POEMS F THE MNTH

September 2010

The terror of error
The error of terror
The terror of seeing
The error of being

 

Most days I write down at least one poem or idea:
a complaint somewhere between a runny nose and diarrhœa.

 

 

MUNICIPAL GUM

by

Oodgeroo Noonuccal,
Australia's first First People poet to be acclaimed by whiteys

Gumtree in the city street,
Hard bitumen around your feet,
Rather you should be
In the cool world of leafy forest halls
And wild bird calls
Here you seems to me
Like that poor cart-horse
Castrated, broken, a thing wronged,
Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged,
Whose hung head and listless mien express
Its hopelessness.
Municipal gum, it is dolorous
To see you thus
Stuck in your black base of bitumen--
O fellow citizen,
What have they done to us?

 

 

TURTLENECK

by

Mike Cluff
Claremont, California

The man in dark turtleneck
and suit to match
and the whitest of hair
unbuckles my belt
slides the tan slacks
slowly to the slope
just above the gartered tan socks
and handles all within.

The answering machine
comes
on
"I am tied up
at the moment"

and so he is.

 

 

TWO POEMS

by

Anthony Weir

1. THE GAP BETWEEN THE WORLDS

is the great consciousness between
truth and fiction
sleeping and waking
singing and talking
art and science
imagination and insight
sex and gender
love and happiness
inspiration and expiration
death and glory
desires and terrors
the left brain and the right
delight and despair -

is the universe
of unseen mirrors -

and in one there,
reclining on a shell
inlaid with lapis lazuli,
Aphrodite Anadyomene
wrings God's urine from her hair.

 

2. sHADES
(revised)

O pity the poor poets
snatched from the
Creative Writing Groups
and squeezed
by the academic, the
entertainment and the
cultural propaganda industries
until what the literati
call Poetry pops out...

...but is only solipsistic
pips of pale purple prose,
for there is no poetry in them
and maybe never was...

I think it was drained
from them or otherwise removed
before they reached their teens
when they were trained
out of truthful sensibility,
and just the phantom of ability,
the ghost of something
worth saying insubstantially remained.

 

 

>> Six translations of a poem by Rilke >>

 

 

HAIKU

by

David Burleigh

Flowers in the dark:
the absence of colour is
a kind of wonder.

 

 

 

 

BEWARE A POET BEARING WITNESS

by

Anthony Weir

To bear witness is to wade against
the filthy flow of smug hypocrisy,
greed, conformity and callousness.

Poetry is the wealth between words.

Where is the poetry of witness
in the English-speaking lands ?

I hear only muzak:
the dreadful drone of solipsistic wordsmiths
sitting on their hands.

 

 

a note on love

 

 

In Memoriam Kurt Schwitters

 

 

Life is too short

to worry about
life being short.

 

 

DOGS & HEAVEN

 

 

SEPTEMBER'S MAXIM

The complete irresponsibility of Man for his actions and his being is the bitterest drop for the seeker-after-truth to drink, since he has been accustomed to see in responsibility and duty the very patent of his title to 'humanity'.

- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Human, All Too Human

 

SOME PREVIOUS MAXIMS:

 

Man is the deranged animal, the laughing animal, the aggrieved animal,
the complaining animal, the vengeful animal,
the weeping animal, the jeering animal,
the unhappy animal, the destroying animal,
the addictive...
the life-denying animal.

 

A mind enclosed by language is in prison.
- Simone Weil

Consistency is the curse of understanding.

 

Quietude, which some men cannot abide because it reveals
their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise.
- Charles H. Spurgeon (English Christian preacher, 1834-1892)

 

It seems to me that nearly 99% of poetry is false.
But maybe high-falutin falsehood is the point of poetry ?

 

To want friendship is a great fault.
Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy,
like the joys afforded by art or life.
- Simone Weil

 

I'd rather be Ireland's unknown McGonagall
than that island's latest Nobel laureate.

 

The world is getting to be such a dangerous place,
a man is lucky to get out of it alive.
- W.C. Fields

 

Opprobrium is more trustworthy than praise.

 

To get power over a living creature is to defile.
To possess is to defile.
- Simone Weil

 

The quickest of us walk about
with well-wadded stupidity.
- George Eliot

 

more recent Maxims and Aphorisms can be read on the
weBlog

 

 

try a page at random

click for selections from
PREVIOUS PAGES OF THE MONTH >>

 

 

making coffee

 

poetic work in progress >