cummings foreword

 ee cummings, foreword to is 5

On the assumption that my technique is either complicated or original or both, the publishers have politely requested me to write an introduction to this book.

At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer. of burlesk, viz., 'Would you hit a woman with a child?-No, I'd hit her with a brick.' Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little-somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions, the Making obsession has disadvantages; for instance, my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately, however, I should prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my 'poems' are competing.

They are also competing with each other, with elephants, and with El Greco.

Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives a poet one priceless advantage: whereas nonmakers must content themselves with the merely undeniable fact that two times two is four, he rejoices in a purely irresistible truth (to be found, in abbreviated costume, upon the title page of the present volume).

so you want to be a writer

video

I started a poem.

 
 the:

deserted carousels, intestines
of video, wide ribboned eyes waiting for
an unravelling,
the spinning
hoo
     la hoo
              ps round&round
the garden like faded teddies memory attempted
to recreate

re
  creation
             al
               playground
to spin the image out&out


I broke this video with a blunt knife.

It bled on the sofa and now it's red.

Collect the drugged eyes of movies
 be
    for
         e they
                 we
                      ave
                           their pictures.

We don't come for the pictures.
Life for memory and ornament,
round&round death cutting straight on its motor-
bike:

 I finished a poem.

picture phase continues

Salvador Dali's Credo

Credo by Jack Kerouac

 Yes, more Kerouac.

Credo by Jack Kerouac

Remember above all things, Kid, that to write is not difficult, not painful, that it comes out of you with ease, that you can whip up a little tale in no time, that when you are sincere about it, that when you want to impress a truth, it is not difficult, not painful, but easy, graceful, full of smooth power, as if you were a writing machine with a store of literature that is boundless, enormous, endless, and rich. For it is true; this is so. Do not forget it in your gloomier moments. Make your stuff warm, drive it home American-wise, don't mind critics, don't mind the stuffy academic theses of scholars, they don't know what they're taking about, they're way of the track, they're cold; you're warm, you're red hot, you can write all day, you know what you know, like Halper; you remember that, Kid, and when you feel as if you cannot write, as if it is no use, as if life is no good, read this over and realize that you can do a lot of good in this world by turning out truths like these, by spreading warmth, by trying to preach living for life's sake, not the intellectual way, but the warm way, the way of love, the way which says: Brothers, I greet you with open arms, I accept your frailties, I offer you my frailties, let us gather and run the gamut of rich human existence. Remember, Kid, the ease, the grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember it, never forget. Remember passion. Do not forget, do not forsake, do not forget. It is there, the order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos, only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness.....Kid, you can whip up a little tale, a little truth, you can mop up the floor with a little tale in no time; it is a cinch, you are the flow of smooth thrumming power, you are a writer, and you can turn out some mean stuff, and you will turn out tons of it, because it is you, and do not forget it, Kid, do not forget it; please, please Kid, do not forget yourself; save that, save that, preserve yourself; turn out those mean little old tales by the dozens, it is easy, it is grace, do it American-wise, drive it home, sell truth, for it needs to be sold. Remember, Kid, what I say to you tonight; never forget it, read this over in your gloomier moments and never, never forget.....never, never, never forget.....please, please, Kid please…

The Foxhole Manifesto

Belief & Technique For Modern Prose-- List of Essentials

JACK KEROUAC   BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
LIST OF ESSENTIALS

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. Youre a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

                                                                                                As ever,
                                                                                                        Jack

