28 Monday Feb 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdO8oS_3MaQ
written and spoken by Cornelius Bent (Dan Kellett)
video courtesy of http://www.youtube.com/user/dkell1713
included in the Crisis Chronicles with the poet’s permission
26 Saturday Feb 2011
Posted in 2000s, American, Merricle (William), Poetry
the king who weighed three pounds
I gave my heart to my head. He put it in a pot as if betrayed.
Complexity’s freezing drizzle aches like Bukowski teeth.
Precancerous polyps get pissed and mass at the borders.
I look into my lover’s face; its knives are light-years long,
Filled with all the grim energy of a simulated orgasm.
We take turns playing doctor:
I prescribe that she write a poem
About an animal holding up a broken paw;
Her diagnosis says I have a deep sprain of the happy ending.
The frontal lobe’s broken rules mistake the moos for the moon.
Turbidity is to fluidity as morbidity is to validity
As instant gratification is to the Buddha.
Truth is made up as a twit.
Time is a pack of lies.
Stillborn, I pay up and leave.
25 Friday Feb 2011
Posted in 2000s, American, Merricle (William), Poetry
Exceptionaljism
Through the years we’ve become
More ruggedly incompetent
At scraping the slime off ourselves
But at least it’s our slime.
Others need to pull themselves up
By their own slime-strands.
Don’t bother coming to us for spare slime.
There is no free in freedom.
That’s no way to run a business.
Like any self-reliant homeland or god would do,
Customers will be turned away at the door.
23 Wednesday Feb 2011
Posted in 2000s, American, Merricle (William), Poetry
it’s the quality of hollowness that determines the note
The darkness is too smart or too stupid not to manufacture the night
My beautiful mind massages truth with sensual oils and emollients
But it’s just a passing fling
The vice president gets a new torture gift set
His needs are profoundly simple
His erection says there is nothing
More romantic than brute strength
The main course was lovely, but there’s blood in the dessert
The melody of the violins stinks of lust
The filament creating the light in my eyes
Burns for decades on the world’s most efficient lack of depth
Bones murmur are you ready to get naked
To the bone
I plead not guilty to blamelessness
14 Monday Feb 2011
Posted in 1900s, American, Masters (Edgar Lee), Poetry
Caroline Branson
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]
With our hearts like drifting suns, had we but walked,
As often before, the April fields till star-light
Silkened over with viewless gauze the darkness
Under the cliff, our trysting place in the wood,
Where the brook turns! Had we but passed from wooing
Like notes of music that run together, into winning,
In the inspired improvisation of love!
But to put back of us as a canticle ended
The rapt enchantment of the flesh,
In which our souls swooned, down, down,
Where time was not, nor space, nor ourselves–
Annihilated in love!
To leave these behind for a room with lamps:
And to stand with our Secret mocking itself,
And hiding itself amid flowers and mandolins,
Stared at by all between salad and coffee.
And to see him tremble, and feel myself
Prescient, as one who signs a bond–
Not flaming with gifts and pledges heaped
With rosy hands over his brow.
And then, O night! deliberate! unlovely!
With all of our wooing blotted out by the winning,
In a chosen room in an hour that was known to all!
Next day he sat so listless, almost cold
So strangely changed, wondering why I wept,
Till a kind of sick despair and voluptuous madness
Seized us to make the pact of death.
A stalk of the earth-sphere,
Frail as star-light;
Waiting to be drawn once again
Into creation’s stream.
But next time to be given birth
Gazed at by Raphael and St. Francis
Sometimes as they pass.
For I am their little brother,
To be known clearly face to face
Through a cycle of birth hereafter run.
You may know the seed and the soil;
You may feel the cold rain fall,
But only the earth-sphere, only heaven
Knows the secret of the seed
In the nuptial chamber under the soil.
Throw me into the stream again,
Give me another trial–
Save me, Shelley!
[To read more Spoon River Anthology click here.]
14 Monday Feb 2011
Posted in 1900s, American, Masters (Edgar Lee), Poetry
Lyman King
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]
You may think, passer-by, that Fate
Is a pit-fall outside of yourself,
Around which you may walk by the use of foresight
And wisdom.
Thus you believe, viewing the lives of other men,
As one who in God-like fashion bends over an anthill,
Seeing how their difficulties could be avoided.
But pass on into life:
In time you shall see Fate approach you
In the shape of your own image in the mirror;
Or you shall sit alone by your own hearth,
And suddenly the chair by you shall hold a guest,
And you shall know that guest,
And read the authentic message of his eyes.
12 Saturday Feb 2011
Posted in 1900s, American, Masters (Edgar Lee), Poetry
Godwin James
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]
Harry Wilmans! You who fell in a swamp
Near Manila, following the flag
You were not wounded by the greatness of a dream,
Or destroyed by ineffectual work,
Or driven to madness by Satanic snags;
You were not torn by aching nerves,
Nor did you carry great wounds to your old age.
You did not starve, for the government fed you.
You did not suffer yet cry “forward”
To an army which you led
Against a foe with mocking smiles,
Sharper than bayonets. You were not smitten down
By invisible bombs. You were not rejected
By those for whom you were defeated.
You did not eat the savorless bread
Which a poor alchemy had made from ideals.
You went to Manila, Harry Wilmans,
While I enlisted in the bedraggled army
Of bright-eyed, divine youths,
Who surged forward, who were driven back and fell
Sick, broken, crying, shorn of faith,
Following the flag of the Kingdom of Heaven.
You and I, Harry Wilmans, have fallen
In our several ways, not knowing
Good from bad, defeat from victory,
Nor what face it is that smiles
Behind the demoniac mask.
12 Saturday Feb 2011
Posted in 1900s, American, Masters (Edgar Lee), Poetry
Many Soldiers
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]
THE idea danced before us as a flag;
The sound of martial music;
The thrill of carrying a gun;
Advancement in the world on coming home;
A glint of glory, wrath for foes;
A dream of duty to country or to God.
But these were things in ourselves, shining before us,
They were not the power behind us,
Which was the Almighty hand of Life,
Like fire at earth’s center making mountains,
Or pent up waters that cut them through.
Do you remember the iron band
The blacksmith, Shack Dye, welded
Around the oak on Bennet’s lawn,
From which to swing a hammock,
That daughter Janet might repose in, reading
On summer afternoons?
And that the growing tree at last
Sundered the iron band?
But not a cell in all the tree
Knew aught save that it thrilled with life,
Nor cared because the hammock fell
In the dust with Milton’s Poems.
11 Friday Feb 2011
Posted in 1900s, American, Masters (Edgar Lee), Poetry by JC
John Wasson
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]
Oh! the dew-wet grass of the meadow in North Carolina
Through which Rebecca followed me wailing, wailing,
One child in her arms, and three that ran along wailing,
Lengthening out the farewell to me off to the war with the British,
And then the long, hard years down to the day of Yorktown.
And then my search for Rebecca,
Finding her at last in Virginia,
Two children dead in the meanwhile.
We went by oxen to Tennessee,
Thence after years to Illinois,
At last to Spoon River.
We cut the buffalo grass,
We felled the forests,
We built the school houses, built the bridges,
Leveled the roads and tilled the fields
Alone with poverty, scourges, death–
If Harry Wilmans who fought the Filipinos
Is to have a flag on his grave
Take it from mine!
