Tuesday, December 31, 2013

ROMANTICISM


Only twelve

when words

unlock the dust

making faces

against a raging night


Six hours

of a lyric answer

a touch of strangeness

from vagabond dreams

rolls over the bed


A bright moon

dances in the shade

and my Keats

has fallen asleep

on the whitest sheet

of a burning ode

from the starry Muse

breathing in the unknown

waking from

disappearing vistas

and Medusa's stone.



LAMENTATIONS


Let's blame Aphrodite

when summer surprises

your echoes settle

from breast to breast


The moon is feverish

to lock light in

hoodwinked by fate

the flesh tears at love


Indebted goddess

to an unarmed power

where fruit and music

jumble up paradise


among sleepless blankets

rinds, words ,gardens

tasting elixirs

of good fortune.
EXPECTATIONS

(for Tomas Transtromer)

The trees cold as footsteps

alive as phantoms

of early music

when in amazement

March sky covers dawn

from pale first light

covering lichen and moss fields

after the snow kisses

ungloved hands

once frozen in the sun

and open tundra

of omen and memory

fooling no one

in a vertical dare

near the green sea

between fjords

where house boats tremble

from off the islands

to surface in the thaw

of landscapes

and life jackets

swaying gingerly

in the low crevices

of now forgotten

love notes

since climbing,

tree, caverns, mountains

in woolen socks

pushing your weight

to host beach friends

who visit and play

under the galaxy

of harmonic undertones

of experimental spheres.
We tolerate what we cannot speak of.

An expression of love is always a hidden confession of much more.

Some hope to purchase a bed, a sofa to read on or a pew without paying

the upholstery costs to service it or forgetting the time to sleep on it.

We return to the faith of childhood with a childhood's faith.

Prosperity first signals tourism, a wish to get away.

Liberals enjoy the morning headlines, conservatives the evening news,

believers already have the good news.

Going to the opera is always an aesthetic excuse to head for the stage.

Art tries to rescue the already drawn lover.

Politics is always a sickly mediocre way to power followed by a lover's

excuse to take cover when persuasion deflowers.

Politics, sex and religion manipulate each other.

When the last lover cannot face the music a new lover improvises

on how to score.

Americans are eternal optimists, the Jewish people with their history

of worldly success yet will not turn to pessimism, hence their dilemma.

Today Europe's Jews are caught between the definitive and dhimintude.

Every writer always has a great aunt and dilettante in his life.

Poets are rebels taking up arms even against themselves.

A few men love to worship in truth, a few women worship the truth

to love.

America is dominated by the middle class, the middle -aged and middle

brows.

The formerly religious feel like lost souls.

Disappointed lovers and poets were neither either.

Artists make the zaniest statements on politics, politicians do like-wise

about art.

Opera is for those who combine melodrama of the queen the act of

betrayal of a king, and the vocal music of the Royal courtiers.

Those obsessed with pedigree are close to dogs.

Poets with a handwriting problem, invariably write well.

Epistles are for seekers of truths, lovers compose letters for others, poets

write for themselves.

Oh that novel look of a first lover-take cover!

If life is an accidental birth, no wonder predestination is by faith.

The economic world is divided by those who lose things, and those who

lose everything.

A chin speaks volumes.

Since everyone applied, everyone lost.

Those who usually demand reform, refuse the lessons of their own

 reformation.

Some who spill their seed have forgotten the cool of the garden

Those who constantly sing lyrics about love must learn to refrain and

rehearse with automatic intonation.

It takes only small arms to fire.

Atheists found their own religion.

Religion is divided between Saducees and its seducers.

A middle aged darkness when the church and state ruled in a universal hell.

Some souls find the cross obtrusive, they prefer a to live crosswise.

Music idols are image-bound to their imitative worshippers.

Fascism is an idolatry of pretense, a carnival only to the invited.

A Jewish identity is folly to the nations.

No one is neutral to the history of the Jews.

The artificial are invariably profane.

Maxims are miniscule, aphorisms are life size.






Monday, December 30, 2013

SOIREE


Off Tremont Street

in Jamesian fashion

you hid Remy de Gourmont

in the yellow book

over the veiled portico

as twin cremona's

played Bach's

"Double Concerto"

gents and ladies

eyed Boston

on the card table

Mrs. Gardiner shined

with the Berenson boy

passionate for Ucello, Vermeer

a Venetian ring

hands in her newest sable

and parodying Edward Lear.


You carried a bundle

of expatriate belle lettres,

wine by your elbow

of cold connoisseurs

enjoying the Japanese china

along the bric-a brac wall

admiring the past Whistler

Firbank's last novella,

Pater's Studies,

and a script of Wilde,

you remember the soirees 

and last November's teas

where you read "Child Harold"

in Byronic company

now it's another Fall to Rome

by way of Greece and then home.

MARCEL PROUST'S NIGHT

The snow cannot sleep

outside your lantern windows

as it covers the dusty memory

in the cold sensation

of buried absence

the egg whiteness of your notes

silent along the hedge groves

that amputates all phantasms

until tomorrow's landscape

in your window's eyelids

bandaged with frost

will rekindle daylight.
 








Sunday, December 29, 2013

ROZYCKI EMERGES

Unwinding language

by a Polish drawbridge

being in runaway time

between borders

of enlightenment.
MIKLOS RADNOTI (1909-1944)

Dying for wings

in the stench

of a forced march

plucked from

your homeland's nest

tortured in the hollows

of sleeping snow

by fascism's last droppings

fading in a vapor's memory

in your thin coat

from a country's wounds

punctured by clouds of light.
Conversation offers the highest language marks for education and debate.

Death is always spiritual.

Burning books before people.

Those who dream of immortality are rarely doomed to extinction.

Love exudes secrets and excludes regret.