Antipodal Dwelling by Aimé Césaire

Crucible in which is born the world hair humus of the first earth

hair first worry stone

when the rain shall be the thread with which bit by bit the world undoes itself

when the sun shall be a spider in which to lose ourselves one by one

when the sea shall be an octopus to spit our hopes at us in our faces

when the moon shall uncoil and will unroll for us its long serpent body

when the volcano shall shake its wrinkled pachyderm body

when the wind shall no longer blow because we have forgotten to strike the wind stones

when the stones shall cease to speak for having preached too much in the desert

(entangling my veins an entire forest down to its lowest branches

entangling my veins completely the water and the regime of faithful fires

entangling that from the bottom shall dash waterlilies in my face and my blood

of redemption and my shoulders slipping better than any knots

entangling

a drop of water in the precious alembic of water tables that shall go to the window and
cry out in Esperanto that the weather is fine poorly heard by the volutes scored by our bitterest spit)

a drop of fire in the throat without risk of wind

firefly and water I shall assemble myself in little drops of water of fire too beautiful for any other architect

dwelling made of water glimpsed upon waking

dwelling made of rumpled perfumes

dwelling made of spangled sleep

dwelling made of swelled chests stretched out of benumbed lizards

strength lines me up on the shadowless meridian

pythons crews of catastrophes unnatural brothers of my longitude

roads raise themselves to the height of green-eyed female gnomes intersected with

prayers taking aim at us on the footbridge of the malfunctioning compass sky

dwelling made of a laying-on of palms of hands

dwelling made of red cheetah eyes

dwelling made of a rain of shells of sand

the revolver shots give me a halo too vast this time for my head which arrives via portage in spare parts

In a Grove by Philip Lamantia

Ulysses on water

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

– from Ulysses, Chapter 17

born.

Clearing out my desktop, I found a short poem and remembered I haven't been posting here enough.
Translations from Polish:
o boże boli= oh god it hurts
kwiatuszki= flowers in a sweet way, something like "little flowers"
tuśki= the way I'd say kwiatuszki when I was small :P

There are also references to a Polish poem about the soldiers of Westerplatte, and though the translation is really bad, at least you'll understand this poem better.

Oh god explaining is as long as the poem itself. Anyway, here it is:
___________

born out of o boże boli and sunlight whipping up the air.
born here and not there.
behind the walls they sing the song of the soldiers
of westerplatte.
but it is not summer, and there are no flowers;
only the memory of how I'd say kwiatuszki, tuśki, and throw them
above my head,
giving birth to a completely new gesture.
but sometimes I doubt there was any birth, ever.
soil is eternal, ever-present, bitter and smiling.

bbc (again!): man drowns rescuing two children

man drowns rescuing two children

How the sea's lullaby rocks the rubber ring,
and every wave speaks the universal language
of tide, of force, of the feminine:
shhhh for she and seducing the moon.
But children are no moon. They are bodies
in a ring, the ring is rubber, is a ring because of its hole.

He also has a hole in him now.
Death could be a hole in which there is no air.
Dying could be slow elimination,
like water disappearing from the beach,
like the moon smiling at his lover
and kissing her goodnight.

bbc: thousands take part in 10km run

I haven't done my whole bbc thing for ages, though I was so excited about it. My excuse is travel, but I laze around so much (watching eurovision, for example) that it's not a real reason at all. Anyway, I'm in a good poetry mood today, so I'll share my good mood and bad poetry with everyone else <3

thousands take part in 10km run

the run of the sole
the run of the soul
the run of the lung that ties you to your breath
until it's lost in a plethora of air
the run of a shoe pointing east
because heading east is shoe factories not money
only when you head too far
you bump into the statue of liberty which is a
stone symbolising standing

this is why i'm on the run, you're on it, and the road

the philosophy obsession.

 BBC day 2 and I'm reading philosophy.


no breakthrough in greek talks


oh plato poor plato banging his elbows against the table spilling the soup
nobody wants to discuss this there there
what of the utopian country on which the philosopher is throned
now he asks as he bangs and there is euro falling from the sky
how strong the soul can be

but you know money is more than an idea
beneath the toga
it throbs

new stuff new stuff

NaPo came and went. I didn't care too much; now I have more of a challenge facing me. My friend from youngwritersonline.net and I decided to write a poem or so a day inspired by headlines from the almighty BBC. Here is yesterday in poetry:

mexico police find bodies in bags

A list of art (definition: asphalt, on other wavelengths- headlines):

