i might learn something
from the way i've been...
or might loathe the
girl who used to be
who i am...

i sit right here...
staring at the words...
never imagine
the impact of
forgotten bittersweet part...
the way it struck me then...
how it shake me now...
how familiar the pain
and wonderful it feel...

the stillness of every word
i wrote...
the feelings..
the hatred..
and the blissful journey...
i once vowed
never again to explore...

..................................................................................................

El perro del hortelano ..... the truck farmer's dog gets nothing to eat and won't let others eat either.

The idea is that a market farmer's dog gets veggies for lunch which he hates, but he barks at you if you try to take any for yourself.

..................................................................................................

melior est canis vivus leone mortuo A live dog is better than a dead lion.
Ecclesiastes 9:4 in English KJV.... Greek ..... Hebrew .. .. Latin

..................................................................................................

Die Glocken, die eisernen Hunde der Luft .... the church bells, the iron dogs of the air...... It is a Heine verse on the story book election of a slow-witted emperor : the church bells ring to announce the coronation of a pudding head.

.

.

]]> http://bitchyangel.wordpress.com/?p=163 Sat, 19 Jul 2008 09:05:28 +0000 bitchyangel http://bitchyangel.wordpress.com/?p=163 we can never hold on
to something we feel.
but this hand of yours
locked into mine...
isn't real?

we should know when
to let go, for us
to be able to find
something to hold on to.
must i let go of myself
just to hold on to you?

the heart knows
what it really wants
the heart remembers
each of it's parts.
what is it to remember
when you are half
of my memory?

Sometimes I think that these posts may be a distraction from my main purpose, but on the other hand they do serve to keep me focused. I set self-imposed targets to try and achieve before the next post. Then the very fact that I have published these targets, gives me the added resolve to achieve them, rather than to have to explain my short falls at the following one.

So far this system seems to be working well. On the last post I said I would spend time on poetry, which I had neglected. Here I claim partial success. I have indeed written another poem, but not followed my plan to study more of Mr Fry’s book.

The dilemma now is simply that I am finding that not only do I really enjoy writing poetry, but also that I enjoy writing it my way. I seem to be finding a voice of my own, poetically that is. I have ideas for poems in abundance, but I need to follow my own structure and rhyme, it has to sound right to me, the way I want it to sound.

Sometimes I think that in our struggle to follow all the conventions and golden rules associated with writing both prose and poetry we run the risk of loosing individuality and originality. The very qualities we should be seeking to achieve, the qualities we look for in a new and exiting author ourselves.

Daniel Walters continues his adventures in Dorset with another post and I am playing with another idea for my younger grandchildren, as well as working on another short story.

Aims for this week: 1. To keep up with the work in progress. 2. To return to Mr Fry with an open mind, but not necessarily the intention to change my style. (Yes I think I have one now.)

The Library of Congress has a full page of Ryan resources.

I like this Ryan poem quite a bit. (My source: the poem is online at the Partisan Review. It is from her 2000 collection Say Uncle.) 

Death by Fruit

Kay Ryan

Only the crudest
of the vanitas set
ever thought you had to get
a skull into the picture
whether you needed
its tallowy color
near the grapes or not.
Others, stopping to consider
shapes and textures,
often discovered that
eggs or aubergines
went better, or leeks,
or a plate of string beans.
A skull is so dominant.
It takes so much
bunched up drapery,
such a ponderous
display of ornate cutlery,
just to make it less prominent.
The greatest masters
preferred the subtlest vanitas,
modestly trusting to fruit baskets
to whisper ashes to ashes,
relying on the poignant exactness
of oranges to release
like a citrus mist
the always fresh fact
of how hard we resist
how briefly we’re pleased.

i remember the streets being alive with danger - now all that's left, it seems, are packs of young hyenas who only feed on the weak and wounded. there are no lions on the streets any more - no tigers burning bright - only scavengers. so many young, clean faces - so few scars. i walk past your cute little clubs, with your cute little bands, and feel as if i've wandered into an amusement park, with nothing more frightening than a ferris wheel.

there aren't any young rebels, pioneers, angels, demons, assassins - everyone is in costume, with nothing real to change into afterwards. there is no subculture - there aren't even any weekend warriors, because there isn't a weekend. instead it's casual fridays at the corporate theme park. except even that's meaningless, because nobody has a clue about anything that couldn't be described as casual.

