Poetry and Prose

[jacknife]

I am going to use this to post various poems and short prose I have written. Some if it will be new, some of it old. Words are meant to incite feeling, so do share how a piece makes you feel (if anything at all!). And if you think something isn't very good I would like to hear that as well. :)

Thanks! I'll start now with a poem.



What
do you mean to say?
Your words are lost in their subtlety; your meaning shines
And I am adamant to know; on understanding

Slow,
is there nothing left?
The happiness was believable; your eyes were strong
But love is kept and caught alive, only for ransom

The price

Heads are once hung high, and not very likely
Tails tucked despite me
Remind me

When
did you find the truth?
The overture was so deafening; the chorus still
Was not with voice they overwhelmed - with august silence

Yet,
here we both remain
I see your fashioned sincerity - what can I do?
Your words are powerless, but still, your passion binds it

The whole

Meaning made malicious; subtlety empty
Feel the message sent me
Against me

Stop.
Please.

[jacknife]

"When all your life comes halting before you, and your barren dreams scream murder in your ears; will you accept your fate as the man with whom all good things die? Or will you clench your hands still tighter in towels too thin to stop the bleeding, and fill your land still deeper with tears too thick to tread? All is already lost."

[Iris]

Wow. Your words have incredible power. They flow together perfectly, and the emotion in them is clear.

How did it make me feel? Sorrowful. I felt the pain of loss all over again (my boyfriend broke up with me last night). It's so beautifully painful.

Incredible.

[jacknife]

Wow. Your words have incredible power. They flow together perfectly, and the emotion in them is clear.

How did it make me feel? Sorrowful. I felt the pain of loss all over again (my boyfriend broke up with me last night). It's so beautifully painful.

Incredible.
Break ups are such intense experiences. Thank you for the wonderful compliments. Hope you're embracing your current state in a beautiful way - I'm sure you are. :)

[jacknife]

asdf

[jacknife]

"The one who lives through great pain may be made great by it. But what of those who have no sad pasts, who have only inexperience, or who reflect often on how life isn't that bad - indeed, how life isn't really much of anything - how are we to be made great? How may we be mountains when we know only of the Earth, and nothing of the ocean's depth? I submit that those who seek greatness, in the absence of any meaningful struggle, must make themselves great; they must struggle with themselves. In a world where the practical has robbed us of the moral, we must become our own worst enemy; and where evil does not exist and passion is dulled by familiarity, man must find in himself something unfamiliar, something inspiring, something utterly worthy of destruction."

[jacknife]

Writing this one right now, as I post it, pretty stream-of-conscious. I'm in an all-too-familiar mood:


What happens next,
Once you come to the acceptance;
Once you realize the truth?

What happens next,
Once you understand that this is it;
That this is all that will ever be?

What happens next,
Once you see your future,
And know exactly what it brings?

When the day can offer nothing
That you haven't seen before
When the night again bares witness
To the too-familiar scene;
The all-too-human dream
is dying.

And with it go the feelings that you once had hoped to hold
The stupid, splendid visions of a life you'll never know
The delusions.

What happens next,
Once your fate is understood;
But you know you are too weak for even that?

Acceptance.
To quit.
To seek an end.
To refuse to want otherwise.
Weakness.
Emptiness.
Nothing...

Is all that's left inside it
Once the pain, itself, goes on
Accepting is to fail
And to recognize your finished
The truth stands undiminished;
yet, still trying,

You fantasize of tragedy, to make it all seem fair
The truth is you are privileged, but remain too weak and scared.
Your heart.

It's always breaking.

[jacknife]

"Through time, I learned that I would never dance with Dionysus on the toppled corpse of Leviathan; and I cowered, thus, at the fire and steel of Apollo. Not with tales of great struggle and achievement, but with warnings of the worse, and a dry sense of compromise in the face of inevitability, Apollo promises to tame the Beast and avert his anger; saying that we may endure him on behalf of our brothers, or starve him at their expense. Confronted - not with my own pain, but my neighbor's - I wondered what choice I really had, and let Apollo purge me of my will. Now we are steel, too; and fire. And we are ready."

[jacknife]

"The art critic who is disgusted by the "common" man's love for "shallow" entertainment, is but jealous that he cannot feel the same love for the "deepness" of his own."

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

"The madmen hide behind the degradation of our language:
turning torture into “techniques for advanced interrogation,”
slav'ry into “service,”
endless war turned into “hope.”

They walk down roads too often traveled chanting “change,”
calling tyranny “democracy,”
higher taxes “public welfare;”
repression termed as “progress”;
domestic policies of nonsense.

Senseless killing in distant lands termed “national security”;
controlling the movement of free people, “border safety”;
drug prohibition, “humanitarian,”
and an unquestioned conformity to all this bullshit
somehow makes one a “patriot.”

If language had any necessary correlation to reality –
if me calling that a plane, and that a tree, made it so –
than we would truly live in a world without hope.

For the political class has distorted the meanings of words so as to be beyond recognition,
so as to be altogether meaningless.
Thus they take these vague terms,
these rhetorical abstractions,
and exploit them for their own purposes:
calling it oratory brilliance –

and using as their means the destruction of our language
they have, in part, achieved the destruction of our freedom.

Because words are calls to action;
and those who act upon meaningless phrases create a meaningless world,
those who act upon the words of liars
create the liars' world.

Thus I act upon the words of freedom."