The desire for love enhances the chances of certain jealousy.

Religion:Habits of force become forces of habits.

Judaism, a people before God, Catholicism, a Church before God,

Protestantism, an individual before God.

Reality keeps you insular, romance keeps you waiting to land.

When success atrophies, you search for trophies.

American religion once had a stockbrokers mentality, today's

ministers are actors, psychiatrists and bureaucrats.

Today childhood in America is neoteric.

Genius is held up by today's parents as a commodity.

Once politicians said "Read my lips" today its "Heed my quips and whips."
Poetry is a calling to the way language acts.

Poetry plays as in Noh for the linguistic actor.

The Muse opens our masks as she asks us to bare truth.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

 A poem should not leave you famished or undernourished but hungry for

another taste.

Poetry makes one forget all other moods and modes.

No gift is as personalized as ourselves.

Today's sleeping beauty is just a tranquilized princess.

After 1789 when you are arrested they call you citizen.

Today public trust is self interest turned into private benefit and profit.

The poet is surrounded with Byronism.

Religion offers dialogue with a future translation.

A poem stands by itself, challenges language,like a watch on a chain,

intricate, perfect, fixed for the right time.

Friday, December 27, 2013

Comics who long for the last laugh often die as half wits.

Today the film media lionizes or cages those whose lines they agree with.

Ennui never is popular on or off stage for long.



Aesthetes focus is on the body of thought.

The arts are subjective, predicated on interpretation of line or voice.

Mediocrity is condemned to live its life undisturbed.

Those who choose others cuisine usually have a miserable waiter as well.

The ill logic of passion sickens every chance of love to be significant.

Our first love is our own undoing, our last is the doing of the other.

Suicides rarely decide to coincide with the uninspired of others.

Life has a cemetery of forgotten lovers and unfounded memory.

Cowardice confounds the beginning and end of sorrows.

Death relieves us while love revives us.

Either we serve our master or a monster.

There is nothing final in a poet's notebook.

Love without eros is uninspired, without caritas it's deaf, withour agape

it is dumbfounded.

The love of change leaves a poor man in his own pauper's lane.

Money as the only value in life doubles as a dishonest friend or honest

enemy.

No poet should imitate a mocking bird.

Insults at an auction bid the first to be sold, the last to be told.

Lies are quickly swallowed, digested and spat out.

Exploitation has the force, face, and farce of a nation's expression.

Fascism has the hooliganism of the moment, the timeless sadism of the

soul.

A poet's conviction is his last sentence.

The habit of work pretends to satisfy our life.

Some are born the betray others or double cross themselves.

The more one claims misfortune and rants about it the chance is that more 

of the others are deceived.

Old enemies in war quickly make a peace treaty with defeated foes but

are never comrades.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

A poem strives by every sound being alive, it must be in heat yet cool, allusive yet illusive, it must affirm and confirm, its images firm yet open as mirages, existential and especial, as our examiner with stamina, personal yet universal with an ability and facile agility, to smile with similes of sense and publish with parts of our own divided fascicle sensibility.

Today's heroes, tomorrow's pharaohs.

Miss Anxiety will not make the society pages.

American evangelists offer us dead seriousness,humor, morality, mortality.

The East Coast is concerned with time, the West Coast with space.

Our nature's are invariably and ably asymmetrical.

Christianity, a God forsaken to a forsaken world.

A poet expects his paradise next to hell.

Fortune offers the lottery of the gods, God confers prosperity.

Escorts play good sports.

Influenced by the Bible, Blake, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Brecht.

Idealism is the haven of the relaxed mind.

Religion may unloose robots, ideology may create useful idiots.

Sometimes nature matures even human ones.

Letter writing formed the first novel; the book marks of a poet.

Some think the gods transcribed the first poet; others subscribe to a scribe for God alone.

There is always a price, sacrifice and advice for betraying a friend.

Sex involves pull and manipulation.

What is sectarian or egalitarian often becomes totalitarian.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

In the Critique of pure reason nothing obviates suffering or cant.

Childhood today is not made up of dreams, but appointments.

The terrors of youth are merely errors of old age.

The death of a poet brings new life to another.

What is romanticized is not yet realized.

To the masses God is left hanging.

How profound it is for humanists to love great liturgical music.

Some wear a cross, have a cross, hide a cross, live and die for the cross; others are merely cross.

Those who sit in the corner usually have first been cornered.

Fascism exhibits the fetishism of fools.

Christmas rush; then a hush.

Persecution of Catholics in Tudor England, of secret Jews in Isabella's Spain, of Protestants in the reign of Mary, of Old Believers in Russia, of minority faiths even in the New World.

We ask nature to be our first teacher, politics to take off our last mask.

Commercialism is the televised picture of advertised capitalism.

No one wants to be an old suit in a open shop.

No theologian saves God his reputation nor to prove our own originality.

After the death of souls in concentration camps, God was still history.

Everyone wants a phenomenal life yet nominal death.

Fascism took all valuables even from themselves.

A wasted life is preferred to a wasted death.

All religion becomes spiritualized.

Only God can outsmart his own.

Monday, December 23, 2013

Poetry appears when language is being deconstructive.

Paul Celan knew his fate in German not in Germany.

American wisdom plays on current folly.

Genius combines old genes with a new genre.

Today's musicians must be soundproof.

Justice inspires an orator, injustice inspires a dictator.

Sects divide, sex multiplies.

Apollo or Dionysus, Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, Bialik or Tchernichovsky,

Proust or Gide, Austen or Eliot.

Everyone wants originals.

Runaway rarely carry mirrors.

Love is always wounded.

Revelation has its God from its seed, revolution plants its roots with
other gods.

Never fall in love, go to the opera, read Shakespeare or publish a line before you are thirty.

