POEM(s) by Bakkhus Unbound
1. Sometimes they are just words, those little pieces of poetry that so
many poets write. (Words found on bathroom walls, words found in garden
fountains, words outside of books scribbled down on tissue paper...).
2. What are poems? “The Raven” from Edgar Allan Poe spoken in the voice
of Christopher Walken: “Once upon a midnight dreary...”, calm
and collected? Iggy Pop punk rock coffee stains on his “Blah Blah
Blah” record covers? Words gathered and spread like so many unwashed
diseases underground, along railway tracks where the junkies allergic to
junk sleep, like William Burroughs eating “Naked Lunch” for breakfast
in Budapest while shooting junk into his veins... Dante’s “Inferno”?
3. Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Poemsarefire! Poem(sin)lust!
4. (Obvious observation): Poetry can lead to “suicide”: the occasional
concept of writing poems: Sylvia Plath, 1963. “Ariel or Winter
Trees”. The English poet Laureate Ted Hughes divorced her like a
well used poem left in a laundry mat (So many bells fall like rotting leaves).
Shit!, that makes Ted sound terrible (and he wrote Snowdrop from
“Lupercal!”: “Her pale head heavy as metal.”). So, like
a poem poor Sylvia killed herself. Then she became famous! And Ted even
dedicated a book for her (a collection of her own poetry,
even).
5. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. How famous a poem did that become! Quite,
and it’s far less than quiet. “I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...” And then most
people do not realize there are actually more words after that. Hell, they
often cannot get past “madness”.
So sad.
Mad-
6. Madness. Another form of expression in poetry. Was Percy Shelley mad?
“Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight/ No more--Oh, never
more!” (From "Lament"). Jim Morrison certainly was mad; in his An
American Prayer: "All join now and lament for the death of my cock a
tongue of knowledge in the feathered night." Absolutely brilliant;
brilliant madness! "Lying on stained wretched sheets with a bleeding
virgin. We can plan a murder or start a religion."
7. Plan a murder.
8.(or) Start a religion! Might just be a little Charlie Manson and Dionysus
in there. We certainly followed him like ravaging nymphs, getting stoned
immaculate and wasted on his words of wisdom... drunk, dying on the vine.
And then he died in some back street Paris hotel.
9. Or was it a murder? Is he the Elvis everyone sees at the Texas gas stations?
10. Poetry is vertigo. Always spinning...
11. I write poetry in all kinds of places; sitting in a small lazy Wednesday
afternoon park in Carlton on Lygon Street smoking a kretek cigarette while
writing words on the back of an Andrew’s Bookshop receipt because I forgot
my damn notebook! Cars passing by like snakes hissing or the howling of
the wind.
12. Poems howl! Poems cry. Poems make me laugh and wonder “why?” (Why
was Poe found dead drunk and alone... why is a book like Ephemerealms
not found next to anything by Auden’s (except, perhaps, on my own personal
bookshelf?).
13. Poems are like ghosts. People sometimes read them. Sometimes they are
glimpsed again, like streets with no names. They are dust words less frozen
in time unless accompanied by music... I see all these little poetry creatures
wandering lost in a world full of books where they are not welcomed, so
they sit in corners and crumble or cry; or they sit in all-night diners
like Jack Kerouac in desolation, feeling the misery of the mystery and
the mist. Feeling the dead naked blues of the streets; the cold saxophone
bones of night.
14. Blown by the wind, poems turn into rust.
15. Poor little creatures.
16. If I had a poem for every piece of shit music I’ve ever heard on
the radio I’d have a large pocket full of change and turn the world “Green”.
No. I’m sure I could do something bigger than that. I’d put a “poem”,
like Saint Nick does w/ toys, in the pockets of every living person and
they’d have no choice but to read that poem over and over and over until
it stuck inside their skulls like music...
17. ...then they’d go out and buy a book of poetry.
18. Jewel put some words together in a book (“A Night Without Armor”)
of what she calls ‘poetry’. Well, it’s not the best bit of poetry
ever, but it’d be nice if more famous people wrote poetry books. Maybe
poems would have a chance. Dylan wrote “Tarantula” (but that’s a
little bit too far of left field for the average mind; possibly any mind).
Lou Reed has a nice collection, as does Patti Smith and Henry Rollins,
but that’s still just not enough for the general public.