no renegades of style - just young clerics in their hoodied hair shirts, with their long beards, their sandals. young ascetics dressed up like japanese cartoons, their eyes unnaturally large from too much gaming, too much twittering, too much fondling their handhelds. i saw no one dressed to kill - only dressed to blend in. only camouflage. there was no foreground music. only soothing background noises.

sitting here in my friend's apartment writing, i can hear the upstairs neighbors with their windows open fucking, crying weakly out into the night, as if begging for an audience. nobody is out on their stoop here. off the avenue, everything closes at 8 or 9. there aren't even any losers hanging out in the 7-11 parking lot - they've all found someplace to sleep.

the cafe called "insomniacs" is closed, the lights dimmed. false advertising, i think to myself.

the air is gentle, like italian air can be at the right time of year. the trees cluster shyly somewhat like they do in greenwich village - they don't explode like they do in philly or in rome or in cambridge. this place wants so bad to be so many places - it wants to be the little european burg with cafes and canals, with just the right edge of seaminess and red light around the edges; but instead it's just a pedestrian mall.

i just got off the phone with an old, old, old friend even more battered and scarred inside and out than i am, and we agreed that for want of a scene, it's time we did like we did back then, and create one. because did i forget to mention? we did. from scratch.  i'm not going to name any names or places - i'm sure your imagination can fill in the blanks and paint a picture familiar to you.

we are the ones who started the scenes that people talked about long after. it's time to get back to work, i told him; it's time to get out of this goddamned clark kent phone booth and put our superman capes back on.

see you on the street.

Six months ago I wrote this poem. It included every month we'd been together from the Aquarius moon to the Cancer moon and what we'd gone through during each month. I promised to finish it after a time span of six additional months and will start from the Leo moon and start back at Aquarius where our relationship had been born. I love poetry but write it seldom due to an annoying self-critical nature I am currently trying to exorcise out of me.

one-

your clothes, my favorite scent

the water bearer shines down on US

quizically quacky and weird

hearts open wide at this crazy invention

an intervention of love

laughing so hard i can’t breath

living so much i can’t dream

are you really all that you seem?

Happy Birthday, US.

two-

swim with me in this vast ocean

i’m drowning with you in a parking lot

two fish trapped, encircled together

lost, never to be found again

never wanting to be found

twirl, twirl, fall down giggling

i lOve you, i lOve you, i lOve you

three-

play with me and lets begin

a war tonight that never ends

you&me against the world,

two hands that naturally curl

around like vines, pulling you to me to you

an inseperable pair, let

the miserable stare and point their fingers

the joyful can laugh and applaud

neither will effect US

four-

Loss&Gain

stubborn as a bull

lost everything but won’t lose you

lose everything but don’t lose me

gain everything and i’ll still have you

gain everything and you’ll still have me

cry, don’t lie so still

work, don’t toil

patterns breaking, hearts aching

through damnation and fire,

i’d never quit you

five-

quicksilver, mercury

neglect and fury

no voice leaves no choice

no choice leaves US broken

i wish i could be smaller,

maybe i’ll stop trying and let

you take me down, in rubble

and burnt ash on the ground

the end: two lovers holding hands,

making a choice: each other.

six-

Brightest light we’ve ever seen

you&me caught in between

moon mother, and father sun

our emotions swept out from

under the rug

making a trip to the stars and back

home

with you

where i wanted to be all along

your laughter, my favorite song

your tongue, my favorite taste

your smile, my favorite sight

your skin, my favorite sensation

]]> http://dillibilli.wordpress.com/?p=40 Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:31:46 +0000 dillibilli http://dillibilli.wordpress.com/?p=40 The Delhi footpath second-hand book bazaar at Daryaganj is where I go, looking for a literary high. Poetry books are my favourite, and poets, I like to think, friends.

Like the 16^th century Polish bard, some say the greatest Slav poet ever, Jan Kochanowski, who convinced me that our steady desire for wisdom has, as a rule, an abrupt and humiliating end, “Wisdom for me was castles in the air/ I’m hurled, like the rest, from the topmost chair,” and that to express emotions is to “bear humanly the human lot.” I found him sandwiched between two heavy law books on a rainy Monsoon Sunday.

Elsewhere, Israel’s modern poet who died 6 years ago, Yehuda Amichai, popped out of a pile of children's books on a hot and dusty summer day to inform me that “Jerusalem is the Venice of God,” and that:

“God’s fate is now
the fate of trees rocks sun and moon
the ones they stopped worshipping
when they began to believe in God.”

