Pennsylvania Roadside Series
Monday, November 22, 2004
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Bitter Water
Sleep will not come
pounding choruses of crickets pulse
blood ringing in my ear.
Night hastens its boney hand
Seizing the light;
Making captive all promises
Of delight.
It does not leave in dreaming.
It buys back these brief contracts from nothingness.
It speaks in voice undead from a whited grave.
Voices etched on the page like a name the hard wind cannot smooth away
An island amidst the chopping waves of broken speech---
Cracked bridge
A fractured boat
Bitter water gathers, slinking stream,
Ashes and pale distillation.
All at once one tries to think
One tries to hide,
Neither wakefulness nor dreaming.
Unrelenting toil
Pounding out our days from dark zero.
All of these things win back our world
No better than yesterday.
11/20/04
Altoona, PA
pounding choruses of crickets pulse
blood ringing in my ear.
Night hastens its boney hand
Seizing the light;
Making captive all promises
Of delight.
It does not leave in dreaming.
It buys back these brief contracts from nothingness.
It speaks in voice undead from a whited grave.
Voices etched on the page like a name the hard wind cannot smooth away
An island amidst the chopping waves of broken speech---
Cracked bridge
A fractured boat
Bitter water gathers, slinking stream,
Ashes and pale distillation.
All at once one tries to think
One tries to hide,
Neither wakefulness nor dreaming.
Unrelenting toil
Pounding out our days from dark zero.
All of these things win back our world
No better than yesterday.
11/20/04
Altoona, PA
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
This is how I am born as poetry.
A line is drawn but leaves no mark.
There is fire, but no ash
There is silence rebuking speech
And a knife carving chips.
This hero is not a hero I think.
All kinds of words are thrown
into the imperturbable façade
Constant as the sea’s breaking fury.
Light varnish and confetti vanish
under faltering footsteps.
As the jury flees.
Under the dim light the theatre shines
For me, for me!
There is fire, but no ash
There is silence rebuking speech
And a knife carving chips.
This hero is not a hero I think.
All kinds of words are thrown
into the imperturbable façade
Constant as the sea’s breaking fury.
Light varnish and confetti vanish
under faltering footsteps.
As the jury flees.
Under the dim light the theatre shines
For me, for me!
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Monday, November 15, 2004
4 July 2003
The widespread apathy concerning the passionate struggle for liberty is painted on America’s festive faces 227 years down the road. The initial concentration of revolutionary energy has become dilute having been spread so far and wide for such a long time. There is simply no way to perpetuate the ideal and ensure that education may promote the values of individual transcendence and innate distrust of government.
Just as the toys and materialistic consumerism have replaced the essential meaning of Christ’s birth in December, and the easter bunny has replaced the mystery of resurrection, so too has the waving of flags and the explosion of fireworks substituted for the thick concentrate which stand at the core of the American Revolution’s radical ideal liberty, individualism, religious freedom, absence of tyranny, as well as egalitarianism (there can be no egalitarianism where certain “executive” workers are compensated ten times and more than laborers).
Every “-ism” is a dilution of a human reality, purer and more profound. A mysterious phenomenon is a substantified with a general concept and a word, eg. “freedom,” “patriot” and so on, which stand for the original phenomenon and eventually take its place. This explains how children today celebrate the 4th of July not knowing, or comprehending the significance of the original mysterious events and phenomena which gave rise to the these traditions and concepts. Waving a flag comes to fulfill an original commitment to risking one’s own life and property in order to promote a reality which is embedded in the expression ‘liberty’.
At root, the fact of liberty has never been proven or demonstrated to exist, and requires an authentic act of faith in order to be a participant. To be ‘american’ means to participate in a type of civic religion with faith in these ideals as its proof.
St. Paul has written: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the grasp of things as yet unseen.” Democracy (there is no such thing as a “national” democracy---it is the common legacy of free humanity, the sole possessors of the truths of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness---solely given by a transcendent God) is the object of a specific type of faith. Democracy does not exist outside of such faith. ‘America’ exists in two aspects: one, as an object of faith, the authentic individual participation in democracy, and the other aspect is material, it is the land, the states, the government. It is only in the former sense that America can claim to be ‘democratic’, and in the latter sense is no better than any other government, great or small, plunged in greed, public confessional rituals, conformity and enormous, overwhelming pride.
A great man once said: “Democracy cannot be handed down from father to son like property---it must be earned by each succeeding generation.” The plastic waving flags on the 4th of July, the misuse of words like patriot stripped bare of original significance in The Patriot Act, or even worse, Patriot Missile, such nihilistic metaphor use hides the original meaning of blood spilled for a transcendent ideal. The word ‘education’ likewise has been emptied of its original significance, whose buildings and rituals distill the spirit of slavery, surveillance and suspicion upon youth whose ideals are not formed, while depriving them of the clean milk of democratic ideals such as Plato, Emerson, Franklin, Jefferson, Whitman and Bob Dylan and others all set against government tyranny and Statism, in which the faith in democracy in The United States is presently immured and inundated.
