Topic: Writings

What ever happened to this thread? I'm starting it again..

Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Re: Writings

Risk
   
And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

Ana

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Re: Writings

San wrote:

What ever happened to this thread? I'm starting it again..

Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

^maybe my favouritest villanelle ever

Re: Writings

Yes..my favourite also. I like that line in that Baudelaire "...and the pleasure that kills".

If you can't eat you got to by E. E. Cummings

If you can't eat you got to

smoke and we aint got
nothing to smoke:come on kid

let's go to sleep
if you can't smoke you got to

Sing and we aint got

nothing to sing;come on kid
let's go to sleep

if you can't sing you got to
die and we aint got

Nothing to die,come on kid

let's go to sleep
if you can't die you got to

dream and we aint got
nothing to dream(come on kid

Let's go to sleep)

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Re: Writings

At the Middle of Life
Friedrich H

You were just a damn sequencer
Moving to the beat
Living with a synthesizer
Cold as a repeat

6

Re: Writings

"We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road,

Re: Writings

Hooray for the writings thread, I have just recently been inspired by this guy talking on this show: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stori … 314762.htm

and have started to try and make some time each day to drink good coffee and read a good piece of poetry, though I find Sylvia Plath to dark and gloomy especially on sunny days, you should read some Kenneth Slessor dear San:

The red globe of light, the liquor green,
the pulsing arrows and the running fire
spilt on the stones, go deeper than a stream;
You find this ugly, I find it lovely

Ghosts' trousers, like the dangle of hung men,
in pawn-shop windows, bumping knee by knee,
but none inside to suffer or condemn;
You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish
and puffs of paraffin that crimp the nose,
of grease that blesses onions with a hiss;
You find it ugly, I find it lovely.

The dips and molls, with flip and shiny gaze
(death at their elbows, hunger at their heels)
Ranging the pavements of their pasturage;
You Find this ugly, I find it lovely .

Re: Writings

And a long one, but another favourite that I can't resist posting before I forget:

   
Five Bells
     
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.

Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve
These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought
Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth,
Gone even from the meaning of a name;
Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips
And hits and cries against the ports of space,
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face
In agonies of speech on speechless panes?
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!

But I hear nothing, nothing...only bells,
Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,
There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait -
Nothing except the memory of some bones
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;
And unimportant things you might have done,
Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,
And all have now forgotten - looks and words
And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales
Of Irish kings and English perfidy,
And dirtier perfidy of publicans
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.

Five bells.

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain
The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,
So dark you bore no body, had no face,
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air
(As now you'd cry if I could break the glass),
A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,
Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,
Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man,
And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls
Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls
Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found.
But all I heard was words that didn't join
So Milton became melons, melons girls,
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,
And in each tree an Ear was bending down,
Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass,
When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought,
The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
There's not so many with so poor a purse
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,
Five miles in darkness on a country track,
But when you do, that's what you think.

Five bells.

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,
Your angers too; they had been leeched away
By the soft archery of summer rains
And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,
The sodden ectasies of rectitude.
I thought of what you'd written in faint ink,
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
With other things you left, all without use,
All without meaning now, except a sign
That someone had been living who now was dead:
"At Labassa. Room 6 x 8
On top of the tower; because of this, very dark
And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed
Into this room - 500 books all shapes
And colours, dealt across the floor
And over sills and on the laps of chairs;
Guns, photoes of many differant things
And differant curioes that I obtained..."

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward, so each night
You crept a moment closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piety
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.

Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water's over you,
As Time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead
In private berths of dissolution laid -
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you
And let their shadows down like shining hair,
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;
And you are only part of an Idea.
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.
If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?

I looked out my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.

Five bells.

Kenneth Slessor

9 (edited by San 2008-08-13 13:45:50)

Re: Writings

I will love..the onomatopoeia in the first poem is beautiful..I look forward one day soon to sitting in the sun in the mountains and reading with you and your lovely robette smile

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Re: Writings

Oh CBS Oh CBS
few radiostations leave me indifferent less
Your drums detroit, your basses italian
Left me working like a horny stallion
Luckily your forum, that gave us eternal joy
has been continued in this online toy


Jeroenemans

11

Re: Writings

Metaphorazine

Johnny takes Metaphorazine. Every clockwork day. Says it burns his house down, with a haircut made of wings. You could say he eats a problem. You could say he strokes his thrill. Every clingfilm evening, climb inside a little pill. Intoxicate the feelings. Play those skull-piano blues. Johnny takes Metaphorazine.
He's a dog.

Lucy takes Simileum. That's not half as bad. She's only like a moon gone slithering, upside-down the sky. Like a tidal wave of perfume, like a spillage in the heart. With eyes stuck tight like envelopes, and posted like a teardrop. Like a syringe, of teardrops. Like a dripfeed aphrodisiac, swallowed like a Cadillac, Lucy takes Simileum.
She's like a dog.

Graham takes Litotezol.Brain the size of particles, that cloud inside of parasites, that live inside the paradise of a pair of lice. He's a surge of melted ice-cream, when he makes love like a ghost. Sparkles like a graveyard, but never gets the urge, and then sings Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Like a turgid flatfoot dirge. Graham takes Litotezol.
He's a small dog.

Josie takes Hyberboldehyde. Ten thousand every second. See her face go touch the sky, when she climbs that rollercoaster high. That mouth! Such bliss! All the planets and their satellites make their home inside her lips. It's a four-minute warning! Atomic tongue! Nitrokisserine! Josie takes Hyperboldehyde.
She's a big dog.

Alanis takes Alliterine.It digs a deeper ditch. And all her dirty dealings display a debonair disdain. Her dynamo is dangerous, ditto her dusky dreams. Dummies devise diverse deluxe debacles down dingy darkened detox driveways. Alanis takes Alliterine.
She's a dead dog, y'dig?

Desmond takes Onomatopiates.
He's a woof-woof.

Sylvia takes Oxymorox. She's got teenage menopause. Gets her winter-sugar somersaults from non-stick glue. She wears the V-necked trousers, in the blind-eye looking-glass. Does the amputated tango, and then finds herself quite lost, in the new old English style! Sylvia takes Oxymorox.
She's a cat dog.

But Johnny takes Metaphorazine. Look at those busted street lamp eyes, that midnight clock-face of a smile. That corrugated tinflesh roof of a brow. The knife, fork and spoon of his fingers, the sheer umbrella of the man's hairdo! The coldwater bedsit of his brain. He's a fanfare of atoms, I tell you! And you know that last, exquisite mathematical formula rubbed off the blackboard before the long summer holidays begin? Well, that's him. Speeding language through the veins, Johnny takes Metaphorazine.
He's a real dog.
                                                      Jeff  Noon

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Re: Writings

I have a soft spot for the Mighty John Hegley


Glasgow

as we walk across the bridge across the Clyde
I talk of the tide
and the spring
and the spring in the suspension
but do not mention our tension
is there any hope of a bridge over that divide
Stephen
a rope even
or must we remain as strangers
like the Pope and Glasgow Rangers