What one loves for one lives for.




THE ACCIDENT

       Alice Boland, shortened from Polaski, that ex-Hollywood super star drives her old Cadillac by her forty-year manager Pop Singer who is slightly injured by a sport car driver Ted Kyros, an exchange student from Greece.

       With her green alligator falling out of the right window she begins to pout at Ted .

       "Young man, you almost killed me this night of the night of the re-release of my classic film, made  after the war and shot around here."

        Pop Singer puts out his face and says in a Brooklyn accent, "Everyone looks shot around here."

         Ted looks a bit embarrassed and turns to Alice and Pop.

        "Sorry I didn't see you."

         Alice is in a nervous rage, a tiny wine glass falls from her handbag.

         "Good looker, don't you know that I am Alice Boland, Hollywood's forever young legend. I can hear by the tone of your voice you are not a native."

          "I am Ted from Athens. My parents are exiles left during the military coup and we stayed here; they teach at Berkeley".

         "Well, Theodore, this is Pop Singer my manager came from Brooklyn, his father was from Germany, live in Tulsa, where my last hubby was into oil."

          " You got soaked by it."

           Pop Singer gets out of the car, smooths his grey hair and takes a pill for his heart condition.

           "What do you think of meeting Alice Boland in the flesh, now that you know who I am."

            "Everything is new every day out here."

             Alice tidies herself up in the now broken car mirror as she makes a grand bow.

             "Seeing you almost smashed into me, I'd like to ask a favor from you. I need an escort at the rerelease of my film, "Star Struck." It's the least you could do, Teddie, leave your car in the parking lot. Pop always comes to my rescue and Teddie, you are now here to save the day."

               "Whatever you say... Alice."

               "Isn't Teddie a love."

               Pop Singer in his Tarzan sweatshirt only laughs. Theodore, looking tanned under the hood of his car does not mention his own acting games and takes his chance with Alice, though he thinks the whole episode rather American- bizarre.

Along the highway Alice puts on old blush she found in her garage, gazing through the mirror at Ted and speaks loudly to Pop,

               "Can't you just see the headlines, Pop...Alice Boland seen with a handsome Greek stud, and the story continues, son of professors and famous Greek exiles. You must run something up for me, it may even make "Variety."

                "You havn't been in "Variety" for twenty five years".

                "I was a million dollar star."

                "Until you squandered all the do re mi...like on that heart-shaped pool you bought on swamp land."
             
                "You don't remember Mr. Sadoff discovering  me. How I dreamed and my wishes came true as Miss Oklahoma."
             
               "That's all you ever made."

               "Shut up, Pop, keep driving. This is a miraculous day for my astrological chart. Ted you are doll. What sign are you, honey."

               "Virgo."

               "I get it. I use to do charts at lunch at the defense plant and we all wanted to be stars. Pop if your dad did not come here you'd be in one of those concentration camps."

               "Alice, let me just concentrate on the road."

                "Pop, I'm sorry, you've always rescued me in so many of my life situations. I'm so excited to see Mr. Sadoff again at my reception with all the college boys and girls and to view the new print of my film."

                 "Alice, I don't feel that too well. Too long a ride for me."

                 "That's nothing new. It's just that pace maker that gives you all the trouble."

                  " I have a rapid heart beat."

                  "You're sweating in your  Tarzan tee shirt. Please don't go on me, not tonight."

                  "I took a pill on the road but I still don't fee good."

                  "Stop the car. I'll have Ted drive us. Maybe we can drive Pop somewhere, I don't have the heart to leave him on the highway."

                   "He needs a doctor Alice. He looks sick.  He is out like a light.I will call up an ambulance."

                    "I need help too,Teddy boy. Pop doesn't think he can make it. Here is the ambulance. Pull over, let Pop out, he is a survivor, he's been in worse jams, Pop understands the show must go on. Remember his father lived in Hitler's times."

                      The couple drive away. Ted senses a raw coldness in Alice, but she warms up against him.

                      "I like a big man and a big car."

                      "I'm not that big."

                      "Not now. I don't like men who talk a lot."

                       "Forgive my English."

                       "You' ll do fine. I lost my son Larry somewhere in Asia, he volunteered but he really ran away from me."

                        "I don't like Uncle Sam"

                        "I hope you're no Commie."

                        "We all feel like exiles some time."

                        "You and Pop came over in the same boat. We're all American now but I had to change my daddy's name. It was Polaski. Who can remember. Sadoff pulled all the strings. That the building. Drive up in the front. There are the cameras and the paparazzi."

                           Alice and Theodore arrive to speak to the students before the film showing and Ted recognizes Iris Sadoff who is in his acting seminar.
                         
                           "This is Iris Sadoff, she's in my class."

                           "Looks like Saul. Here he is. Oh Saul. Thanks for the invitation. This is Ted, my escort."

                           "Where is Pop Singer?"

                           "He's indisposed."

                           "I hope you are sober, tonight, Alice. How goes it?"

                           "Since my last husband died and then Larry... I wish you could give me a character part."

                            "Actually I'm looking for a young actor to play opposite Iris. The film is on political intrigue in the Balkans. Ted, are you free this week to take a screen test."

                            "I'm in Iris' class at university."

                            There are a few photographers taking pictures of Iris and Ted after a prompting from Saul Sadoff who walks on the platform and introduces Alice before the film.

                            "I am Alice Boland of "Star Struck". Any questions?   Iris andTed are on the couch Ted will not respond to Alice who is inebriated and  talking irrationally.

                              "I need money for gas. Me, Alice Boland. Imagine!"

                              "But where is Pop Singer."

                              " I will try call him, Saul. Call me. Saul about a future part. I brought some old photos for the film students."

                               "They are no longer star struck."


THE END
Think and drink in solitude.