Just as the toys and materialistic consumerism have replaced the essential meaning of Christ’s birth in December, and the easter bunny has replaced the mystery of resurrection, so too has the waving of flags and the explosion of fireworks substituted for the thick concentrate which stand at the core of the American Revolution’s radical ideal liberty, individualism, religious freedom, absence of tyranny, as well as egalitarianism (there can be no egalitarianism where certain “executive” workers are compensated ten times and more than laborers).
Every “-ism” is a dilution of a human reality, purer and more profound. A mysterious phenomenon is a substantified with a general concept and a word, eg. “freedom,” “patriot” and so on, which stand for the original phenomenon and eventually take its place. This explains how children today celebrate the 4th of July not knowing, or comprehending the significance of the original mysterious events and phenomena which gave rise to the these traditions and concepts. Waving a flag comes to fulfill an original commitment to risking one’s own life and property in order to promote a reality which is embedded in the expression ‘liberty’.
At root, the fact of liberty has never been proven or demonstrated to exist, and requires an authentic act of faith in order to be a participant. To be ‘american’ means to participate in a type of civic religion with faith in these ideals as its proof.
St. Paul has written: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the grasp of things as yet unseen.” Democracy (there is no such thing as a “national” democracy---it is the common legacy of free humanity, the sole possessors of the truths of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness---solely given by a transcendent God) is the object of a specific type of faith. Democracy does not exist outside of such faith. ‘America’ exists in two aspects: one, as an object of faith, the authentic individual participation in democracy, and the other aspect is material, it is the land, the states, the government. It is only in the former sense that America can claim to be ‘democratic’, and in the latter sense is no better than any other government, great or small, plunged in greed, public confessional rituals, conformity and enormous, overwhelming pride.
A great man once said: “Democracy cannot be handed down from father to son like property---it must be earned by each succeeding generation.” The plastic waving flags on the 4th of July, the misuse of words like patriot stripped bare of original significance in The Patriot Act, or even worse, Patriot Missile, such nihilistic metaphor use hides the original meaning of blood spilled for a transcendent ideal. The word ‘education’ likewise has been emptied of its original significance, whose buildings and rituals distill the spirit of slavery, surveillance and suspicion upon youth whose ideals are not formed, while depriving them of the clean milk of democratic ideals such as Plato, Emerson, Franklin, Jefferson, Whitman and Bob Dylan and others all set against government tyranny and Statism, in which the faith in democracy in The United States is presently immured and inundated.
Friday, November 12, 2004
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Final Poet
The final poet
Is a rocky pier
Who gurgles exclamations---
Bits of things
snatched back and judged by the growling surf.
Jagged edged plastics,
charred branches
broken shells,
an orange sponge
rhythmically slapped into hollows of rocks.
At a stone’s throw in the grip of a tossing wave
A salty tongue licks clean the rusted limbs
Of a shipwreck,
Whose emaciate wrist
clutches down into final grip
naming man’s last thing---
It is the word of the final poet.
The poet startles green life
And crablike---
sideway scurries
From its meaty feast.
The pier calls the step
Beyond comfort and things wrought by man
Beyond descriptive language
And concern for clarification,
Into final words
minerals smashed clean in the mist.
On salty air
he soars
Without concern
For what is left behind
She weeps over broken things
And promises and trusts;
There are no pillars to lean upon
Something in the wine
Rends her mind.
Betraying what is dear.
Silly chalice!
Foolish thirst!
“I cannot bridge every fall of water
and so face a full night of silence
from my tower.
Fickle constellations---
Fickle companions!”
Terrible beauty seizes his mind.
The rocky pier draws a line into the sea
And cradles the jagged pieces
Tossed by crushing surf.
The day has laid down its treasure.
She drifts away on memory,
On long drawn sketches and voices.
The horizon recedes before her confidences,
Scraps of paper litter the tawny field;
poems stripped bare in wild winds and
Sunny bright mornings
This poem, too, is a line drawn between what is tossed up in verbal game
And the crackling of all that is left behind.
Is a rocky pier
Who gurgles exclamations---
Bits of things
snatched back and judged by the growling surf.
Jagged edged plastics,
charred branches
broken shells,
an orange sponge
rhythmically slapped into hollows of rocks.
At a stone’s throw in the grip of a tossing wave
A salty tongue licks clean the rusted limbs
Of a shipwreck,
Whose emaciate wrist
clutches down into final grip
naming man’s last thing---
It is the word of the final poet.
The poet startles green life
And crablike---
sideway scurries
From its meaty feast.
The pier calls the step
Beyond comfort and things wrought by man
Beyond descriptive language
And concern for clarification,
Into final words
minerals smashed clean in the mist.
On salty air
he soars
Without concern
For what is left behind
She weeps over broken things
And promises and trusts;
There are no pillars to lean upon
Something in the wine
Rends her mind.
