An Afternoon At The Biograph
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Spinal Tap
The feeling of you pulling
Away is the instant beverage
Reader's Digest experience
Condensed bitters and soda
Version
Of our twenty years.
From the Edinburgh University Companion To Twentieth Century British and American War Literature
I had thought for the last couple years this poem was lost, but using the link in the footnote in the book excerpt I was able to locate the original version that had been on Poets Against The War. That was at a site run by Glenn Butkus, link here: http://bibliosity.blogspot.com/2009/09/artificial-light.html please visit and support people into poetry and ideas and truth and beauty and goodness and...
Artificial Light
Under the sweet desert
the anniversary impulse
is bred into
the soldiers heart...
in time nine beats
for eleven measures
and self disappears
into the Arabian rhythm.
In rhythms and beats the orange
sun rises and violent
its violet edges
say good night
and good morning
to insurgents and surges
of soldiers playing and plying
the dead for mediated
affirmations of each other's
causation.
Under yellow sodium
artificial light
death came.
To each with ecstasy, sadness,
passion and numbness;
To each with pain,
forgiveness,
and hatred.
Two televisions sit facing
each other, transmitting
in different languages, filling
the air with sounds
mixing together,
playing to an ever
deafening crowd.
-Mark Brunke
https://driftwoodforgetting.blogspot.com/2009/10/artificial-light.html
it was a year
It was the best of years
The worst of years
It lent itself easy to paraphrase
Call me Bartleby
Call me anything
People just don't share their feelings
They leave them inside
So they don't catch a burning sun
And get left alive alone for winter
Falling in love and falling apart
Picking up the pieces
In looking we find, but ever
Do we find the missing?
Do we find the missing?
I wish I could see you again
Eyes of sapphire green and pink sleeves
Eating pizza and talking of Michaelangelo
These canned peaches
Were really something
And I'm just left drawing the label
the history of water
Slow lumbering beast
Lurking heart
Hidden beneath winter buffalo grass
Spring beneath the ice
Forming life
For the physical sky
there is a sacred sky
For the physical earth
there is a sacred earth
For the physical love
there is a sacred love
For the physical body
there is clay mixed with water
and you're coated in a second skin
that dries in the sun, a deep red
turns light brown, cracks
and peels, and your naked
and covered in dust, wind
bristles, wearing myth
in eternal return.
With your forefinger of your left hand
you touch your tongue and draw
an eye on your forehead
as the sun rises
and my deep voice, wordless
before your illumination,
is wordless before
your illumination.
For the physical sky
there is a sacred sky
For the physical earth
there is a sacred earth
For the physical love
there is a sacred love
For the physical body
there is clay mixed with water
and you're coated in a second skin
that dries in the sun, a deep red
turns light brown, cracks
and peels, and your naked
and covered in dust, wind
bristles, wearing myth
in eternal return.
With your forefinger of your left hand
you touch your tongue and draw
an eye on your forehead
as the sun rises
and my deep voice, wordless
before your illumination,
is wordless before
your illumination.
I make sad distributions
I make sad distributions
Of property
To feed
Such things
As pieces
I make a hand of musings
For inspiration
She is distant
And it's still
Still the only thing
I can draw paint from
And so I draw
Nothing
That's the evidence
Of something
Of property
To feed
Such things
As pieces
I make a hand of musings
For inspiration
She is distant
And it's still
Still the only thing
I can draw paint from
And so I draw
Nothing
That's the evidence
Of something
ghost dancer giving thanks
Ghost dancer giving thanks walks across
Fish Lake pray past the old Pine
That marks the passage to the place
Where the peacemakers went when they were
Irrelevant
That time in the years, the years right after,
After the famine came, after we began
Giving into reservations.
They gathered in the spirit, the spirit called
Madness, the one that cried for food
As much as freedom, that wondered
Where the buffalo went, what god did
Not let them return, shady skies and
Bodies in a bloodless Earth.
