Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Ascent

into newness
or return to formerness,
with a twist;

from charged brown hominids,
some having orangey fur
bubbling like whitewater brooks
with magic-8-ball eyes -
scorn or desire;

from tough roads, jungle trees,
an island of effluent not affluence
food not polystyrene
service not manufacture
haggle not hustle;

from water clear as floating plastic
with a fulfilled destiny
lacking destination;

from thunderous motorcycle crashes,
loud and harmless,
idiots abroad facing
adventure not danger,
sunburned in a hot spring,
then painless goodbyes
with liked ones;

from foggy horizons,
bubbling ashen brews
viscous green goos,
easing down mountainsides
like goats
high on Bob Marley
and his kaya philosophy;

into Big Booming cities

of magazines, expensive cigarettes,
sweet sin and egotism,
books of great magnitude,
where newspaper salesmen
would fly but for the time -
so much pornography left to sell;

into newness:
the sweet, the stale,
the curvaceous, the limp,
the shaking, the et cetera
of this vast living’s
eternal march.

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Comments:
It's not easy for a journaliast to write poetry. Organization always sems to trump essence.
 
Who is that comment coming from? Can you be more specific/constructive in your feedback here? I'm open to it.
 
Actually, I don't even try to write poetry. I don't have the patience to learn it (and thus develop any talent for it).

I am kinda curious about Anonymous' comment, though. Seems to me there's always more than one way to be a poet, just as there are many different kinds of poets.

Forgive me, but it's just that I've always been rather skeptical when it comes to purists.
 
Vague criticism is no criticism.

You moving house?
 
Having been a journalist, I am,uh, smitten by Anonymous' comment.

I guess it's my final realization that journalism is a business, and what a business it was and is.

It has led me to monkey busines,disguising short stories as editorials.
How else to sneak into the mass media?
Norman Mailer used to say, "Get a job in the mass media and subvert from within. :)
 
X: As a rule I agree with you about purists. Poetry wouldn't exist if we were all purists; nor would jazz or hip hop. Yet I think there's probably a useful, more specific critique of this poem in Anon's comment. I just wish s/he'd been clearer.

Toast: Naw, this was written in 2000 on a plan home from Indonesia - Jakarta to Toronto that is.

Ivan: Does that advice still work? In Mailer's day the mass media still had length, bulk and analysis. Now it's 3-400 word fact lists about recent crimes, deaths and factory closures. How do you even subvert that?
 
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