Poets are sky diving acrobats of God.



A specter is haunting Europe; the inspecter.



Writer- good conversationalists, poor time keepers.



It is silence most souls fear.



Lenin wrote,what is to be done, Jesus, it is finished.



Marx said, you have nothing to lose, Jesus said I am not of this world.



Religion appeals to those without further appeals.



Hitler knew the kind of socialism his marks bought.



While listening to Mozart's Masonic Funeral March,you are in heaven.



A maxim like a commandment begins with definitions,ends in premonitions



If Freud had not lived Oedipus would have.



Religious wisdom, life is a ritual bath.



No Russian winter novelists, no spring, no poets.



Suffering is always remarkable.



The world is made up of short fictions.



Jews are obsessed with life, Catholics with death, all others purgatory.



One cannot develop a poet or a soul.



A poet dreams on extremes.



Loneliness is terminal; joy is eternal.



Geniuses have great aunts or a grande mother.


Sometimes an illness saves a life.


A poor soul hears a coin drop a mile away.


Salieri wrote thirty operas, Mozart, a handful.

















Beware of the slogan,behind it may be a gun.



Beware of final solutions.



We learn from the young and aged, in middle age we teach.



Unlike a statesman's understatement ,only a poet carries his own sentence.



Futurists had a brief future.


The greatest good is not in numbers but for life,anyone who does not believe


it has not possessed it.


Snobbery is the worst form of robbery;it steals from the heart.



Flattery charges its own assault and battery.



The selfless have to be and the selfish want to be.



One always returns to one first love, even if it be hatred.



Poets move at signs as streetwalkers in faces.



Life vindicates like death as it authenticates.



A poet and a saint live by seasoned yet unreasoned signs in life.



We love what we cannot possess, suggestion has everything.



Justice recalls old love or business affairs, war recalls old wounds,


politics, old times, poetry older images.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Proust and Faure, the music of the French tongue.


Russians like their Czars like Americans adore their cars.


Italians are among the most civilized people in a civilization.


Schubert- ethereal yet venereal.


One's double is also in oneself.


Today one can overdress, undress and cross dress in one act of a play.


True religion encourages the mind, false religion is for the mindless.


Few in a dressing room will abandon the mirror.


Not even a poet or outwits his God.


Jealousy preserves more marriages than marriage counselors.


Figures cannot lie, only liars cannot figure.


Sex is overrated, but one wants to know who does the ratings.


Episcopalians are on time, even for God. amiable but not too friendly.


Who was the chairman of the board on the cross.


All saints are neurotics but not all neurotics are saints.


One trades with butchers all day.


The saint lives on his knees,the poet on ironies.


The lower middle class always go for a march.


The philistine ideas of prose; a believable story.


The philistine idea of art, portraits of themselves.


Kant's is the philosopher's Immanuel.
















Seamus Heaney (1939-1913)


Hearing your voice rise

in the evening stillness

at dark green nature's call

at you reading Beowulf,

now you too are translated

on this elusive path

at a proverbial second light.

Even fanatics hate other fanatics


Art is the great humanist religion.


Love is casually mistaken, even for jealousy.


Idleness has the privilege and knowledge of the confined minded.


Magic is always hypnotic in politics.


Graffiti has its own history.


Life is an unfriendly host.


Letter writers create carbon copies of themselves.


Self punishment is never undernourished.


Science diagnosis its own helplessness.


There is no harsh penalty for a bad sentence.


Fascism has an image of being hostage for history, and geography.


Art assimilates while it vindicates.


Today's egalitarians of class, race,gender, religion, age and art may be


secret totalitarians.


Literature may be honest because it is confessional.


War reduces life to a battle of phrases.


Only the speechless are in love.


Jewish actors in their exile play many nationalities in a play.


Look at the library and you will understand the soul.


The cruel ironic paradox of a Jewish origin founding a double crossed


religion or politics on them.


Everyone else is homely.


Social administration in medicine has its own pathology.


Fascism, the populism of the little man.


There is no charity in art.


The punished fear blessing.


When you ask for water, some will give you milk













PERSONALITIES OF THEIR CENTURY


Woody Allen- neither Doestoevsky, Checkov , nor Bergmann yet all Woody.


Hannah Arendt- Germany's Hannah obsessed in life and death with her


Heidegger's Being of beings.


W.H. Auden- the prototype love subject and object our poet's time.


Djuna Barnes- a class act by herself for herself.


Walter Benjamin- The Benjamin in a time of Jacob's trouble.


Leonard Bernstein- A rarely composed Jeremiah with his own jeremiad.


Lenny Bruce- America's first sociologist and black comedy criminologist.


Wm. Buckley- Thought of himself as America's Burke.


Truman Capote- in cold confinement.


Al Capp- the unthinking man's antinellectual.


Castro-  America's first and last Lenin.


Paul Celan-  Memory's brother.


Arthur Chester- invented,lived, loved, and tormented camp.


Churchill- thought himself savoir of Western Civilization.


Hart Crane- America's first underground poet.


TS Eliot- The critic's poet and poet's critic.


Ronald Firbank- the first in the camp.


Freud- makes everyone annoyed.


Frost- America's archetypal poet.


Garbo- Everyone and no one's lover.


Judy Garland- foster mother of forever children.


Stefan George- A wounded aesthetic in a bloody time.


Ginsberg- A post Blakean Beat, a fakir of words.


Paul Goodman- had a literary soul wanting to make a name for himself.


Billy Graham- Protestantism's Paul.


Graham Greene-  A catholic agnostic.


Laurence Harvey-  knew it was all an act.


Heidegger- Philosophy's gravedigger.


Pee Wee Herman- a forgotten avatar of sorts.


Hellman-  All in a name.

 
Hitler- Destroyer of Western Civilization.