The Starvation of 1884.
a history in short wherein love lies
A history in short wherein love lies:
What was true lays in down, and defeated
I suppose, it was good to be needed.
But then kneaded and falsely given rise,
I left myself often open what for
Appeared as kindness but was just a door.
She exists, a constant performance in
Consistent adornment of consciences
Created to elude her lack of sin,
A future held back by present fences.
I suppose it was good to be needed,
Yet learn asking same to be defeated,
Microcosms of her alcohol rise,
History in short of a love less lies.
The Muses
Terpsichore
The Men-Think
the debris
she left was gathered,
given implication, and
a faction.
A war
on memory,
this war.
Shrapnel,
a word floats
a parade
inside
a bandaged head.
Calliope
The fear is coming back
into particles of light.
Erato
In December light
Simple little glue, blue flies,
eight days to get
straight, I'm
waiting on Tuesday.
We muse upon
their liberty, a ruse
of sovereignty, careless
in our salvation dispenser.
Clio
The noisemakers wandering up
a Persian landscape.
Six thousand one years
back to Zoroaster,
twenty six point four degrees
twisted
against the sun.
Six thousand Year Ones
back to Zoroaster,
and there she stands
by the color TV.
Urania
What half would I have been?
The sphere is coming
back into particles of light.
Polyhymnia
The Mother nurse, she is standing
by the color TV. From
where I am looking,
air is nowhere,
but there is
air in everything.
Euterpe
The head
is a receptacle, the mind
is a wire, listen
and you will figure out
why: There
is where I am from,
and then There is Me,
and then There is Everything.
I heard the egg screaming
the secret name of God.
Melpomene
I am listening
to the desert sea.
The sound is pieces
of conflict sculpted
on transportable
insurance beds.
Half-lives of radiation TV.
I wonder which half I would have been?
Thalia
Where were my welds
and my mounds, my wounds
of Vietnam? Why did Americans
not bring home a poetry
of the mountains
and quiet rivers? Why was it
only the wreckage and Eagles?
It flies under me,
a war
on memory,
This war.
A war on memory,
this war
too will end. The fatherless
will look to the land,
not for a connection
but a conviction, a plea
bargain. They will be
dog bodies of the August moon,
a yield of the American sundown.
Game mercenaries lying crosswise
In the vast stage of history, epitaphs
for opinionated pandering.
Under the empires
their youth will be providence
but limbless, a viral video
easily forgotten
against the lineage of oil sacks
and moneyrooms.
Will they see their own mind, in a prison,
eyes lidless under a forgetting sky?
We are born turning revolutions.
The mirrors give us the illusion
of time as moving forward.
The interruptions in the lineal
system betray the circles we spin
until darkness becomes light,
everywhere, mirrors,
everywhere, the face of God.
And when we become blind,
we live, with our fear,
in the past, or we live
with our fear in the past.
The Men-Think
the debris
she left was gathered,
given implication, and
a faction.
A war
on memory,
this war.
Shrapnel,
a word floats
a parade
inside
a bandaged head.
Calliope
The fear is coming back
into particles of light.
Erato
In December light
Simple little glue, blue flies,
eight days to get
straight, I'm
waiting on Tuesday.
We muse upon
their liberty, a ruse
of sovereignty, careless
in our salvation dispenser.
Clio
The noisemakers wandering up
a Persian landscape.
Six thousand one years
back to Zoroaster,
twenty six point four degrees
twisted
against the sun.
Six thousand Year Ones
back to Zoroaster,
and there she stands
by the color TV.
Urania
What half would I have been?
The sphere is coming
back into particles of light.
Polyhymnia
The Mother nurse, she is standing
by the color TV. From
where I am looking,
air is nowhere,
but there is
air in everything.
Euterpe
The head
is a receptacle, the mind
is a wire, listen
and you will figure out
why: There
is where I am from,
and then There is Me,
and then There is Everything.
I heard the egg screaming
the secret name of God.