Betraying what is dear.
Silly chalice!
Foolish thirst!
“I cannot bridge every fall of water
and so face a full night of silence
from my tower.
Fickle constellations---
Fickle companions!”
Terrible beauty seizes his mind.
The rocky pier draws a line into the sea
And cradles the jagged pieces
Tossed by crushing surf.
The day has laid down its treasure.
She drifts away on memory,
On long drawn sketches and voices.
The horizon recedes before her confidences,
Scraps of paper litter the tawny field;
poems stripped bare in wild winds and
Sunny bright mornings
This poem, too, is a line drawn between what is tossed up in verbal game
And the crackling of all that is left behind.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Jesus Wept
It is reported how Jesus before calling to Lazarus: “Arise,”
wept.
And the time when to the centurion’s daughter struck with palsy he cried: “Little maiden, ARISE!”
Skies like tarnished silver butterflies
Weep tears like soft rain
On the Rolling Andes Hills.
To eyes which survey
The endless Dakota plain
Tears of purity
Tears of forgetting;
Rivers of tears.
Tears of hope
Tears of joy.
Tears of family and earth
Tears of friends
So many tears
Jesus wept.
Thunder poured upon the rooftop
I saw the tattered wing of night swoop low
Heard the devil’s diamond claw
Scraping in the stony burrow
Blood filled the furrow
up to the sky
Red and fiery and pink.
On the porch deck
Silver puddles of rain
Dazzle and dance.
Lake Randall rocks leaden and slow
Like a shimmering jewel
The rain shower glistens
The weeds and grasses.
High upon a meadow
I stepped into a pow-wow circle
And was Initiated within the sweat lodge.
On the scorched Indian land
drier than dry
healing rains began to fall,
but the earth doesn’t know why Jesus wept.
This poem is a trail of broken treaties
It is a fence---
A net in the salty sea of Galilee.
I wandered lonely on the streets of man
Where the proud and mighty
Made the low high
And the high low
Like tarnished silver
And broken promise
Howling sirens race into the night
On the streets where
Brown-eyed children with laughing
Eyes dance.
The beggar calls out for love,
And finds no reply
He cannot remember how Jesus wept.
When Jesus wept
Tears like soft rain
Drifted on the Rolling Andes Hills
On big skies where silver clouds
Roll on forever
Silver skies like tarnished butterflies
And clouds like the rolled bundles of sweet smelling alfalfa.
Postscript:
This morning rain showered the rooftop of this world/made glisten the weeds and grasses mada Lake Randall a shimmering jewel. Inn the scorched Indian earth hungry roots reach even deeper into the dry of dry… the earth doesn’t know why… Jesus wept.
And in the mighty forests the tallest oaks were fallen. Thunder roars/the valley shakes/ fires leap up into the sky. Silver clouds roll on forever, but the streams have lost their way.
wept.
And the time when to the centurion’s daughter struck with palsy he cried: “Little maiden, ARISE!”
Skies like tarnished silver butterflies
Weep tears like soft rain
On the Rolling Andes Hills.
To eyes which survey
The endless Dakota plain
Tears of purity
Tears of forgetting;
Rivers of tears.
Tears of hope
Tears of joy.
Tears of family and earth
Tears of friends
So many tears
Jesus wept.
Thunder poured upon the rooftop
I saw the tattered wing of night swoop low
Heard the devil’s diamond claw
Scraping in the stony burrow
Blood filled the furrow
up to the sky
Red and fiery and pink.
On the porch deck
Silver puddles of rain
Dazzle and dance.
Lake Randall rocks leaden and slow
Like a shimmering jewel
The rain shower glistens
The weeds and grasses.
High upon a meadow
I stepped into a pow-wow circle
And was Initiated within the sweat lodge.
On the scorched Indian land
drier than dry
healing rains began to fall,
but the earth doesn’t know why Jesus wept.
This poem is a trail of broken treaties
It is a fence---
A net in the salty sea of Galilee.
I wandered lonely on the streets of man
Where the proud and mighty
Made the low high
And the high low
Like tarnished silver
And broken promise
Howling sirens race into the night
On the streets where
Brown-eyed children with laughing
Eyes dance.
The beggar calls out for love,
And finds no reply
He cannot remember how Jesus wept.
When Jesus wept
Tears like soft rain
Drifted on the Rolling Andes Hills
On big skies where silver clouds
Roll on forever
Silver skies like tarnished butterflies
And clouds like the rolled bundles of sweet smelling alfalfa.
Postscript:
This morning rain showered the rooftop of this world/made glisten the weeds and grasses mada Lake Randall a shimmering jewel. Inn the scorched Indian earth hungry roots reach even deeper into the dry of dry… the earth doesn’t know why… Jesus wept.
And in the mighty forests the tallest oaks were fallen. Thunder roars/the valley shakes/ fires leap up into the sky. Silver clouds roll on forever, but the streams have lost their way.
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Thursday, November 04, 2004
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