On Hipsters

These sun-starved soul-sick lonely vagrant boys

commit themselves to only blank pages;

the words they spill, they leave as only ploys;

they say their verses are their own cages,

but each vagrant boy in silence rages

against his tepid urges and passions.

The settling dust accrues across ages,

atop each book, designed after fashions,

as each vagrant boy takes drugs as rations,

and calls himself a maker of the truth.

What use could they make of sweet compassion's

warm touch? For they are the world's uncouth,

adrift and wayward, cast to sea, lost in

dreamy tarnished glory, and far too thin.

Marching Song

My person out of many people grew,

steeped hot in many climes of human thought;

of their best parts, as Pallas born anew,

fresh from their forge, my better self was wrought.

In caution's clasp my fancies were arrest,

lost but for verse's sweet escape from flesh,

'til their many characteristics blest

enraptured verse which with their strength enmeshed.

What lies inside the secret hearts of men,

which little keys the light of day doth bring!

How harsh the burn, how fierce the field! But then,

how sweet the day, and too, how right the sting.

Parades of youth to tides of time are lost,

but change's mark is on my soul embossed.

Oneiroic Ode

Awakened I with some slight im-

perfection rent from Sleep's sweet shadow realm,

haloed 'round with vision, song, and storm, and him,

smoky, bright Morpheus, sand, and cloak, and helm.

Prophetic cries burst from him of fancy and dread,

graven portentious dream things of sleep and rest!:

"Wake ye not, die ye not, for the middle places are the bed

of human want and human need. 'tis best

to 'void low depths. Sleep's realm has idylls vast.

Soporific veils may cast on thy soul

a pallor which life nary at first hast,

but this pallor's peace make thee at last whole.

Find in my dream palace your own wide berth,

create for thee thy own true human worth."

Doing Lines

Layover in O'Hare,
just a quick jaunt from
one plane to another.
No more than twenty minutes,
vast hordes of us do it
every day.

-

zephyr threw a glance
in our direction as
the branches chattered
their derision, drowning
the gentle sussurus of
breath and skin-against-skin,
but that brief notice
of our deviant bliss
was all the world cared
to muster, the enormity
of our shared sphere

-

Drunk enough I'm sweating rice
in this Harajuku hell.

-

The winter and the people
seem a little colder here,
lost as I am
in the midst of boulevards
and avenues named after fruits.
What will our descendants,
a thousand years from now,
think of us when they see
the products of our ubiquity,
the likeliest signs of us to remain,
our chalk hopscotch boards,
our crayoned walls, our
hand-outlined festive turkeys,
our ten-thousand-piece puzzles,
the closest things to art our housewives
will ever achieve?

(copyright a(scetic)verse, January 03, 2010)

Observations 1

father, carrying infant
12-gauge plugs in
both ears.
the four-leaf clover tattoo
on his left elbow
matches his shirt.
green's a good color
on him.
he's too hot for his wife, though,
whose thighs are each,
individually, wider than my torso.

what's an inverted hourglass called?
one where the top and bottom
are the thinnest points
and the middle is the widest?
well anyways she was wearing
a shirt that said "you'll never get over me"
but maybe it should have said
"you'll never get around me"
because she took up the whole sidewalk.
maybe if i was shorter i could walk under
her hips. maybe i could shove her
but even if i could overcome her center
of gravity, i don't have the cash
to pay the property damages.

green apron
reindeer antlers
flapping his arms like wings.
i come here too much,
so i'm not really surprised, anymore.
maybe he's like a walmart greeter;
i've never seen him make a drink.

he wants to take me out
to dinner and get to know me,
but he's wearing paisley and he
lost his bangs in the war. he gave
me his card; i guess i'll tell him
i didn't mean to stare, it's just
that i'm paranoid-schizophrenic
and the giant insect legs sprouting
out of his back kinda freaked me out.
i hope he'll understand the mix-up, 'cause
this kind of thing happens to me all the time.
i just can't see myself with a kafka-esque monstrosity.

(copyright a(scetic)verse, November 22, 2009)

Mistaken Identity

I am not simply
the sum of my
many mistakes,
though I hope
that in this,
for once,
I am not mistaken.
The proportion
approaches too closely
one to one.

(copyright a(scetic)verse, November 22, 2009)

The Resting

The red clay will one day
swallow up my gunnysack
of meat and sticks. Who could cry
about this everyday thing?
Who finds it sad when old friends reunite?
When twos become ones? Besides-
there are no drunk uncles who want to
hit me or put themselves in me,
sweating and furious with themselves,
under the red clay or brown dirt or green grass
or any other place I'm apt to lay.

I want to say that I will end up
in the ground safe from uncles
and hellhounds and hate. But 'end up' is not
quite right- I'll stay in that bright red clay for a
night or two and then I'll turn to dust or soil
and, with the turning of the earth, will traipse away
into the void. We got these forms from the hearts
of dying stars, you know,
and I'm a good boy so someday
soon I'll give mine back. That's good
sharing; we learned it when we were kids.