Heine, Germany's second son after Goethe.


Henry James- America's King English.


Kafka- a prophet of the world's psychosis.


Kierkegaard- Changed philosophy into religion.


Tony Kushner-  last party to the Cold War.


Lermontov-  The lyrical soul of Russia.


Primo Levi-  The Jewish hemlock taken but not worn out.


C.S. Lewis- A saint of a Christian imagination.


Norman Mailer-  New York's eternal hipster.


Thomas Mann- Germany's man .


The Marx Brothers- class acts.


Golda Meir- Israel's grandmother.


Henry Miller- carved his world in a brown paper bag.


Montale- A modernist after Dante.


Nabokov- America's enfant terrible.


Neruda- A song bird of the America's.


BZ Niditch-  wanted to be a Karl Krauss, without a press of his own


Nin- a novel in herself


O'Connor- Southern ,Gothic and cross.


Orwell- England's great political writer and prophet.


Pascal- Wagered on God.


Pasolini- Anarchism's poet.


Plath- frightened herself into poetry.


Poe- America's Goth poet.


Pope John XX111- A St. Franciscan of his century.


Ezra Pound- A false prophet who thought of himself as the poet.


Johnny Ray- Cry baby for us all.


Rilke- Germany's first and the world's first international poet.


Roosevelt- thought of himself as savior of America.


Bertrand Russell- Usurping judge and jury of his time.


Nelly Sachs- Memory's sister.


Sartre-  At his life's ending searched for a more personal existentialism.


Edith Sitwell-  The mother of all  future language poets.


Susan Sontag-  A metaphoric writer.


Stalin- Ivan the Terrible.


Karl Sterne-  A Jewish psyche with a Catholic mind.


Ungaretti-  Hermetic who saw where fascism lead.


John Updike-Orally sexed, runs like a rabbit about his religious characters.


Gore Vidal- thought of himself as novel,critic and atheist, humanist.


Orson Welles- showed us a Citizen Cain.


H.G. Wells- the prophet of the new age.


Nathaniel West- Thought of himself as an American Dostoyevsky.


Walt Whitman- America's great democratic poet.


George Will-  With God's help could be a Chesterton.


Tennessee Williams- America's poetic and theatrical drama in himself.


William Carlos Williams- the first small press poet.
















 







 












Saturday, December 21, 2013

In literature, politics, art and religion, passion is all.


Today there is instant news, the good news has to wait.


Like a street preacher, a writer has an itinerant career.


Public education covers up private disorders.


A scientist suspects music will outlive him, even an unfinished symphony.


Denial is always an accomplishment.


No one has the last word on sensibility.



Evil shows up when goodness takes time out.

Chess is music composed while being played,chamber music on a math table.

A symphony is math made audible.

The upstanding do not want to be stood up but to have an understanding.

To go between friends is to have a go at an enemy especially as a go between.

A confidence man is always under surveillance.

The trouble with confessional poetry it is does not allow for conversation.

Friday, December 20, 2013

SPECULATION


It was noon on a busy Sunday at the museum when Billy Williams enters the museum, observed now on camera forever.

He was about twenty with a slight build wearing a white golf shirt. He has brown eyes Mr. Fine,the curator recalls.

It was in the Impressionist room with Renoir's "Dance in the Country" when Billy walks up and the painting opens up in its life like portrayal and motion when Billy begins to dance in a street performance together with the couple.The polite crowd is startled to see none of the patinas is damaged nor was time altered.

It happens again upon seeing J.M. Turner's in his"Hannibal in the Alps" when history and geography collided and the art patrons watch Billy Williams" participation in battle.The museum goers take out their own cameras to record the scene.

Billy goes toward the action painter Jackson Pollock "Dark Side of the Moon"and moves on the lunar surface with its beautiful yellow and riotous red colors of meteorite trails.

Mr. Fine's face turns like the color of moon as the guards try unsuccessfully to take Billy away. But the art lovers embrace Billy and will not let him be arrested.

 Psychologists, experts on extra sensory perception, space scientists,and art critics from around the world have as yet no explanation.

Billy takes questions from a news conference and says he cannot for life of him know what accounts for his special relationship to art. He says to us that paintings inhabit and envelope him in internal light and dark seizures like surreal yet human paroxisms.



LONDON BRIDGE


The rain stops in the London home, not far from Oxfordshire, UK.

Sonny, take out the garbage from the kitchen. I told your mother it is better we had a retard than such a playwright genius the Oxford  professors wrote on his examinations. I will have to take it out as a usually do.

"You have no right to enter my room."

Mr. London sweeps the floors with a mop.

"You have half the house. And no girls or queers are welcome. You're just like prince Charles your drunken  brother, thinking you know more than me. At least he teaches classics. Spoiled brats you are because of your ill mother. And the reason she got sick was because of you in childbirth."

"You married her for her fortune."

"It's fortunate for you."

Sonny takes a revolver from the desk.

"No initiative and that professor calling you Shakespeare and telling us you won the Oscar  Wilde prize for drama. I don't want him sleeping around here. And put that revolver away or you'll go through the revolving door yourself."

The door opens and Charles takes the broom.

"There are too many cobwebs here. And it will take more than one Sherlock or Shylock to tell the real truths about us. It may take a decade to publish what Sonny here is writing about you."

"Write on! Reputations are not lost by one young play write."

"Then why do you spy on Sonny, if you are not afraid. You can't sweep us away with the hard drive."

"Do you think London Bridge will fall?"

The revolver goes off from Sonny's hand and Mr. London falls over on the ground.




THE NEST

The scene: Brooklyn, NY 1982

Rose  - the mother
Frank - the father, smokes a pipe
Steve - the son
Lois - Steve's girlfriend
Hank - the other son


Frank - "A regular American League baseball team with only Steve left."

Rose - "Our nest is almost empty; I miss Eugene the most but I know he will return from Cuba."

Frank-   "He drowned they said after the Venceramos brigade harvest."

Steve - "Mom  you know that's true. Reggie his friend ...

Lois - "Boyfriend, Steve let's be honest for once in this house."

Rose -  "Oh radio Havana speaking. What do you know, Lois. You just occupy a working space in our house"

Lois -   Reggie told us some Russian guy objected to their form of romance."

Rose- " That was a set up by the FBI or CIA  for disinformation. Eugene  I named for the socialist presidential candidate and Eugene will be back to vote in the next one. And remember he saved Brenda's life from the Brooklyn Bridge. He was the best swimmer from our nest. Brenda was so young, adorable and impressionable. It was Brenda's only first attempted suicide. And the producer  assured me it was only a publicity stunt and please call her by her Hollywood stage name."

Lois- " He made her change her name but not her ways."

Rose - "I never  ever believe those television reporters; they hated her political stance in what they call  these days the Cold War".

Frank-  "Cold or hot, Brenda's doctor told us she was depressed about not getting any academy awards when her producer fiancee left her saying she couldn't have his child or any other."

Rose-  "Corporate lies..."

Steve-   "At least Brenda visited us and offered to buy you all a house on Long Island."

Rose-  " All my children are good. Hank's play is off Broadway, what a genius, that famous Times theater critic wrote he was a combination of O'Neill and Odets. Here's the article rank framed."

Lois-     " Hank wouldn't give Brenda the lead role."

Rose- "What do you know. You're not family yet even though you wormed yourself in here working at the Big Apple club where you met to harm our youngest boy Steve. You left your father after all he did for you. You aren't his husband yet."

Steve-"That's not true. She's like a partner in the best sense. She works with me on my novels even does some of my typing when not she's not singing in the club".

Rose- She's your typist but not your type. You loved Gwen."

Steve-  That was two years ago..."

Rose-  Not that I need see a ring or ceremony...Brenda didn't get the part... But that wasn't Hank's fault, it was that damned producer who has it in for her, forever. You tried for the part too Lois and you didn't get it. Not even the understudy, Hank's agent told me that on the qt..."

The phone rings

Frank  "It's Hank. He's invited us to see his play Tuesday night."

Rose- " We will all go... but perhaps Lo you are too busy...."

Lois-  "That is our moving day, Steve".

Rose-  "Your father told us Lois you always were moving about town. Your poor father injured his back while moving you back and forth with your sheet music books in your hippie days and had to  move all the way to Florida because of his back."

Lois- "Back that up with proof..."

Rose- " I believe him more than you with all your false pregnancy tests... fooling my Steve so he would leave Gwen"

Steve- "Only a few more days Lois..."

Frank -   "Fire and water, you two... We have a letter from Tanya in Santa Clara. She just published a new progressive children's book she says. She put in her monthly check for us."

Rose-  "Did we get Sara's check yet?"

Frank- " It's not the first of the month yet."

Rose-    "Sara was our problem child joining that Nevada desert teen age cult Children of the Most High when we had to hire that nice de programmer Morris to get her not to believe she was Salome in a past space life and having her own child with that so called Deacon John who screwed her up royally convincing her in that strip club in to do the dance of the Seven Veils."

Frank-  "I told her not to be a runaway but it did no good."

Rose-  "She was only fourteen and she couldn't take all the aggravation about Eugene."

Steve-  " You kept telling us Eugene was coming home every night and Sara was having nightmares so she ran away. "

Lois-     "I can't blame Sara."

The phone rings.

Frank-   "It's Hank's agent. Hank is right on his way because he forget some props in this house."
         
Rose-     " I hope he's eaten before the performance."

Lois-      " What a stage mother!"

Rose-     "You're not on stage nor a mother"                  

The door opens

 Rose-     " Here is a Danish."

Frank-    " He's not playing Hamlet."

Hank-      "Lois, some good news. The understudy got a job in summer stock, and the lead is leaving next week. I know it's late to ask, but you may have the part for the asking."

Lois-         "I'd like the part. Thanks Hank for the script."

Hank-        " Rehearsal is at nine sharp."

Rose-      "But what about your sister Brenda. Though she's in rehab she needs the work. There is no bad publicity, Hank says.

Lois-        " I will do my best."

Frank-       "To be or not to be."    
                     
Rose-         "I've made some strudel for Eugene's birthday today. He will be her  soon. I just can feel it Frank. Can't you sense it. I wish I could find Reggie's phone number."

Lois-           Reggie  passed away. I saw him regularly at the hospice."

Rose-          "I'm sure he and Eugene are best friends. He is so handsome."

Frank          "Whatever you say Rose. Life is a stage even though we're always on the stage of collapse."      



The end

 
Today's writ has no etiquette or even predicate.

Logic is often irresolvable on its own table.

Each religion has its own purification rites and wrongs.

For a writer each achievement leads to a galley proof of bereavement.

Some are emergent in water, others lie in the mud.

No one is successful in religion, always striving from failure from someone of a higher power.

Today predestination is electable.

Our minimalists are minor prophets with their own liturgy and clergy.

Old information is expected news.

In the dissonance of long suffering is our only chance at discovering. 

The quickly edited are soon discredited.

Silence conquers all.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

THE NURSING HOME


SETTING: Vienna, 1941. A day room in a nursing home, which was formerly a convent, and has all its religious trappings

CHARACTERS: Irmgaard

Ursula

A silent Jewish woman

Irmgaard and Ursula sit at one end of the room, a  Jewish woman at the other.


I. " I don't know why they don't take her away like the others. I know she is a Jew."

U. " They say her son got the Iron Cross in the Great War.  But they are so busy to win this one soon for the Fatherland...but they won't forget her. You can be sure. " Sometimes I wonder if this war isn't all about her and her kind."

