Please use headphones and turn up the volume, both on your computer and YouTube to hear the audio, this is a spoken word poem. It is an erasure poem based on the 3rd chapter of The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. I am hosting Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft today at dVerse Poets Pub where we will be exploring Erasure Poetry. There are tons of ways to approach the prompt so for further examples see here and here or visit others who’ve already posted their erasure poems today. Please don’t be intimidated by the visual aspects of this prompt, you may simply chose words from an existing text and post them (attributed) on your blog as you would any poem or you can incorporate white out, marker, paint or multimedia to create a visual aspect. I would love for you to join us later.
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To join in Kelly’s birthday cyber-celebration of life I’ve posted a kaleidoscopic music video at Chromamisc. Also, I’ll be hosted Meeting the Bar at dVerse on Thursday; I would love to see you there.
incoherent, irrational
emotionally hypothermic
she initiates terminal burrowing
paradoxical undressing,
an illusion of warmth,
accelerates her demise
beneath the frosted
eyes of aspens
a final hallucination
circle of frozen angels
their wings long distorted
by the transformative ice
preside, their excruciating
silence heralds her
last breath, reveals
her true nature
Notes: This poem is a continuation of Ice Floe, originally posted in March:
picture by mobius faith /used with permission
one hundred billion neurons
Saraswati’s expansive lotus of the mind
illuminating the supreme appeal of exploration
jasmine colored moon lights the path
from stimulus to response
her swan glides through neural networks
discerning eternal from evanescent
action potential encoding creativity,
consciousness, it’s fractal diversity
is not an imprecision of biology
but critical to cerebral function
lotus hands weild the vina, ecstatic instrument,
strumming the perfection of arts and science
intrinsic biophysical heterogeneity reveals
complex nature of synchrony, rhythmicity
lustre upon the eloquence of knowledge
Claude Monet Nympheas (public domain)
This poem will be linked to the Poetics photo prompt today at dVerse Poets Pub. Please join us!
“Man is not free to refuse
to do the thing which gives him
more pleasure than any
other conceivable action.” – Stendhal
III 1: Pure potentiality and suffering
forceps bruise her unformed head
Shakespeare’s extraordinarily gifted
sister is born, made aware
of her conscious mind, she will
now address the reader as an I
already creating lexical lists,
exploring the avenues
of concurrent thought
am I dreaming or the
universal dreamer?
III 1.1: Anything can happen
it does
III 2: The sanatorium collides with the imaginarium
I keep you under lock and key
like the Marquis de Sade
my kaleidoscopic star,
you blow my mind
and arouse my (curiosity)
I’m repelled, terrified, and
utterly besotted by your shenanigans
III 3: Neologisms ignite the thaw
I will write my way to freedom
into or out of sanity depending
on the size of my nonsense
dance to the compelling
beat of semiotic erotica
IV 1: The awakening and immersion
Your image arrives in my mind
and I realize what it is
to melt in the presence
of another’s beauty
travelling an infinite distance
to caress the contours of your face
embrace your anarchic heart
I make no claims upon it
will not burn it or suck it dry
before you are gone
only I want to see it beat
and respond to the world
its liberty astounds
IV 2: Without a room of her own watching the procession of the sons of educated men
a spiritual medium scrys:
you know nothing of the frustration,
the rage to master
crushed by the tides
of apathy, misogyny, and abuse
my ferocity burns mountains to ash
your terrors haunt you,
mine devoured me long ago
I am free of fear but dead
yet continue to believe
I am alive
IV 3: Conflation of the immensely attractive and talented jester genius, the teasing diver, the downtrodden poet philosopher, the spiritual professor, a faithful cuckold (almost), a foreign artist, the intriguing flatterer/thinker, all the gods and monsters, matter and antimatter, and me, the one who refuses to be cast as the observed
Hofstadter laughs at my quandary
we no longer need to get together
fuck, or even exchange e-mail, now
that we understand that our consciousness,
our ‘I’ is distributed among all our brains
as part of the ‘strange loop’
it makes human interaction redundant
I’ll keep to my cave
Zarathustra Rapunzel
consummate performance artist
unless, of course, mind melding
isn’t the primary agenda
linguistic experimentation is
akin to sexual creativity
was Joyce masturbating
or gifting us a vital energy?
