Cynthia

“What the Motorcycle Said

Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackerty-am-m, OM, AM:
All-r-r-room, r-r-ram, ala-bas-ter-
Am, the world’s my oyster.

I hate plastic, wear it black and slick,
hate hardhats, wear one on my head,
That’s what the motorcycle said.

Passed phonies in Fords, knockede down billboards, landed
On the other side of The Gap, and Whee,
bypassed history.

When I was born (The Past), baby knew best.
They shook when I bawled, took Freud’s path,
threw away their wrath.

R-r-rackety-am-m. Am. War, rhyme,
soap, meat, marriage, the Phantom Jet
are sh*t, and like that.

Hate pompousness, punishment, patience, am into Love,
hate middle-class moneymakers, live on Dad,
that’s what the motorcycle said.

Br-r-r-am-m-m. It’s Nowsville, man. Passed Oldies, Uglies,
Straighties, Honkies. I’ll never be
mean, tired, or unsexy.

Passed cigarette suckers, souses, mother-fuckers,
losers, went back to Nature and found
how to get VD, stoned.

Passed a cow, too fast to hear her moo, “I rolled
our leaves of grass into one ball.
I am the grassy All.”

Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackety-am-m, OM, Am:
All-gr-r-rin, oooohgah, gl-l-utton-
Am, the world’s my smilebutton.”
― Mona Van Duyn

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
― Virginia Woolf

“THE OWLS

by: Charles Baudelaire

UNDER the overhanging yews,
The dark owls sit in solemn state,
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.

Motionless thus they sit and dream
Until that melancholy hour
When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
The nightly shades assume their power.

From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest;

For he who follows every shade,
Carries the memory in his breast,
Of each unhappy journey made.
'The Owls' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“God

In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls.
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.

Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy, although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep;
And when the cats come out the rats are sly.
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn

But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful.
Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us, but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it.
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through,
Where blind farewells are taken easily ....

Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!”
― Isaac Rosenberg, The Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg