Poetry archive 1

[Elven Doritos]

On the corner of West 65th and Kissinger Street, you can buy a gun for a couple hundred dollars. I watch from the dirty windowpane of an abandoned Rockefeller warehouse as a pair of misanthropic Peruvian night-owls, dressed like Pinochet but with the guile of Aylwin, deliver nine crates from a beat-up schooner. An inscription on the side of their vessel is faintly visible as they venture into the unknown night. It reads: 'Dictablanda.' If only their hearts were softer than their iron fists.

   Three men with glasses and suits from the Agency arrive. They talk quietly and open the crates, inspecting the goods and nodding to one another. They call each other by name as they dilute the product of all but three of the crates. One Theodore, one Augustus, one Napoleon: 'We are what we need to be,' said one indistinguishable suit to the others. 'Remember that without us, there is no them.' They report back to Julius. What needed to be done has been, and with one crate in stow they vanish into the night.

   A man in a fine suit, probably Armani, strolls onto the dock, flanked by a trio of darkly clad enforcers. 'Ah,' the Armani says, 'the goods are here.' His slicked back hair is graying at the temples, but his subordinates address him as 'Sam.' The enforcers take one crate each, and Sam calls his nephew. A celebration is at hand, and Sam is supplying the fireworks. His empty Armani suit creeps out of the street light. 'Leave the rest for the street rats,' Sam quips.

   Midnight is fast approaching. Twelve blue men and twelve in red approach the product. Their hands extend to spray lethal bits of hateful matter, and the screams of the stars have no bearing on the twinkling parallax of their slavish morality. When the red blood flows into the gutter and the blue remains standing, the five who breathe still take each one crate. Brothers in arms have become compost for a white garden.

   I make my way to West 65th and Kissinger and I ask to speak with Ronald. As it turns out, Ronald has left his gun store to a father and his son. I ask if I can speak with them. The answer is an emphatic 'no,' as they are too occupied with their machine to pay attention to the business. Some men from the church had asked them to work on it, and it was designed to power the homes of businessmen and thieves.
 
   I wish the family business was in better hands, but perhaps when they take a trip to the docks they'll understand.

   Or maybe I should bring the docks to them.

[Elven Doritos]

[spoiler=WARNING, COARSE LANGUAGE]

Look, you just need to understand. You didn't really'"well, that is, I mean to say that I could have BEEN THERE, but you wouldn't look me in the eye. OH MY GOD SHIRLEY IS THAT A NEW PAIR OF SHOES WHERE DID YOU'¦ they say, well, the stock market's a mess, wouldn't bother; look, nigga, ayo, fucking check bounced nigga! I broke up with her yesterday, caught her cheating on LIBERTY MUTUAL SAVINGS, I wonder if she even loves All you need is love. Nah, don't worry about it, I'll see you tomorrow? Vote for Halverson. Oh my god Jason it's been like forever since like I saw you how's Brittney?? What, oh, no, sorry, didn't, uh, sorry'¦ CHRIST COMMANDS YOU TO buy now, for just nine ninety five! Awwwww shit, I love this song! Wait, wait, wait, hold up. I think I heard her say'" uh, was that yesterday, tomorrow, today? Shit, I don't know. Fucking going to the spot tomorrow, can't wait to get blazed up'¦ I don't understand. THE END IS NIGH. Haha, no, no, nothing like that. George Bush can go to hell. Sir, vote Halverson. Who in the hell needs a Bible? Shit no, I just wanted to shut the old man up, jeeeeez my professor sucks. Three thirty, are you serious? Nobody, and I mean NOBODY can drink more than Joe.

Hey, what are you writing down?

[Elven Doritos]

What's in a name?

After all, everything is named. Be it a proper name or just a plain old lowercase name, everyone has one. We're all Joes or Johns or Jacks or Mohammeds or Nbwanes or what have you.

I don't care much for names. Am I a Jack? Or a Jake? How about a Tobias? Why am I not a Gaius Julius Caesar? The people around me name things and name me, and I speak their language for the sole purpose of acceptance.