I.  " She does attend Mass but is silent like the Trappists who lived here. I heard her son who is a doctor cured someone high up in the government. But everything now is rumor."

U. "She never talks. Maybe its all pretense, or the cat has her tongue or it was taken out from her. She could be Italian or Croatian my son said on his way to fight in the East."

I. "She doesn't seem suspicious. I saw her washing the picture of Jesus in the chapel. They tell us God is not Jewish,never was. But in that picture he looks like a Jew."

U. " That's blasphemy, Imgaard.  When she is sick she never complains but it makes me sick thinking about her."

I.   " She always picks up after us. She hardly eats like she's fasting. Maybe she wants to be a nun or like us . Maybe she's half Jewish. I wonder if she is a witch who steals the wafer from communion. I read a book after high school about it in the middle ages...and then they took blood..."

U. "She doesn' t do anything for her appearance... no make up... though they are in a low supply. We must conserve, Fritz my son says until until after the war's victory."

I.  " Maybe she is a deaf mute,  or a spy. She could be a  Vienese Communist or a Gypsy."

U. "I wish she was invisible. I heard a rumor Frau Ursula they were going to clear us out from here. I  can still remember to the day when Hitler was visiting Vienna, and everything was spruced up and he came by in his motorcade some ladies picked up the stones and ate them. They gave out toothbrushes for the Jews to sweep the streets. I confessed to the priest I stole all the rings from my Jewish neighbor and never gave it to the authorities."

I.   "That should be our worst sin. Fritz wanted to kill her, but he was afraid of Father Joseph."

U.   "Is your son Horst coming for the Easter holiday?"

I.    " He is so busy with the law and the police powers."
   
U.  " I hope for God's sake we are safe at least here. But there are so many rumors, like you say. Maybe they will transfer her. Or us, but the East is so cold.  It's all for the God and the Fatherland they say."

       THE END

At the zoo each has its animal own caged magnetism.

Those who adore language often lie with it.

The nostalgic can make others suffer from their memory.

Those who make predictions are at a loss at their own misfortune.

Those who hide their identity really have one.

Moralists rarely like each other.

Some people are in perpetual recovery and still always feel unhealthy.

Some wish to be poets but not live as one.

Good times often hide bad crimes, bad times often hide good people.

Those who act diplomatic are unusually fanatic and full of intrigue.
 Poetry like good pottery does not age.

 Some people spend their long lives planning a short funeral;others spend  their short lives planning a long one.

Poetry like jam is what preserves.

What has killed France; her politicians, England her Empire; Russia, her Empire, Germany; Germany her warring ghosts; what saves them, her poets.

When Russia had her nightmare, America was still a land of dreams.

Artistic ,musical  and religious revivals rival those who are saved.

Jealousy alone brings love and lover to their senses.

Some critics should be confined to their pens.

The metaphysical poets expected to be translated but only to heaven.


Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Life,like Bach is a two part invention.

All comedy comes from Sterne.

Charity is today's way to celebrity.

Every yuppie thought his neighbor was a yuppie.

Socialists have their own definition of class.

Some live to charm ,others charm to live.

Ethnic food is always a poisoned cuisine to the xenophobic.

Today exile and imprisonment assures instant recognition and reward.

An image cannot speak for itself or be drawn for others.

Even loners make boners.
The artificial are always officially profane.

Fascism is a carnival but only to the invited, where everyone has a pretense in his masquerade.

Today America's whiz kids cannot pass any quiz.

Poets are often God's rebels.

No one wants a melancholy child or poet around.

Poets and fools are obsessed with portents of death.

Today our faculties need to be schooled.

No gift we give is as personalized as ourselves .
At one time every child thinks he is adopted.

America's sex symbol is really the auto body.

Narcissism is a mirrored privilege of the body builder.

There is rarely a penalty for today's conviction or even a just sentence.

Art assimilates while it vindicates.

Today post modern life is quickly posthumous while death is postmortem.

Wedlock often means deadlock when love is mistaken.

Only the speechless are in love.

Suffering spares any misunderstanding.

When language or a language is lost so is a people.

Fascism is pretense of people wearing masks, a carnival but only to
the invited.

The artificial are always unofficially profane.

Couples have their own double entendres.

The nostalgia for all forms of socialism is always tinged with romanticism.

Everyone wants originals.

Hell is the sickroom of the impatient.

Few actors abandon the mirror of an outcast.

Only genes cause genius.


Reform emerges before the storm.

The haters of others are poor narrators of themselves.

Anti-semitism is the hypertension of the body politic which is hard to cure.

Those who read cards leave out the Joker.

Art always makes demands on those ministers without portfolios.

The poet needs the sea, the way a politician needs a country crowd, and the religious needs a wilderness.

Art,politics and religion thrive on commentary.

The Jews once belonged to Royalty, the Gentiles to loyalty.

Today art is confessional, politics is professional, and religion is
obsessional.

 Suffering spares misunderstanding.

 Art often rescues us, politics sues us and religion may amuse us.

 Those who want to get down to basics eventually do.
  
  An anti semite can never understand a Jewish joke.

  Jewish self-criticism leads to a national higher criticism.

  Art is a poseur, rarely a gentleman.
 
  The sculptor exhibits his own stature.

  To the sanguine there is no such thing as discipline or sin.
 
  To the phlegmatic, life is problematic.

   Choleric persons make good critics and clerics.
 
   Melancholy marks the folly of a poet and philosopher.
 
   The only just thing worth striving for in life is mercy and the only
   merciful thing worth striving for in life is justice.
    


 

 










Zen poetry is a riddle, even to its adherents.

No one can be neutral to ones believed to be chosen.