Nearer home Daud Haider, the Bangladeshi poet who was exiled from his country in the 1980s for denouncing corruption and oppression, crawled from under the Lonely Planet travel guide books to say that in Bangladesh “There is revelry around/the palace of dead rulers…”

And now a few months ago I was gifted a pre-Independence edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s “My Boyhood Days” found by a friend looking for architecture books at Daryaganj.

The book is of average palm length, stamped, POEMS with a photograph of the poet at his table and replica of the poet’s signature singing the cover --- Rabindranath Tagore ---- penned in languid yet controlled loops. It’s a second edition, printed in 1943 by Visva Bharati, 2 College Square, Calcutta.. It’s first few pages are inked with the original owner’s stamp: Master Khursheed N Shroff, 3^rd. Fl 141 Mody Street, Fort Bombay.

Does poetry lose its soul when pen is put to paper or letter to print, he asks, adding that he himself would have preferred to have lived in the age of Kalidasa and not the printing presses.

“Here I send you my poems
densely packed in this writing book
like a cage crowded with birds.
The blue space, the infinity around constellations,
through which flocked my verses,
is left outside.

Stars torn from the heart of the night,
and tightly knit into a chain
may fetch a high price
from some jeweler in the suburb of paradise,
but the gods would miss from it the ethereal value
of the divinely undefined.

Imagine a song suddenly flashing up like a flying fish,
from the silent depth of time!
Would you care to catch it in your net
and exhibit it in your glass vessel
among the swarm of captives?

In the expansive epoch of lordly leisure,
the poet read his poems day by day
before his bounteous sovereign,
when the spirit of the printing press was not there
to smear with black dumbness
the background of a resonant leisure,
alive with the natural accompaniment of the irreverent;
when the stanzas were not ranged into
perfect packets of alphabets,
to be silently swallowed.

Alas, the poems which were for the listening ears
are tied today as chained lines of slaves
before their masters of critical eyes, and banished into the greyness of tuneless papers,and those that are kissed by eternity
have lost their way into the publisher’s market.

For it is a desperate age of hurry and hustle
and the lyric muse has to take her journey
to her tryst of hearts
on trams and buses.

I sigh and wish that I had lived
in the golden age of Kalidasa,
that you were, -- but what is the use of
wild and idle wishing?
I am hopelessly born in the age of the
busy printing press, -- a belated Kalidasa,
and you, my love, are utterly modern.”

: )

For reasons not to be stated here, i will just tell you that i wanted to share this poem, dedicated to you years ago. If you come accross this post, that would be a great pleasure if you post a comment.

Here is my poem!

JOYFUL JERRY

Hope induces expectations

Even in case of  desillusion

Over and over again you try

Revelation may be at the end of that path

Riding out storms

Rosebuds will colour your way

Till you reach your aim

You may be Stone cold,

Not for me

Enjoy life Jerry

And never settle on regrets and sorrows

Keep being as strong as a rock

For ever and ever again

Poem by Hortense (Willykean)

Please ask if you want to use this text. That is the least to do

Here a song to give you a joyful day

poem
poesie
poetry

seeing moonlight

Love she imagined

a feeling

of holding hands

spongy

quaggy touch.

Love she felt

butterflies fluttered

on her palm

- a little romance with herself!

Body electrified

watching sea tide

Love she imagined

a feeling

of pulsating moment

twittering

thrilling hug.

Love she felt

sitting on seashore

assaying each tide coming near

- a little romance with herself!

Ear splintered

reciting some smitten poem

Love she imagined

in radiant, angelic

poetic words.

Love she felt in

"                                     "

- blankness, vacuousness

tranquility of sub rosa

where imagination fly blindly

- a perfect romance with herself!

To anyone but myself.

The way it should be?

----------------------------------------------

Pure Haiku is intended to be about nature. From one perspective, this particular Haiku has nothing to do with nature. But from my perspective, it is nothing but nature. I don't know, perhaps I'm just extra melancholy because of the perfect storm that has formed in my life right now.

_{"In a typical week, only 6 percent of children ages nine to thirteen play outside on their own."
from The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger}

Water spills over the edge of a forgotten glass, Left under the tap in excitement.

The dry sky splits and darkness cracks open, light spills over a small boy in a back field-racing across the grass and seeming to stop on his upturned face, he stands as a signpost in the shifting field.

Driving over the nearly flooded river, I imagine that I am the only person for 100 miles.

Stripes of light, seen through the right window, pulse through the trees:

Remind me of your attempts at storytelling, car trips full of half told childhood stories, rich with the impossibility of description, ended with silence.

A boy runs through the back door, unable to answer questions

Eyes screaming colors.