I'm not a Carlos. I'm not a Steven. I'm not a Hu. I'm not a Vladimir. I don't use names for other people if I can at all avoid it. Because I don't think it's fair to sum up an entire person in one word. I don't think it's just.

Nominatively speaking.

[Elven Doritos]

This will apparently be the dumping grounds for any short snippet of stupid ideas or literary pseudo-experimentation I do for the next couple of days, so bear with me guys.

And feel free to comment.

[Elven Doritos]

[spoiler=ABSOLUTE GIBBERISH]

The pilgrim came to me for advice, I pointed him toward the pool of knowledge. To bathe in it is to immerse yourself in St. Augustine's blood. When I asked you how you were, I didn't mean to demean it, I mean, I meant to be mean. Did I tell you the story of the strange man and the old lady? Together, we'll dance in the twilight street light while watching the white and black knight engage in a fist fight.

Did you think it would be so easy? That's not what I thought of, not what I wish she would have said. Could anything have been more subtle than the disdain you felt toward my stained heart? When is this movie going to be over, I'm bored of monologues.

Yesterday, I spoke with you about tomorrow. Today, I didn't exist. When we all thought I was gone, you surprised him by reminding us of your voice, quiet but terrible with thunder. I thought they said "Yes," but it was secretly a cover-up of a much more sinister plot. Adverbs spilled from the dingy leather pouch you hung on the wall.

I told you, but they told me. Only after telling her what it was could I understand that I wasn't what she thought we were; only together could ideas and people become separated and our hypocrisy could evaporate. Now two midnight bunkers erupt with applause as the clerk and his wife separate for the first time in years. Yes, yes, it's all okay, we don't need a demonstration of your technical skill. Go play a trumpet if you feel like letting Jericho fall.

Is any of this sensible?

Could you please turn down that aggravating whistle that infects my brain?[/spoiler]

[Elven Doritos]

A master and his student were sitting in the monastery, carving statues of Apollo and Artemis from half-hewn stone. When all was finished, the Master spoke in rhyme and rhythm, though the rhyme was in another tongue and the rhythm was hidden beneath the green sands of eternal wisdom, lost on the beachhead of Sophia Heights.

"To what purpose," the student asked, "do we write such poems and brave such heights? Why do you leave the stone unhewn, the statue unchisled? What beauty of the present do you destroy?"

The master set down his chisel and his hammer. "Beauty is a fading transience, a temporary substitute for the happiness within. Outer beauty can be found in all things in all their forms, and it is not our task to shape the things of our world to our liking."

"Should I retrieve the morsels, so that we may eat in celebration?"

"Unless your nourishment is in fact the reflection of our inner turmoil, I am neither eating nor making such."

"But I could build a castle of our grain and oat, a tower of impression and impressiveness."

"On false foundations. Castles corrode as stone and mortar fade to sand, sand along the beachhead of Sophia Heights. Blasted by wind and rain and hateful bits of metal and propelled into the drift of eternal motion."

"Your poetry is murder," the student quipped.

"My prose is treason."

The student nodded. "Your crimes against humanity are the origins of literacy."

"If I had only been a carpenter, rather than a thief. A carpenter's victims never scream."

"The things you had designed would still be the greatest horrors in history."

"To the yew and birch and maple and oak perhaps. The willow is on average an emotional creature, so its sorrow would have been disregarded. But to take the lives of those who cannot speak and to create a home for those who can is better than to take the joys of all and put them to sleep as though a mangy mutt."

"Should not the masses share your plight? Could not your inner struggle propel their minds toward Sophia?"

"These words and thoughts are mindless drivel, dammed against the river of eternal, purified harmony. The thoughtful stream of consciousness."

"I would suppose there is but madness at that river's delta, and ocean in the chaos beyond."

"Chaos and tranquility are often confused, and it depends upon perspective. There is a certain harmony in the fundamental wellspring of element. To return to the ocean's floor is to discover life's silt-covered start."

"And the cycle of passive-agressive evolutionary fury and tidal destruction begins again?"

"Hardly passive, and nearly passionless."

"Then you should put these thoughts to string and chord, to lyre and song."

"Were that rhythms and rhymes were as kind as the gentle caress of a muse's fingertaps along my scalp! Would I conform to meter, tapping my feet to a hidden pathway to which these thoughts could abide?"

"You could allude to its purpose. Call it for what it is: philosophy as art."

"I will have resigned my destiny to the captive audience of strings and horns, the blaring anger of the lyre and flute. For now I shall keep my thoughts and writings separate, as though two squabbling children who fight for my attention."

[Elven Doritos]

This started out as prose, but ended up in poetic form. I decided to post it here.

The night I met Sophia, I was far from sober
I think still of how I'd feel had I the chance to know her.

Drunk of the heart and of the mind, to mention not the liver,
 I stood and spoke and laughed and joked to strangers holding mirrors.
Their eyes, their masks, their hateful strands of whimsy known to few'"
such are the facts of tasteless tracts said toward my view.

The words and deeds and thoughtless pranks of my false peers of age
soon seemed to fade from this parade of lustful angst and rage.
The dead air's night and willful fright took naught but some to bed
as mist and moon and midnight gloom brought visions to my head.

The grove, the grave, that erstwhile slave, my friend quite prone to fancy
stood yet aside the twilight stride, its glow and life entrancing.
Enter did I into that realm of dead and mournful song,
interred inside was all I knew of life and love withdrawn.

And as I stood along the stone that marked my mother's home,
the mist and moon and midnight swooned and offered up a throne.
Seated there, in autumn's air, I heard the wispy whiskered call,
and sleep and sweep along the streets did death's embroidered shawl.

'Come now,' said she, her hand outreached, her eyes and spirit loosed.
'Who, me?' said I, my eyes enticed, her deathly glow a truce.
With little left to wonder, I moved to make demands;
with wisdom, whips, and winsome wish instead I shook her hand.

Sophia, she speaks in volumes; her hand is the concernéd touch,
but my drunk ears, my useless peers, could not discern much.
I sat with spite as snow and ice began to tumble down,
report did I the record thy sightless eyes do sound.

My words were minced, my heart was torn, my conscious cast aside;
for all I knew and all I was, from her could not I hide.

[Hibou]

I'm reminded a little of Poe in the last one.

[Elven Doritos]

I'm reminded a little of Poe in the last one.

I was reminded a little of Poe when writing it.

[Elven Doritos]

Don't really like how this one turned out. Poem.

Walk on down to Blue Street
At a quarter past three past five
You'll meet old Mister Princely
He's got a pair of wooden eyes.

You'll see the scene
Where I have been
Which I will now describe
I miss the midst of Mister Fisk
But now I am your scribe.

The jester saunters in
With the swagger of a king
You'll laugh once and again
But that ain't what he means.

The joke's on you
At least to him
And that is what he'd say
And as he laughs, he'd steal your hat
With the quickness of a snake.

The barber and his neighbor
In the dress-coats of the dance
Walk into Mister Princely's
And proceed to shake his hand.

When all is said
And all is done
You look twice at their names
You see their slate is red with hate
And their minds are turned to blanks.

Now I ask you, stranger
From the bottommost wells of truth
Could not the path of Blue Street
Hold the potions that could sooth?

If all is sold
And all is gone
Would hope still yet remain?
I feel it's true, this avenue
Is all that's left in vain.

[Elven Doritos]

This one is slightly inflammatory. Just a warning. The easily offended should stray away.

It seems like the entire world is being devoured by the greedy mouth of Cronus, who wishes to share neither his love nor his wealth with the offspring he has spawned. The derelict father of a generation will gleefully fill his belly with our future misery.

We don't need a Zeus. Kill the father and become the tyrant? The lamentable fate of all such kings, and Caesar's sword testifies as such.

We don't need a Lenin. For ailing intellectuals, their hearts misplaced, will give way to brutish thugs with hammer and sickle brandished in hate.

