R.M. Engelhardt's Blog: Burn Brightly, page 19

Three New Poems In The Kitchen Poet

Three New Poems …

Beauty, Midnight & Vision

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:

Let the winds of dawn that blow

Softly round your dreaming head

Such a day of welcome show

Eye and knocking heart may bless,

Find the mortal world enough;

Noons of dryness find you fed

By the involuntary powers,

Nights of insult let you pass

Watched by every human love.

Poetry Is The Necessary Angel …

To confront fact in its total bleakness is for any poet a completely baffling experience. Reality is not the thing but the aspect of the thing. At first reading, this poem has an extraordinarily factual appearance. But it is, after all, an abstraction. Mr. [H.D.] Lewis says [in his essay, On Poetic Truth] that for Plato the only reality that mattered is exemplified best for us in the principles of mathematics. The aim of our lives should be to draw ourselves away as much as possible from the unsubstantial, fluctuating facts of the world about us and establish communion with the objects which are apprehended by thought and not sense.

—Wallace Stevens, “About One of Marianne Moore’s Poems” from The Necessary Angel

I BELIEVE

“I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

-

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

-

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.

-

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

-

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

~ Neil Gaiman, From “American Gods”

“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain...

 

“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives… and to the “good life”, whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.”

~ Hunter S. Thompson

From the darkness you must fallFailed and weak, to dark...

From the darkness you must fall

Failed and weak, to darkness all.

~ Kataris

The Silence Falls …

R.M. Engelhardt … On Poetic Diversity

SILENCE FALLS

Remembering Lou Reed, Poet~Musician~Pioneer

 

PLAYING MUSIC lS NOT LIKE ATHLETICS

Playing music is not like athletics:

One may improve with age.

The untrained mind with natural talents

reflects the part and never the whole

it is too narrow to perceive itself.

Its goals erase themselves.

May I have your ear, that

curlicued receptor of sound?

(If this were Rome we could be so grand).

The movement from instinct to calculation is quite profound

You’ve listened and been more than a tape recorder.

Talent carries its own weight;

the intellect it weds determines greatness.

Our age is such that we must fight off fat.

One hopes the mind outlasts the skin.

If this is true,

I’II say goodbye to me,

and say hello to

yet another you.

Hooky Wooky CD single, 1996

Lou Reed, 1996

Photo: Renaud Monfourny, Les Inrockuptibles, no. 45

WASTE

Sometimes when I’m all alone

I feel a type of fear

dawn’s descending, dusk is breaking

creep my darling near.

I see my life before me

as a seamstress sees her pins

fulland linedwithfailure

and coated then with sin.

An education gone to waste

talent left ignored

imagination rent with drugs

someone who’s always bored

scared to death of life itself

but even more by death

not fit company for anyone

let alone a wife

no example for a child

therefore no sun for me

I am told never to think these thoughts

for they make me unhappy.

The sin was craziness you see

don’t blame yourself for that -

a strange childhood, wel1 that is true

but nothing can be done about that.

The future is the same for all

we face it as we can

and there is nothing wrong with fear

it proves that you’re a man.

Then other times I feel so good

the opposite you see

I think I’m full of talent

good old intuitive me.

I write all hours of the night

terrible poetry.

Others say that it is good

but they are lying to me.

Why would they lie, you might ask

and to this I would reply

encouraging me encourages them,

to cut me shows their lie.

For mine was illusion of life well spent,

everyone thought so.

I was courted as a rake

wherever I did go.

But I know warts, you can’t fool me

with flattering and praise.

You sing my songs to prove to yourselves

that you are not a waste.

THOUGHTS TURN TO MURDER LATE AT NIGHT

We can learn to murder in the early hours

mulling over dour fate

technology offering its endless alternatives:

poisons, boxes spewing chemicals.

And yet

in murder

we return to the odious spectacle of physical expression -

I’ll break you neck;

I’ll break your back

thinking unacquired savagery.

Karate is a special kind of dance.

Who pulverizes someone else’s bones

has lifted violence to the level of

an art,

which, unlike ballet,

does not require the total man.

Magic And Loss, Metal Memorial Edition CD, 1992

NEVERMORE

smokeswordscoffee.

smokes

words

coffee.