The Poetry Only Thread

[PeterofLoneTree]

(To the tune of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again"):
While going the road to sweet Athy, Haroo, haroo
While going the road to sweet Athy, Haroo, haroo
While going the road to sweet Athy
A stick in my hand a tear in my eye, a doleful damsel I heard cry
Johnny I hardly knew yeh.

With drums and guns and guns and drums, Haroo, Haroo
With drums and guns and guns and drums, Haroo, Haroo
With drums and guns and guns and drums the enemy nearly slew you,
My darling dear you look so queer, Johnny I hardly knew yeh

Where are the legs with which you run haroo, haroo
Where are the legs with which you run haroo, haroo
Where are the legs with which you run
When you went to shoulder a gun, indeed your dancing days are gone
Johnny I hardly knew yeh!

With drums and guns and guns and drums, Haroo, Haroo
With drums and guns and guns and drums, Haroo, Haroo
With drums and guns and guns and drums the enemy nearly slew you,
My darling dear you look so queer, Johnny I hardly knew yeh

You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg haroo, haroo
You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg haroo, haroo
You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg you're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg
You'll have to be put in a bowl to beg
Johnny I hardly knew yeh!

With drums and guns and guns and drums, Haroo, Haroo
With drums and guns and guns and drums, Haroo, Haroo
With drums and guns and guns and drums the enemy nearly slew you,
My darling dear you look so queer, Johnny I hardly knew yeh

I'm happy for to see you home haroo, haroo
I'm happy for to see you home haroo, haroo
I'm happy for to see you home
All from the island of Sullon, so low in the flesh so high in the bone
Johnny I hardly knew yeh!

With drums and guns and guns and drums, Haroo, Haroo
With drums and guns and guns and drums, Haroo, Haroo
With drums and guns and guns and drums the enemy nearly slew you,
My darling dear you look so queer, Johnny I hardly knew yeh

But sad as it is to see you so haroo, haroo,
But sad as it is to see you so haroo, haroo
But sad as it is to see you so
And think of you now as an object of woe, your Peggy'll still keep you on as her beau;
Johnny I hardly knew yeh!

The lyrics to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again", described on the website as "...popular music just before and during the Civil War..." can be found at http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/johnny.htm

[NavnDansk]

http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.ph ... &o=21&part

HYMN OF PRAISE
The Holy Archangel Michael and all the Bodiless Powers of Heaven

Heavenly Commanders,
Who watch over us with great care,
Cover us with your wings,
And shield us with your power.

Armed with the power of God,
Crowned by His glory,
You wield flaming swords,
To cut the demons down.

Swift, swift as rays of light
You soar on the clouds-
The clouds of the air-
Where you do battle for God.

Without fatigue and without sleep
You hover ceaselessly
Over men and created things,
And over countless worlds.

Behold, yours are mighty armies,
Legions virtuous,
And gentle battalions of angels:
And, according to the Creator, our brothers.

Commanders of the might of heaven,
Lead us where we need to go-
To the throne of the Most High
Who created us from nothing.

REFLECTION

Holy Scripture clearly and irrefutably witnesses that angels ceaselessly communicate with this world. The Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church teaches us the names of the seven leaders of the angelic powers: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Salathiel, Jegudiel, and Barachiel (an eighth, Jeremiel, is sometimes included).

[brownzeroed]

The creature in the sky...
Got sucked in a hole,
Now there's a hole in the sky...
And the ground's not cold.
And if the ground's not cold,
Everything is gonna burn.
We'll all take turns.
I'll get mine, too...

--Black Francis; Pixies

INDEED.

[erosoplier]

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.


The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Blake, 1793

[Gouda]

“The United Fruit Co.”

by Pablo Neruda,

When the trumpet sounded
everything was prepared on earth,
and Jehovah gave the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other corporations.
The United Fruit Company
reserved for itself the most juicy
piece, the central coast of my world,
the delicate waist of America.

It rebaptized these countries
Banana Republics,
and over the sleeping dead,
over the unquiet heroes
who won greatness,
liberty, and banners,
it established an opera buffa:
it abolished free will,
gave out imperial crowns,
encouraged envy, attracted
the dictatorship of flies:
Trujillo flies, Tachos flies
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, flies sticky with
submissive blood and marmalade,
drunken flies that buzz over
the tombs of the people,
circus flies, wise flies
expert at tyranny.

With the bloodthirsty flies
came the Fruit Company,
amassed coffee and fruit
in ships which put to sea like
overloaded trays with the treasures
from our sunken lands.