Melpomene
I am listening
to the desert sea.
The sound is pieces
of conflict sculpted
on transportable
insurance beds.
Half-lives of radiation TV.
I wonder which half I would have been?
Thalia
Where were my welds
and my mounds, my wounds
of Vietnam? Why did Americans
not bring home a poetry
of the mountains
and quiet rivers? Why was it
only the wreckage and Eagles?
It flies under me,
a war
on memory,
This war.
A war on memory,
this war
too will end. The fatherless
will look to the land,
not for a connection
but a conviction, a plea
bargain. They will be
dog bodies of the August moon,
a yield of the American sundown.
Game mercenaries lying crosswise
In the vast stage of history, epitaphs
for opinionated pandering.
Under the empires
their youth will be providence
but limbless, a viral video
easily forgotten
against the lineage of oil sacks
and moneyrooms.
Will they see their own mind, in a prison,
eyes lidless under a forgetting sky?
We are born turning revolutions.
The mirrors give us the illusion
of time as moving forward.
The interruptions in the lineal
system betray the circles we spin
until darkness becomes light,
everywhere, mirrors,
everywhere, the face of God.
And when we become blind,
we live, with our fear,
in the past, or we live
with our fear in the past.
Moving-On-To-Nothing
Everybody falls in love it's just something
Everybody does
Something everybody knows
Everybody does
Something everybody knows
Everyone feels alone it's just something
Everybody knows
Something everybody does
Everybody knows
Something everybody does
Everyone goes home inside themselves
Everybody is a body that doesn't show
Nothing ever comes of joy
Love leaves you to die alone
Love leaves
Through all the seasons
Falling from a tree made of everything
Everything that came before
Everybody is a body that doesn't show
Nothing ever comes of joy
Love leaves you to die alone
Love leaves
Through all the seasons
Falling from a tree made of everything
Everything that came before
You feed the stardust alone
The years go by, there's nobody home
We end in memories of yesterday
Before moving on to nothing
The years go by, there's nobody home
We end in memories of yesterday
Before moving on to nothing
I Only Know My Love By Few Moments
I only know my love by few moments
Five and ten feet deep. Only memories
In my eyes at night in sleepless arrest,
Replayed as a film, moments of a force
Acting at a distance, flickering scenes
Before me, as my eyes fade and age in
Darkness, the light ever towards night, her eyes.
Few minutes they were, fewer the count yet
When measured in hours, a book of few pages.
Yet read them I do, every breath and word,
Every moment of her, each slow gesture.
Relive then I do, pain in an ever
Increasing distance. Of this loveless day
I can only hope it ends, or I can
Hope.
Life At First Sight Is A Broken Heart
It is
It's broken
The first time I looked across a room
And saw you, the way you moved
And your eyes, and your smile
The things poets have to write about
I saw my future
Falling apart
An edge
Falling apart
An edge
A broken heart
When you touched my elbow
I was shocked to life
And I found I dove
In feather pieces
In feather pieces
Into the future until it became passed
A broken heart at first sight
Everything bypassed
Like a nine month wormhole
You devastate me
A memory like a book of poetry unread
How did I learn your smile?
How did I learn to quit?
When food that begins
How did that become me?
When food that begins
How did that become me?
How do you sit alone
In a crowded room
Unlit in despair?
Those lonely souls who have lingering
Lumbering days, space
Those lonely souls who have lingering
Lumbering days, space
What is love?
I always fall in love, with every beautiful
Thing and then another too, it's a flaw
I know to look for, that if there's love
There must be one more, converging
And coming through the stinging door.
Whenever there is stillness
Thoughts run back to you,
If I say I know how to move on
It was out of fear. I don't even
Know what it means. I've learned.
Love is sometimes a stone mountain,
It may be a thousand different things
At a thousand different times,
But someday you may notice, every
Little once in awhile you may notice,
Beneath that season's grass or the collapsing
Tourist, it's a stone mountain.
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