(copyright a(scetic)verse, Jan 03, 2010)

a first kiss

A First Kiss

She had always wondered, ever since she first paddled to the middle of the lake towards the end of summer in her third year of vacation here, how many bodies the police have had to pull from this particular lake. The hazy quality of light had always raised in her a certain melancholy, an introspective awareness of not just her own mortality, and it was no different then, set adrift as she was on an ancient, sturdy wooden raft in what was roughly the center of the lake, nothing but that raft and her hands and a battered copy of "The Weary Blues" and the crust of a peanut-butter and raspberry jam sandwich to keep her company.

People in this mindset, she had read, often felt a certain compulsion to organize, to make orderly, to straighten, to tidy up. She had always been the sort to make the best of what she had, and so she aligned the crusts with the slants of the topmost layer of wood, laid the book open in perfectly-squared orientation at the center of the raft, which, when she settled again, resembled a floating altar, Arthur's place of meeting with his Lady of the Lake. Her own place of remembrance for those she imagined had died here.

The copse at the shore over her shoulder stood its silent watch, cloaked in the early morning fog and mist which had settled around the stoic wardens. She knew it must be lonely, guarding this lake for the half-century or more that the trees had grown in their inexorable upward climb. She felt something like that, that she had grown amongst a pack of others growing just the same, but that she was ever apart, that she was as thickly-skinned as the oaks lining the shore. Their roots drank from the soil goblet, constantly draining the ever-replenished vessel. She felt that craving. She was empty, parched. As she cast her gaze back to the raft, she caught sight of Hughes' words, wound tight and brief like a viper ready to strike:

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.

And the words sang to her. The water's voice enticed her. And she was parched. And she had never been asked for a kiss before. The romance was brief, as the best of summer are. But she felt safe, wrapped in the warm clear kiss of the lake. The pain too was brief; waves of euphoria supplanted her sense of shock, the initial terror of something so new undermined by the pleasure of belonging, of acceptance. For perhaps the first time she felt truly in good company, proud to share this magic with those who led her here, who captured her imagination, who brought her to such a tender and devoted lover as her lake.

Her brother told the police what he knew of her fascination with the isolated forest shrine. They dredged the lake, then, for the first time in the town's history, and brought up a lone, swollen corpse.

Wordplay

Words are just lies we use
to play at the truth,
crude facsimiles of real things
like sex and fistfights,
sunshine moonshine and hopes,
and the nightmares that, like
good sex and fistfights and
sunshine moonshine and hopes,
leave you collapsed on your back,
chest heaving, forehead slicked with sweat.

Still Life with Still Frames

Still Life with Still Frames
A Poem in Eight Parts

A Moment Late
-in which his first brush with chaos upsets his worldview-

The cameraman captures his quarry in mid-stride
as the young girl turns to her left.
In the next moment, the image is perfect.


In The Negatives
-in which his vagaries of the past take flight-

As his camera rewinds,
the last frame pressed neatly into place,
he comes to realise
that he will be forced to relive
a week of misery.

He wonders, however,
if, in the negatives,
a new perspective
will show its face.


The Blessing of Silver Bromide
-in which his sense of revision extends too far-

Forced to reverie by the stills,
he finds that it is easier to portray his own reality
in the near-black of his dark cave
than it is behind the shutter;

walking in the light,
reality is right there,
so close,
tangible but untouchable,

while in the darkroom,
it is spread flat before him
and a single drop of a chemical
can change reality forever.


As Zeus Severed Man
-in which his uncertain aesthetics settle-

He broods over the drying photo sheet,
acutely aware of the imperfections,
the inconsistencies between the printed page
and the vision screaming out to him
from deep within.

Art, he considers,
is perception.
The raging muse can inspire,
but the artist cannot portray
the true form of the flame.

Imperfection, he considers,
is art.


Nulla Dies Sine Linea or, Not a Day Without a Line
-in which his struggle to persevere seems bleak-

The young photographer,
his aspirations birds
with clipped wings,
sits cross-legged upon the floor,
his portfolio spread wide and empty before him,
the jaws of the future gaping from its depths.


Ars Gratia Nihil or, Art for the Sake of Nothing
-in which he perseveres, perhaps-

Servile,
he works to placate the violent muse;
she is not an inspiration but a force
of drudgery,
snapping whip and
flinging stone.

In these hallowed halls,
creativity comes not from within,
but from the clenched fist of
professor - expert - master of her craft -
when in reality,
creation must come from the artist-within.

Freed,
his is the life of expression,
happily absent from the
dark realm of academia.


Separation Anxiety
-in which his regret screams rapture-

Pawing endlessly through
page after page of
old photos,
he wonders what he has
made of his life.

At all the key moments,
he is there,
not in the scene,
not participating,
just preserving.

Now,
he sits with his camera,
alone.


Perscribi Non Est Esse or, To Preserve is Not to Be
-in which his tenuous aesthetic shatters-

His world of still frames
crumbles about his feet
(it's not the disparate moments which he may choose to live,
but a steady flow of time with which he can not
force-feed the half-starved, carnivorous shutter).
Each frame is silver-kissed
and in darkness given to light
(his art is womb-carried, painfully born,
but static, always immature,
powerful, a thing of life, but dead if left alone).
The camera is plenipotentiary,
the product impotent
(beauty is not a moment cast apart from the whole,
but the aggregate of life, of second-by-second struggle,
which not even memory's lens can capture).