Meanwhile the Indians fall
into the sugared depths of the
harbors and are buried in the
morning mists;
a corpse rolls, a thing without
name, a discarded number,
a bunch of rotten fruit
thrown on the garbage heap.

***

La United Fruit Co.

Cuando sonó la trompeta, estuvo
todo preparado en la tierra,
y Jehova repartió el mundo
a Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, y otras entidades:
la Compañía Frutera Inc.
se reservó lo más jugoso,
la costa central de mi tierra,
la dulce cintura de América.

Bautizó de nuevo sus tierras
como "Repúblicas Bananas,"
y sobre los muertos dormidos,
sobre los héroes inquietos
que conquistaron la grandeza,
la libertad y las banderas,
estableció la ópera bufa:
enajenó los albedríos
regaló coronas de César,
desenvainó la envidia, atrajo
la dictadora de las moscas,
moscas Trujillos, moscas Tachos,
moscas Carías, moscas Martínez,
moscas Ubico, moscas húmedas
de sangre humilde y mermelada,
moscas borrachas que zumban
sobre las tumbas populares,
moscas de circo, sabias moscas
entendidas en tiranía.

Entre las moscas sanguinarias
la Frutera desembarca,
arrasando el café y las frutas,
en sus barcos que deslizaron
como bandejas el tesoro
de nuestras tierras sumergidas.

Mientras tanto, por los abismos
azucarados de los puertos,
caían indios sepultados
en el vapor de la mañana:
un cuerpo rueda, una cosa
sin nombre, un número caído,
un racimo de fruta muerta
derramada en el pudridero.

[FourthBase]

I guess this poem was an "erasure" poem, created by taking pre-existing text and erasing chunks of words. In this case I think the original source was the movie reviews from a single issue of the New Yorker. I've been able to identify a few of the movies, but it speaks to the artist's achievement how hard it is to do so. Hugh, I figured you would enjoy this in particular.

Now Playing

I.

This is a revelation.
The story remains the same.
A young artist tries and says nothing.
The master plot yields to a vortex of images, shifts
In dialogue, changes of angle, unhindered recording --
Brings to fore the speeding detail of decades.
Astonishing the artist, creating canvas:
An already definitive method,
As well as the motives behind it.

II.

Film the summer of 1963 and twist the fall.
Lee's traces of many years' making clear the fated,
Outnumber the curious motion-managing, once hectic.
Sluggish once, the heroes grow painfully alive and stretch:
The tragic there is fine, as the baffled two men
Picture whose downcast gaze and words
Bear testimony to a siege attempt
To promote an agenda badly misplaced.
Here is the most sorrowful lane, hidden.

III.

The attempt to disturb our code takes place.
Panic seems ideal for this time,
Whose minutes are scrutinized.
The fear of being intensifies
Secrets of a dismaying childhood,
A pitiless hangover, some harsh knowledge:
History might be on its own, though
The least of its ending remains,
Wrecker of nerves.


IV.

Lincoln film:
Riding with the woodsman,
Telling his story to a detective.
The film is made and the visuals are rough.
The edges project, nonetheless.
The homemade tone is set.
In the free seventies, a clutch
Of the era's subplots kicks and gags,
Interchangeable for all ages.

V.

Release the intruder,
Inspired by his patient attempts to linger.
Memory is a reclusive countryside,
An uncaring and secretive ailment,
A vault for a black market in impressionistic
Scenes of flowing bodies, hypnotic passing words.
To say little: brooding is itself
A source of images from an early living,
Memory for the idea merely a late attempt
To fuse narrative with what is unrealized.

VI.

In the back, as if he'd been sleeping for decades,
The matted hair returns to the depression which was made.
This time when in the jungle, the ape isn't hurt.
She moves clearly and shifts his weight, Jack restrained.
The moviemaker is the hero, though he receives
Less than the original, dreadful version.
Who comes to like this version more?
Impossible partners in a colored fantasy.
The movie more than stops a skull scene.


VII.

In half or so of the upper-class, "exposition"
Feels impoverished: outsiders born unsuccessful,
Trying a wealthy idiom, falsely manipulated.
The two face off, widely spaced and flattened.
Upper can (calculating a dress unusual...low, smoky)
Voice what explicitly directed the scheme:
Many hands, against better instincts, are blooded.
"Murderer!" (every way via the banks) sings.

VIII.

Despair holiday:
Are they enjoying themselves?
Is to have caught the ghastliness a vacation?

...The technique is dry.
The chronicle of frustrations sinks,
The co-author sparse with nostalgic misadventures.

IX.