(he so wanted to be natural)
will my art be tainted like Bronte’s
with rage and sexual frustration?
I gave up everything for you
but gave it to someone else
who shattered it into pieces
V 1:Fluid cyclicality
an enormous aureate ouroboros forms
and proceeds to consume itself –
it’s in its nature
V 2: Chameleonic desire, a great daimon
the most profound expression of the self
or even more ontological than this ‘I’
the loam out of which a self emerges
Plato’s divine spark longing
to unite with ever more
transcendent forms of beauty
V 3: Interstices and penumbra of the soul
Eros awaits in the density of allusion
cartographic intertextual patterns
that gather in erotic cathexis
vast ecosystem arises
integrates with the eternal
V 4: Skeleton key
for a moment I thought
you caught sight of
me in the corner of your eye,
availed your coruscant intellect
and emotional intensity to really see –
not observe but engage,
an eye that challenges but invites
a look that doesn’t degrade,
demand, or destroy but makes whole
a look of recognition
often only given by
an inner paramour
V 5: Anything can happen
I will live here in the poem
and begin to see what is possible
Notes: This poem was written for Victoria’s excellent prompt on literary allusion at dVerse Poets Pub. It makes allusions to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (perhaps the most allusion laden literature ever written), Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and the philosophical writing of John Riker. The title Saudade is Portuguese and means the feeling of longing for something that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a ‘vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.’
Click on the picture to zoom
This is my poem for Open Link Night (up early) at dVerse Poets Pub.
Joe asked us this week to share where the inspiration for our poem came from so here goes: I was reading Keith Waldrop’s translation of Anne-Marie Albiach’s work yesterday morning and found an excellent review of Figured Image. I was drawn to doing something new with the inspiration I found in The Line The Loss. I admire her work a lot despite the fact that I can’t seem to embrace the flattening of language the underlying philosophy advocates. This poem was born out of those sources, The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, my desire to paint and use Photoshop for this week’s offering, the fun of experimentation, remembering some artistic tools I’d used in a previous poem Apophenia & Creativity: A Kind of Self-Possession (the Train Wreck Rewrite), my dry wit, the inanity of transhumanism, and a deep and abiding love of language. Thank you, Joe, for asking!
Francisco de Goya, Saturno devorando a su hijo 1819-1823 (public domain)
War is anthropophagy,
Leningrad gangs roaming
streets lined with
bread made of sawdust
picking dog-meat from
between their teeth
with rat-bone toothpicks
the Butcher salivates
examining the thigh –
castrates his male victim
Wendigo psychosis of leadership
warmongering cowards consume
the poor, these huddled masses
blood lust dilated pupils
loll in sockets reddened
by thoughts of feasting
ideological sacrifices for
120 seconds of silence
organ donors to greed
black acrimonious humor
gives the Butcher a voracious
appetite for human flesh
war profiteers gather and gain
vorarephilia inspired erections
rubbing together in orgiastic frenzy
crunch, squelch, he wipes
grease from his cheek, excretes
gluttonous cries of pleasure
millions are slaughtered
in a ritualistic, magical
cannibalism mimicking
Lord’s Resistance Army
training, in a flurry of
deadliest conflict
one-upmanship
Saturn devours
his children
one by one
Map of Cannibalism (public domain)
Written for Poetics prompt at dVerse Poets Pub where I tried to follow Karin’s advice to take no prisoners: http://dversepoets.com/2012/11/10/armisticetruce-making-peace-with-poetics/
Brief, brutal act
reenacted
ransacked pages
wrote love’s stages
their rages inked
taut cages wrought
here she first taught
what he sought out
she caught his core
James Joyce’s score
‘strange-eyed whore’, Nora –
jibdoor obscene
Letters unclean
to be seen, shown,
his keen mind blown
gifts to atone
she alone knew
his moan’s timbre
Written for Form for All at dVerse Poets Pub on Than Bauk http://dversepoets.com/2012/11/08/formforall-than-bauk/. James Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s erotic letters were the inspiration for this piece. A jibdoor is a door made flush with a wall without dressings or moldings and often disguised by continuing the finishings or decorations of the wall across its surface.
My poem for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub, Orphan of Silence, is here: http://kshawnedgar.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/orphan-of-silence/.
Chromapoetica 