Bureaucracy drives us crazy while it makes us lazy.

Fascism combines the mythical, mystical, traditional and irrational, suited
to a state cult, tailored to the occult, deeply coated with the fanatic and colorfully fantastic.

Christianity has a forsaken God.

Only God promised marriage to Israel.

Dread cannot be put to bed.

In art, politics and religion a revisionism is the numinous.

All politics, religions, and sex bite .

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The creative always live lives of calculated miscalculation.

We can get wildly histrionic about history, calmly Platonic about art, and ironic about life.

No one likes to think except someone with a motto.

Abstinence has a penance all its own.

Today children are programmed at birth, type cast in adolescence and dismissed as an individual upon maturity.

Our friends are those who love and understand us and do not bother to analyze us.

Personality determines everything, especially our love affairs. 

Aesthetes love the body of thoughts and the human body as a paradigm of themselves.

Poetry appeared when language itself became its own deconstruction. 

Jazz offers improvisation with notes to spare.
Listening to Mozart's clarinet concerto, only he never fails to delight and move us to a higher plane of existence, like reading the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard we reflect on our own way to a future from our constant but inconsistent existential states of aesthetic experience.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

The persona of the poet often hides the discipline and aesthetic revolutionary spirit which illuminates the outlines of our identity which only the medium of language will reveal in an artistic consciousness.
We awake with blank slate of verse hoping for creativity to blanket me like today's first snow flakes to dawn anonymously.

Snow storms create patterns on our geography and history's variations,expecting ideas like small footprints of a cat in a Sherlock Holmes novel to guide us to a path of a body and soul's discovery.

Some write for themselves,to alleviate their state of mind, imagination, vocation, station in life, for their generation, prosperity, posterity or divinity.


Saturday, December 14, 2013

LES TEMPS MODERNES

Beyond sunny Hanging Gardens
One pardon for the world
while in eternal cities men argue:
Hail Caesar in Palestina,
with legions by the Palatine,
while near a Roman canal
and dying ruins
a poet visits the gods
of Prosperpine, Babylon and the Jew.

The harlot out of Tiber
walks arrayed
in scarlet cloth
while behind her
history flays armies
of the Huns and Visigoths.

A Victrola plays
"Heart to Heart"
the stage is set
for Sarah Bernhardt,
and King Victor reads Savanrola,
royalty mourns its days
without the high priest's roll
the crowned fish heads
like the Baptist in Fiesole.

High culture
packs its bags
in a dozen words
Joyce pens " The Portrait" in Trieste
Eliot pontificates after Browning
on the damned
among Pound's rags.

The guest card names
are now gone
Conrad, Ford and James
lost to friends
of discursive English
from the Holy War of words
eaten slowly in the dish.

And the wine
which communion takes
is consumed
in one critic's earthquake
modernity dies alone
(like modesty)
all art is fake.

Aesthetes wash
none of each other's feet
they have met to quarrel
on the Montparnasse
crowning no laurel
with absinthe in the spas.

The son of man
is kissed twice
on the high brow
through Blakean night
in the dice of his robes
gambled in the available night.

On alabaster chairs
the slaves whisper
they will be master
while in Florence
the talk is of D.H or T.E.
along the roads
a dusty, less noble poverty.

A time without a room
for Babbit and Hulme
who with stick and carrot
await the modern sublime
while Wyndham
proclaims the " New Age"
Yeats relapses
in Blavatsky's tarot
and Auden turns another page.

No one hears
the jazz piano sounds
except loudly in the Savoy
Quarter and Underground
while under Saturn
the poets demand Dante
a return to Latin.

Lenin fools the Utopian
and futurism the Italian
Hitler and Stalin
on mass political platforms
now madly Aesopian,
in the same uniforms
all false hopes
through Spain,Munich
and the Ethiopian.

Children in Rotterdam
along the Kurfurstesdamn
in Amsterdam 8
crucified on a string
along the city proper
the furnaces of affliction
by the Palatinate
the blood of snows
turns to spring.

Hail creator so great
as forced the king
in rain god thunder
to abdicate,
the blood of Abel
cries out on Pilate
Narcissus pisses in the Rhine
cold and frozen
by a mirror stains
a chosen poet shivers
in the Orwellian remains.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Romanticism changes you as a person and a poet each day of its medium with its references to an aesthetic language which recharges your life using your own dynamic surrealistic phonetic powers for a visionary outlook.

When a reader responds to my avant-garde poetry, fiction or plays with any serious attempt at understanding, it recreates my energetic poetic personae anew and contributes to a  more fluid experimental condensation of my language's imagination's freedom.

Long suffering in silence, Emily Dickinson's personal sense of searching for what gives satisfaction to a spiritual void made our world a richer place, the same with Baudelaire, Verlaine, Pasternak, Rilke, Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, all exiles on this earth. 

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Being in New England,poetry opened up for me a literary world of deeply held Emersonian metaphysical resolution rescinding all negative phantoms of my own reserve disclosing my language's power which keeps me a creative being.

Reading Thoreau, the Lowells, Plath, Bishop,Aiken, Sexton, made their own imagist and confessional poetry of local color into a new wave for me, short winded my own complex nature and renewed my mind drawing in the strength of a great if unorthodox tradition.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Today is Rilke's birthday. I wrote a poem about him whom I believe is the
first international poet. He had an angel safety net for the unspoken and a broken heart with clear intensification and insight of a language's unceasing search for the unmasked memory of the ages. We celebrate the marvel of Rilke in the midst of his compelling, remarkable, prolific energy and synergy unfolding in the geography of our spirit.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Favorite music: Mozart, Monteverdi,Bach
Favorite novelists: Flaubert, Proust, Stendahl
Favorite poets : T.S. Eliot, Pasternak, Baudelaire