A certain archives begins at the killing
Then follows those wrongly suspect of the attack,
Leaving behind pregnant heads-to-hinds in the quest
For well-oiled statistics to drag through, slaying
The scene devised there...Debate over?
The politics of balance; gesturing; grievances.
The assassins leave agonized,
Good range never quite enough.

X.

The pulse in the evidence has none of his to bewitch time.
Retelling may be historical research -- but it floats.
The legend plays captain: John lands in Virginia, falls...
In the body that enshrines the hostilities restored
(And reassigned to John) is the consummation of the blast:
The conversation meandering into place.


XI.

Square-made documentary of the subject --
Their orthodox stories unbroken:
Analytical garbage, forbidden
(Suggest the presuming) to resolve
If provocative enlightenment remains.
Apostates focus on the discourse nonetheless.

XII.

The tentative answers smash that adapted film
And doomed money from transferring
And recapturing the original.
As the impresario plays, the harried bloom --
Lobbing volleys at each other,
No matter how familiar.

XIII.

The material reproduces the original tense.
Outrageously complicated, corrupted:
C.I.A. politics of a large oil firm;
An operative (George), a couple (who lose);
Wind-up terrorists, cynical bureaucrats.
There is the protagonist, killed...
Blown junk abruptly hanging in the air
Hops over the method, makes it impossible
To really see this order fully.
It has a sharp way with many.

XIV.

When the comedy has left, go darkly
In a grotesque mask, with eyes exaggerated.
That murder, when broken-down, soon won't leave alone
If overplayed -- the film has a hypnotic effect.
To fall for each fantasy: life yields,
Juxtaposed with the capture...
To the right, just the right.

- Paul Chandler (after R.B., A.L., D.D., P.K., B.D., and S.L.)

The author is a friend of mine, and interestingly enough this poem was sent to and partly inspired by a poet named Matthew Zapruder, the grandson of Abraham.

[slow_dazzle]

non-Brits might not get the nuances of his dialect. If a dialect can be cool here 'tis:

LWJ

"Tell mi someting

how lang yu really feel

yu coulda keep wi andah heel

wen di trute done reveal

bout how yu grab an steal

bout how mek yu crooked deal"

[slow_dazzle]

WW1 poem.

You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
You can’t believe that British troops "retire"
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses - blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

My late grandfather served in France during WW1. He once told me about walking over a field of dead soldiers. The warning of gas attack was banging mess tins together. The sound would get louder as the soldiers took up the warning call.

[justdrew]

Song of Childhood
By Peter Handke
When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.
When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.
When the child was a child,
it had no opinion about anything,
had no habits,
it often sat cross-legged,
took off running,
had a cowlick in its hair,
and made no faces when photographed.
When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not just an illusion of a world before the world?
Given the facts of evil and people.
does evil really exist?
How can it be that I, who I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, I, who I am,
will no longer be who I am?
When the child was a child,
It choked on spinach, on peas, on rice pudding,
and on steamed cauliflower,
and eats all of those now, and not just because it has to.
When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.
It had visualized a clear image of Paradise,
and now can at most guess,
could not conceive of nothingness,
and shudders today at the thought.
When the child was a child,
It played with enthusiasm,
and, now, has just as much excitement as then,
but only when it concerns its work.
When the child was a child,
It was enough for it to eat an apple, … bread,
And so it is even now.
When the child was a child,
Berries filled its hand as only berries do,
and do even now,
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw,
and do even now,
it had, on every mountaintop,
the longing for a higher mountain yet,
and in every city,
the longing for an even greater city,
and that is still so,
It reached for cherries in topmost branches of trees
with an elation it still has today,
has a shyness in front of strangers,
and has that even now.
It awaited the first snow,
And waits that way even now.
When the child was a child,
It threw a stick like a lance against a tree,
And it quivers there still today.

[wintler2]

Politics, elections
pricks & erections
merging and
converging
on a grey male mafia
called democracy.

-Annie McManus

[§ê¢rꆧ]

(Open your eyes before you die)

We're here because of you - We're here because you were there

We've arrived from every corner of the planet to this nation to seek the fulfillment of a promise of America.

We were promised a better life in our home countries, where we were told that privatizing water and electricity will make things run more efficiently.

Instead the quality remained almost the same and the price was increased until it became an unaffordable luxury.

Some corporations are more efficient than government, but their motivation is not the health or the well being of the people; it's only about profit, everything else: their image, their human resources, their public relations, only exist to protect the reality behind it.

Once upon a time, we were told that nationalization would prevent growth by limiting competition; that our countries were nothing without the companies that invested in us and so they privatized everything.

