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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

The Sky On Repeat

I don't really read poetry; this is an understatement. I don't read poetry, which is odd, because its the sum total of my literary output these days. So where is this inspiration to pen weird little unrhymed verses coming from?- couldn't say, but I have a guess.

I listen to this kind of nonsense on repeat while I drive to places like Seattle and Leavenworth and Utah.


















And then I write something like this.


Firmament

And all the world is metallic and ticking and lit,
Lit when god intended darkness
- June 2009

There above us burns eternal the great map–
All the creatures of the earth and their lives empaneled,
(Deer and hare and dove and groundvole)
Dancing forever that vast turning cirque.
This was our guide,
By its mazes we steered our ships and raised up our towers
And every night we gazed through its windows and beheld the universe.
From those lines in the ensconcing hands of god must our futures have been determined,
For only in his palms was there any surety,
Any wheel returning to the same,
(Riding over mountains beyond mountains…)
Any firmament beneath our feet.

Was there ever such a map and was there ever such a time?
Could we see a path before us any clearer before we lit the night?
It is a marvelous symbol, yes,
Of how I feel I have lost my way,
A lovely consolation that we have sullied some primordial world,
And a ringing cry of helplessness before
The pathless, and the untrodden;
For the wheel loses a piece of itself with every revolution
(You cannot step twice into the same stream)
And all history may be written in such mazes,
But for the doors, the maps, of night
We have no key.


I am not sure I see a connection. I may have posted those purely so I can listen to them without screwing up my iTunes play-count.

2 comments:

  1. Do you often go on long drives?

    I had never actually listened to the lyrics of Paint It Black, strange revelation. Nick Drake's Road is nice. Reminds me of something. Cat Stevens, maybe. These Blackbird Raum people are so raucously fantastic.

    Wherever went your other writing styles? Or have you always been solely poetic? Is your poetry ever spoken before written? Are you methodical about it, or does it happen all at once? What do you plan to do for the rest of your life? Poetry? Are you the sort of person who doesn't plan at all?

    What are your current thoughts on religion? Your opinion of the Who and Quadrophenia?

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    Replies
    1. I end up driving for long periods of time... occupational hazard i suppose.
      Paint it Black came up on an English Folk station on Pandora, so i ordered like this 4 disk best of Rolling Stones thing from the library and it turns out that Paint it Black is the only song of their's that i like (one hit wonder?).
      Blackbird Raum - aren't they!
      Technically i have a couple nonpoetic longer-form writing projecting going, but i have not touched them in almost a year, and no substantial work has been done for about twice that long. there's a weird mythological fantasy epic and an even weirder pacific northwest alternate history kind of thing, I like to think I’ll complete them someday but who knows.
      there is nothing methodological about my poetry. its like taking a crap, you can't force it, you just have to wait for it to happen. i'll be somewhere doing something random and a line will just come to me, and then i'll repeat it to myself and work out a stanza or two just so i don't forget it.
      My plans mostly involve climbing. Poetry is an outlet, its a pressure valve on my less-than-stable mind.
      My current thoughts? I suppose these days I am a pretty devout atheist. Religion is what it is, it can be helpful for some people but any claims it makes to represent an objective reality are necessarily false.
      The Who is ok, not bad but not a group I listen to a lot. I have not heard Quadrophenia.
      These question seem a bit scattered, do I know you?

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