We don't need a Jesus. The thoughts and beliefs of our people need more than radical reimagining, they need to be stripped away and structured again.

We don't need an Emerson. To stand aside and seclude oneself, to withdraw and write and mind your mind'" the conceit of the collective self and the genius link to it is not to be celebrated.

What do we need? Bush wanted to reach Mars. The dusty red Roman god of war. The irony is astounding.

What do we need? Smiles and glitter replace thoughts and beliefs. We talk about the superficial connections when we need to talk about what matters.

What do we need? I drink the black bile of the Earth's crust, it fuels my life. I will make Gaia weep with blood until I, the dread vampire of the human race, have killed her with my arrogance.

All things must pass. Life is the transient expression of an immutable vibrancy; my atoms are borrowed from canyons, gasses, stars and unknown parts. We are the self-aware universe, the wrinkle in thought connected to all things. And when I pass, bury me beneath the willow tree, for there I shall become immortal.

I want to go to sleep and wait for this to end. I so desperately wish for all to be replaced with a deathly void of the unknown night and shadow, the comforting embrace of nothingness.

But I know that sooner or later, I would have to wake up.

[Elven Doritos]

Those familiar with Walt Whitman might appreciate this or hate it.

When I heard the learn'd English teacher;
When the themes, the essays, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the prose and metaphors, to see, dissect, and ruin them;
When I, sitting, heard the English teacher, when she lectured with such self-cause in conjectured form,
How soon, insurmountable, I became bored and sick;
Till hiding and sidling out, I wonder'd off to myself,
In a cynical choice right there, and from line to line,
Look'd down in perfect silence at the book.

[Elven Doritos]

My life is a deck of cards
I feel like shuffling them
And maybe after rearranging them upon the table
Their order unimportant
I'll draw a new hand from the deck

[Elven Doritos]

Have you ever stared into the violet eyes of an unapologetic paradox?

Have you ever stood on an azure mountaintop, breathing sweet caramel air?

Have you ever smelled a flower so yellow it tasted green?

Have you ever felt the sound of laughter scraping slowly across your scalp?

Have you ever heard a sour apple?

[Elven Doritos]

I'll let this one speak for itself.

It was an odd and sunny Monday when the chancellor made his speech
While JFK and Ronald Reagan barked up a tree
I walked down from the docks and I held my head up high
I had yet to learn that this would be my day to die

I waited at the street light, when it said stop then I would go
And at the old folks' home I picked up Edgar Allen Poe
'Take me to the bar,' he said with quite a thrill
So I revved up my car and we drove down to Bunker Hill

As we ordered drinks I noticed there was trouble there
As two men in minks came in with uncombed hair
One said his name was Ralph and the other's name was Henry
But I knew as soon as they walked in that they would apprehend me

So I took a cue from my old friend, the Kentucky Colonel
And I jumped behind the frying pan as if it were a hurdle
And as the two argued among themselves about their garden
I ran across the marketplace looking to buy a pardon

The lecher and the pauper were eyeing me strangely
As an old and younger couple were trying to buy a baby
I took out my fireworks and lit off quite the fuse
And when they let me lead the band I had to refuse

I decided then that I would go to see the sights of Paris
But the Hilton there was closed so I just crawled upon the terrace
The king and queen stood all alone, sipping on their wine
And I tumbled down to be their clown and tell them all was fine

The jester did not like that, so he moved to kick me out
But I just tipped my hat to him as I hopped upon a trout
The sudden call of sea-bound hauls then burst upon my soul
So I communed with nature and changed my name then to Thoreau

But soon as I had done that, a soldier took me by the arm
And told me that I had to go save the countryside from harm
So I hopped into the marching order of the ants and bugs
But they led me to a spider-hole where I was given handsome hugs

I kicked my feet and jumped right back up into the melee
When suddenly I learned that I could turn night into day
So I slipped and slept until the sun and moon had switched around
And I let my life expire so that a new one could be found.