorns

wounds of my animal form
create caves to the underworld
I am wise and foolish, powerful and weak
never capable of being otherwise

psychic scars form the light
witnessed through the veil
I reveal my ancestors and progeny
my dream time chameleonic nature

jungle dwelling dangers
find exorcism in expression
liberate my vulnerability
inspire your intentions

you coax me from the treetops
dispel my debt of gratitude
salve my Godsmitten paw
unite us in shamanic ecstasy

Jaguar (public domain)

Tags: poetry

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Less Intense: Equally Effective?

Filed under: Personal, Science — 21 Comments

September 14, 2013

mixed media visual journal by Anna Chamberlain (sticker is from a Listerine bottle)

my depth of processing
a sensitivity to subtle stimuli
creates emotional reactivity

being overly aroused –
not as fun as it sounds –
contributes to my
vastly nuanced nature

an innate trait
hardwired into my
nervous system
makes me different
I live in a CAPITAL
letter world

full of bright lights and loud noises
a shock and awe campaign
against my nerves
a life of too much stimulation

I need time alone
to recuperate from this
strongly empathetic,
intuitive existence
this overactive conscientiousness

introversion encounters
my complex inner life
I’m moved immensely
by music and art
these creative gifts
of my active imagination

I chastise myself:
don’t cry at road kill
feel love with casualness
develop thicker skin
focus less on others
BE NORMAL FOR FIVE MINUTES

I engage my copings strategies:
overachieving (an understatement)
because I don’t want to be criticized
walking on eggshells (tightrope)
because I am deeply affected by your moods
project a veneer of self-assurance (pretending)
because I want to be like you

yet I cannot be other than I am
so this intense, responsive,
O-V-E-R-W-H-E-L-M-E-D
(highly sensitive person)
will have to become empowered
by naming this state of being,
become emboldened by its truth

If you’d like to take a psychologically valid self-test to see if you’re a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) you may do so here.

Tags: poetry

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Too close to be named

Filed under: Art, Personal, Philosophy, Postmodern, Science — 20 Comments

July 23, 2013

Acrylic on paper 2005 Anna Chamberlain, poetry 2013

Tags: experimental poetry, poetry

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• Denise Levertov

  When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.

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• Postmodernism

  Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.

• Robert Anton Wilson

  Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

• Witold Gombrowicz

  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.

• Gustav Flaubert

  Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

• Dušan “Charles” Simić

  Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

• Monique Wittig

  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.

• W.S. Merwin

  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

• Thomas Aquinas

  Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.