19. Instead, poems are just little slices of life. Carved into our hearts
then forgotten. Like car crashes (no, car crashes are always remembered).
Car-crashes are more like poems, actually. “Crash” (originally in
"The Atrocity Exhibition") from J. G. Ballard is a great book, reads like
poetry. Made into a Cronenberg film, even. Most people who have seen that
film do not know it was ever a book; a thing with words between the front
and back covers. (I have a nice little copy... but bloody Hell! I like
reading Ballard.)
20. “Roses are red, violence is blue. I saw you dead, with the ducks
at the zoo.” Now that really sucks. Ducks aren’t even kept in zoos!
They might hang around there, looking for crumbs or poetry, but they are
there on their own. Like squirrels at The Boston Commons. Nibbling on all
those little lost poems, the poems that fall off the trees or out of newspapers
or from the mouths of arguing lovers fighting over whether or not they
should see this film or that film; all along a little bug poem is tugging
at their pant legs saying, “read me, please.” The boy plucks a rose
from a bush gives it to the girl they go off to some hotel instead and
that poor little bug poem is left there like a mistake.
21. What the hell kind of bloody poem is this? I had an idea, but it fell
out of my head so instead I’m writing this strange bit of delirium, this
transcendent burn of the fantastical romances of my heart. No, that’s
not it either.
22. REM on the radio, I turned to the TV pages. There were eleven green
dragons flying out from my self-conscious. I saw a world inhabited by Raindogs.
Cats were hiding in all the shadows, hiding with their poems because on
that Raindog Planet poems were outlawed and Cats were less than zero.
“Can’t get There From Here.” And then I wake up in a strange
hotel, a red neon sign flickering outside, my head hurting like film-noir
narration.
23. I did. I was born (like Dickens’ David Copperfield). I was
bored. I wrote a poem and it turned into a wooden piano. “Pardon?”
someone said thru the watery nimbus of the rain. Sitting in the back of
a taxi, U2 on the radio. But the poem was halfway out the door...
24. “ The heart is a bloom, shoots up through the stony ground/ But
there's no room, no space to rent in this town...”
25. And then I saw her standing on the street corner, stuck in the moment.
I thought of all the most beautiful women in the world, from Brigitte Bardot
to Vanessa Paradis, and saw that they were all poems. This one was no different.
The rain clung to her dress like words from the pages of Edward Estlin
Cummings ...E. E. Cummings. All those avant-garde sonnets, from the blues
form and acrostics of love. And nature. Like sketches, and paintings.
26. The odd typography or punctuation: this is how her dress flowed...
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
27. “Loneliness,” I breathed, gently like leaves fallen. Almost a whisper.
“If strangers meet
life begins-
28. “anyone lived in a pretty how town/ (with up so floating many bells
down).”
29. She had green eyes, every different kind of poem was in them. I followed
her down like a bell sound, a tintinnabulation into that “rabbit’s
hole” down into the subway basement of the old Alice Hotel. She said
there was a whole new world where people read poems everyday. “No, they
are poems. Each person has a poem memorized inside their head and everywhere
is like a café in Paris or Prague. Wanna come along?”
30. Of course, so I did.
Epilogue:
E1. In the end I became Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
“April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”
*for Purr, because she thought
"Bug Dallas"
was going to be something
about
lit
(ti
ny)tle
crea
(bu
gs)tures...
On Thursday, November 23, 2006, Rebel_not_Radical
(136) wrote:
On Thursday, November 23, 2006, Anna Helianthus
(972) wrote:
On Wednesday, November 22, 2006, Instant Insanity
(657) wrote:
On Wednesday, November 22, 2006, LOKI
(170) wrote:
On Wednesday, November 22, 2006, Anth
(1437) wrote:
On Wednesday, November 22, 2006, Anth
(1437) wrote:
On Wednesday, November 22, 2006, Anth
(1437) wrote:
On Wednesday, November 22, 2006, purr_verse
(1320) wrote:
On Wednesday, November 22, 2006, The Zebra Warrior
(2209) wrote:
On Wednesday, November 22, 2006, Bakkhus Unbound
(1055) wrote:
On Wednesday, November 22, 2006, mozarts cat
(239) wrote:
On Wednesday, November 22, 2006, mozarts cat
(239) wrote:
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