536 Philosophy poems

Do not make things too easy. There are rocks and abysses in the mind As well as meadows. There are things knotty and hard: intractable. Do not talk to me of love and understanding. I am sick of blandishments. I want the rock to be met by a rock. If I am vile, and behave hideously, Do not tell me it was just a misunderstanding.

I mean to really live? Kick a spook in the stomach and commit to yourself and not be committed. Sit through another because I got it like that yoga class where a Coldplay soundtrack competes with the upbeat white chick reminding you to be present, to thank yourself for making it to your mat. Point to any place on the map and blow it up. Blow up spots. Why you gotta blow up spots? I loved Lebanon, never quite made it. I spit out the sudden ash with Don Cherry in Marrakech. I lifted one chiseled leg so high over my head Magic City had called and the ATL was ready to blow me up and I said,please. Do I do.What you do. Sing with me. Another shooter made it first and the ACLU was a petty bunch of pseudo-saviors but they blew up spots that one day. So many sad stories you start laughing at the wrong time and you thought yours was one ’til the time working at Ailey with the girl whose mom was killed by her very own daddy in front of the just-say-no rainbow she drew him in class. She wears heavy aquamarine eyeshadow and closes the gap between feeling and being. I’m glad you’re Dorothy Dandridge. Ban on that word, daddy. Banksy sees the zoo in you and cages hisself in bluer notes. I go wild and will, and will. Myth is a special kind of killer and I love her atonal smile. Without her we’d all go bye-bye, point to a place in the rap and make it a black hole, let it suck us in hug the cuckolded sucker emcees and let it hold us against our certain demolition. Without her you would find it hard to live. All the opiates would shrivel into sickle cell and all the blood running through the streets would keep on believing in bodies —  what obsolete machines, the only ones worth saving. Thank yourself for making it     for being present for the cold ache you sit with and rock into situations     for the way you exploded in nuclear winter and thought you had dreamed it     and made a new world bent as your denial     reached forth to caress it all and it shocked your fingertips     this is the bravest numbness

Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; And done, we straight repent us of the sport: Let us not then rush blindly on unto it, Like lustful beasts, that only know to do it: For lust will languish, and that heat decay. But thus, thus, keeping endless holiday, Let us together closely lie and kiss, There is no labour, nor no shame in this; This hath pleased, doth please, and long will please; never Can this decay, but is beginning ever.

They are so like Us, frozen in a bald passion Or absent Gaze, like the cows whose lashes Sag beneath their frail sacks of ice. Your eyes are white with fever, a long Sickness. When you are asleep, Dreaming of another country, the wheat’s Pale surface sliding In the wind, you are walking in every breath Away from me. I gave you a stone doll, Its face a dry apple, wizened, yet untroubled. It taught us the arrogance of silence, How stone and God reward us, how dolls give us Nothing. Look at your cane, Look how even the touch that wears it away Draws up a shine, as the handle Gives to the hand. As a girl, you boiled Your dolls, to keep them clean, presentable; You’d stir them in enormous pots, As the arms and legs bent to those incredible Postures you preferred, not that ordinary, human Pose. How would you like me?— Leaning back, reading aloud from a delirious Book. Or sprawled across your bed, As if I’d been tossed off a high building Into the street, A lesson from a young government to its people. When you are asleep, walking the fields of another Country, a series of shadows slowly falling Away, marking a way, The sky leaning like a curious girl above a new Sister, your face a doll’s deliberate Ache of white, you walk along that grove of madness, Where your mother waits. Hungry, very still. When you are asleep, dreaming of another country, This is the country.

Don't allow the lucid moment to dissolve Let the radiant thought last in stillness though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers We haven't risen yet to the level of ourselves Knowledge grows slowly like a wisdom tooth The stature of a man is still notched high up on a white door From far off, the joyful voice of a trumpet and of a song rolled up like a cat What passes doesn't fall into a void A stoker is still feeding coal into the fire Don't allow the lucid moment to dissolve On a hard dry substance you have to engrave the truth

The heat out there this evening is contained heat like things keep applicable boxes at the ready then subsume their diverging constituent parts long ambivalent talks into midnight, all those glowy Sophia Coppola movies, Prosecco the sexiest records I know. I don’t feel how I know anymore to be more than something seeking my appalling lack of cinematic knowledge, fictive innocence & something like the break-down of those little boxes little tombs put their hands up in front of my mouth there’s a tacitly humiliating eulogy to drown out couldn’t feel much more stupid about feeling stupid over feeling stupid, living. Let me go & watch something moving several images some of them symbolize humility broken postures bloodshot eyes, intimately talking through this publicly I am not developing at all but just the same. So hot outside in the evening heat locking hazy jonquils & sunflowers dead for two weeks, ridiculously mournful as I’ll try & dimly think of the last real shock. I remember disgust perhaps & something like alarm (the phone going off in the middle of the night) pervasive disappointment &, for sure, horror, but shock?, as if the heat were seceding from the frames of its containment thought & feeling & establishing some wonderama ratios & beanpole features quick to surge beyond the human model. I know I do the heat out there this evening will & maybe I should be the one I know who has to stop. If I have to heal myself completely every time before I start I shouldn’t be. I think about the god of demurrment in the world or I think about it later having fallen to its love spell — the heat keeps me shut up at the table in the evening at the laptop arranging each letter with the same affectless love it’s nothing moving Avery born & Vivian to come December Kermit the Frog sings the Ave Maria while the white flag is endlessly lowered & raised through the whole master/slave dialectic forever. Don’t let me be wistful. Let me be the actual heat, forgiven its severity & leaving for the year. Mercy is just like the children’s zoo it’s real weird to think about anything now, think how fucking hard a fucking beach read used to be sewn into its spine delicious words from start to finish I could just lay there & die it’s so goddamn nice in this sigh vitrine real 9/11 kind of midnight Friday midnight, lamely shifting in my chair, the fan that stops the love that moves the world that stops goes out on gold weeks other weeks it just sits in the back. It collects statically. I hate that.

it’s iron, the bottle crouched on its white pedestal, long beak spout and wide open handle you could see starry sky through. Everybody was doing that new stitch, it had spread far west, oh yes, said Mrs. ______ at Knit & Purl, but how many hats can one person wear? I’d like to be more useful—say apprentice to a bung fitter, or make chipped ice, to hit something (not live) on the head, directly, I’ve not yet seen the Rock Wren though I saw a photo of one inserting pebbles in the airflow pipe of a mine, therein to lay its eggs.

An open door says, “Come in.” A shut door says, “Who are you?” Shadows and ghosts go through shut doors. If   a door is shut and you want it shut, why open it? If   a door is open and you want it open, why shut it? Doors forget but only doors know what it is doors forget.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.

so it is death is the condition of infinite form— the rebellion of particulars, ourselves and each thing, even ideas, against that infinitude, is the story of finitude—the dream of the children harvested in a harvester-machine there are the real voice and the voice imagined and both have a reality, but the latter is out of it the ladder of things never accept gifts from the gods —Hesiod’s bitter-sweet sense of it— rings true and doesn’t settle the sea-shore down to where the heart breaks or is bronzed ‘I am happy,’ the man said, ‘because the toad of the morning is the worst thing I’ll find today’ an d CBC’s TV c ritic says, ‘television is the Shakespeare of the 20th century’ red lilies fall on the carpet and Art Tatum, drawing his art out of hymns, wanted more dissonance perfect there are knives in the air all around the poorly loved their lives follow life back into stone and they dream a sweeter consonance at the centre the art of a screaming and demented oyster