Everything in our country was owned by people that had no connection to our culture, by those who never had our interests at heart, they didn't care about our survival or well being, they just wanted to turn a profit by raping our land, by exploiting our people, our industry and our resources.

They took everything we built and made it theirs. First by creating racism to justify slavery, building the capital for capitalism, and then when they gave us what they call liberty, everything we had was still owned by them.

Our governments told us that socialism was the real enemy and that we would have freedom, but the foreign powers and corporations were the ones with real freedom; the freedom to take all the wealth generated by our work and our land and gave us only a small percentage of the scraps from the table.

Their lust for power and their greed drove them to betray not only us but themselves and the word of their own God.

(Open your eyes before you die)

And while some used missionaries and donations to off set this abuse, other countries and companies were blatant with their crimes, using war, disease, and sanctions that killed millions.

They supported corrupt governments that were almost like the old slave masters in their oppression of the people, because their loyalty was to those who enable them, restored them and kept them in power, they became the bastard children of American industry, kleptocracy, governments of thievery. They protected the corporations and went to war against their own people to preserve those profits.

The puppet rulers were given billions of US tax dollars to fund civil wars, right wing death squads, execute political dissidents, sympathetic clergy and, even overthrow democratically elected governments.

And so the age of revolution began again; they painted it as godless terrorist versus the free world and the market.

But the free market has never been free, because the market does not regulate itself. It is manipulated like a puppet and it survives because of its image. Destroy the image and the enemy will die.

Such is the same in the rap industry. But the major label super powers treat the underground like the 3rd world. When they need new assets, new artists to prostitute a side-ins and put on a shelf to use their songs.

When they needed new concepts, music and publishing to steal from the producers, they came to the underground, to the 3rd world, they took our culture, our property and our industry and our resources, even using our own people to help them exploit us.

But behind the mask of efficiency, they claimed that we need them to succeed. They're no better than us; they're economic advertising was always a lie, a few got rich but most were given an illusion of wealth, almost as if it was designed for failure.

Opportunity comes at the price of soul and the music, so remember what they are underneath the fancy architecture, glittering rented jewelry, the cars, the IMF loans, the seeds with suicide genes, 20 year contracts and oil bloody money.

Build your defenses my independent brothers and sisters. They’ll stop at nothing to get what they want. They paint the 3rd world (underground) as savage and backward. But the super powers are no less corrupt; they've just learned to disguise it better, ‘cause they fix elections too, they embezzle tax money, they go to war for resources, they fund terrorism for their own benefit, and when there's enough at stake... history's taught us that they'll even assassinate their own president.

-Immortal Technique, Open Your Eyes

[American Dream]

The Way Men Live Is a Lie"

The way men live is a lie.
I say that I get so goddamned sick
Of all these pigs rooting at each other's asses
To get a bloodstained dollar -- Why don't
You stop this senseless horror! this meaningless
Butchery of one another! Why don't you at least
Wash your hands of it!

There is only one truth in the world:
Until we learn to love our neighbor,
there will be no life for anyone.

The man who says, "I don't believe in war,
But after all somebody must protect us" --
Is obviously a fool -- and a liar.
Is this so hard to understand!
That who supports murder, is a murderer?
That who destroys his fellow, destroys himself?

Force cannot be overthrown by force;
To hate any man is to despair of every man:
Evil breeds evil -- the rest is a lie!

There is only one power that can save the world --
And that is the power of our love for all men everywhere.


By Kenneth Patchen, from his book An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air (1945), as reproduced in Collected Poems.

[justdrew]

THE HOUSE OF DUST
A Symphony

By Conrad Aiken


PART I.

I.

The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light.
The trees grow dark: the shadows lean to the east:
And lights wink out through the windows, one by one.
A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night.
Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from the sunken sun.

And the wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
The purple lights leap down the hill before him.
The gorgeous night has begun again.

'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .'
The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,
Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest,
Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.

We hear him and take him among us, like a wind of music,
Like the ghost of a music we have somewhere heard;
We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight,
We pour in a sinister wave, ascend a stair,
With laughter and cry, and word upon murmured word;
We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer
Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .

Good-night! Good-night! Good-night! We go our ways,
The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
We walk, we run, we ride. We turn our faces
To what the eternal evening brings.

Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
We have built a city of towers.

Our hands are light, they are singing with emptiness.
Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours . . .
What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . .
Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . .
And after a while they will fall to dust and rain;
Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands;
And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1246

[justdrew]

But what after all is one night?
A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave.
Night, however, succeeds to night.
The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers.
They lengthen; they darken.
Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness.
The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands.
The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

[justdrew]

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.