Shearing time
Waters recede
The gasping fish
The ionized star
In Mexico a baby’s crying, crying
In Calcutta the cattle step and groan
And north far off the point of Ellesmere Island
A distant thud — a distant thud, alone.
You: tick-tock when the algae starts to blooming
Shave a minute off the sentence handed down
Put a staple in the ear of your beloved
So you’ll recognize her when she comes around
Tick-tock-tick the windows are all closing
You can feel it in your dreams and in your trips
Something creeping up with parlor tricks and flowers
Its bony grin is pressed against your lips
In countries which your children never heard of
The outbreak starts. It shudders off its sleep.
Ten thousand years of gentle irritation
It’s time now for the shearing of the sheep.
March 5th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Yes, fine - but where is the astonishing carnival of weirdness and the nuclear call to arms of the abrupt of seven to ten years ago? The dives into the void, the wild clarion, the subversion and freedom seem to have vanished. Have you “moved on”? The account you wrote of mushrooms on erowoid was one of the most marvellous things I’ve ever read. There doesn’t seem to be anything like that here now. Why? Is this just different, or don’t I get the point? It seems to me you are living a more comfortable life, and you are softening up, becoming normal, but this is just seeming. Sorry if this sounds blindly critical - perhaps its just hard to get my teeth into poetry, perhaps thats the point. Maybe I am impatient, or over rational, but either way your poetry, nice thought it may be, doesn’t make me want dance through the streets dressed as batman; should it? What do you want to achieve with your current output? Are you not in love? What’s going on over there Mr Abrupt. I bow low.
March 6th, 2007 at 12:05 am
Your sharp insight offers an honorable challenge, and on certain points you are correct.
I should not be completely unrecognizable to you. Those dips into the void may have faded, but they nonetheless left me changed. Much of what has come out as poetry is the vision of history as a great coalescing process. The full implications are unknowable, but the recurrent theme is that “business as usual” is a highly unstable proposition. This intuition is directly informed by the sense of profound impermanence I experienced in those forays into the dark. I’m trying to trace the outlines of something big which I sense is coming to our world.
The poetry is an attempt to capture these visionary fragments before they dissolve into static. I cannot apologize if they do not suit your needs — for me they feel like groping towards something greater, which I have yet to discover, and I track them as best as I can.
The world changes. Nature ebbs and flows. What I once was, I will not be again. But I have not given up on the growth of the mind, and I hope you don’t either.
Be well,
abrupt
March 9th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Yes, I think my brain isn’t quite so well built somehow for poetry, unless its of a sea-shouldering alliterively sumptuous classical bent, but even then I prefer a crystal clear meaning (which doesn’t necessarily meaning intellectually neat).
I’m not quite sure I was referring to “the growth of the mind” though - noble though this might be. Rather a kind of inner fearlessness and a taste for wildness.
So I get the very vague impression that you have lost touch with the void a little, but it could be just that this something big you hope to describe I hope to understand.