49 bodies 49 nouns
110 miles (180 kilometers) 110 verbs (180 irregular)
04:00 local time 12:00 time of the muse
18 people in 2 abandoned vehicles 18 words in 2 stanzas
35 corpses in Veracruz 35 rhymes in a masterpiece
26 corpses in Guadalajara 26 similes in Poemcity
47,000 people killed in 6 years 47,000 commas vanquished by 6 poets
1 me reading 1 me writing

nepal's mystery language on the verge of extinction

To fall out of a language like a myap at night.
Even the frogs have their hymns after darkness steps in.
Silence is guiltiest of all. Bells remind of sin.
A woman is trying to break the chair she is sitting on
to get rid of the voice, and the voice follows the creak
of wood, a full sentence like a stomach overflowing with plums.
Your language expresses your guilt
while a confessional takes it, hand-washes and hangs
on a metaphysical line until it's bleached.

What if the moon spoke to you, child of the myap?
What if you are the moon, dying, as the chair creaks?

rise and fall of underwater volcano revealed

there are uprisings and there are falls
there are rainbow lollies melting in sun
heat always makes the headlines
the pacific also feels like fame

the mountains of underworld
have special cores for reciting poetry
that advertise once in a while
but art is drying up
and hades is snoring

his sheets violent waves
sweeping us off the mattress of the world

Bilingual/Bilingüe- Rhina P. Espaillat

My father liked them separate, one there,

one here (allá y aquí), as if aware

that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart

(el corazón) and lock the alien part

to what he was—his memory, his name

(su nombre)—with a key he could not claim.

“English outside this door, Spanish inside,”

he said, “y basta.” But who can divide

the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from

any child? I knew how to be dumb

and stubborn (testaruda); late, in bed,

I hoarded secret syllables I read

until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run

where his stumbled. And still the heart was one.

I like to think he knew that, even when,

proud (orgulloso) of his daughter’s pen,

he stood outside mis versos, half in fear

of words he loved but wanted not to hear.

Across a Great Wilderness without You - Keetje Kuipers

The deer come out in the evening.

God bless them for not judging me,

I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe

and make strange noises at them—
                                                  language,

if language can be a kind of crying.

The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow,

each bullet hole suffused with moon,

like the platinum thread beyond them

where the river runs the length of the valley.

That's where the fish are.

                                   Tomorrow

I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled

stone beneath the bank, their bodies

desperately alive when I hold them in my hands,

the way prayers become more hopeless

when uttered aloud.

                            The phone's disconnected.

Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you:

I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm

over my bed. It's the sound of them

shouldering against each other that terrifies me,

as if it might hurt to brush across another being's

living flesh.

                But I carry a gun now. I've cut down

a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town—

my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools

I've retired from their life of touching you.

excuses no.2

I'm continuing NaPo. I think. Thing is, I got caught up in numbers. I would write every day not even for the sake of writing something, but being able to tell myself that I wrote something. I hope the difference is clear. I want to write poetry and care about every word, not the number beside the title, day one, day two, day three. I want to write a poem, a real poem, every day until September. After exams and a camp, in a few weeks, I'll be free to actually think about poetry, to put myself into it. For now, I'll stay with the routine and hide the effects of doing so. I might post some poems I love so this doesn't get too abandoned too quickly. See you lovelies.

The Strength of Fields- James Dickey

... a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power and a life-enhancing return ...

Van Gennep: Rites de Passage

Moth-force a small town always has,   

          Given the night.

                                           What field-forms can be,

         Outlying the small civic light-decisions over

               A man walking near home?

                                                         Men are not where he is   

      Exactly now, but they are around him    around him like the strength

Of fields.    The solar system floats on

    Above him in town-moths.

                                             Tell me, train-sound,

    With all your long-lost grief,

                                             what I can give.   

    Dear Lord of all the fields

                                             what am I going to do?

                                        Street-lights, blue-force and frail

As the homes of men, tell me how to do it    how

    To withdraw    how to penetrate and find the source   

      Of the power you always had

                                             light as a moth, and rising

       With the level and moonlit expansion

    Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men.

       You?    I?    What difference is there?    We can all be saved

       By a secret blooming. Now as I walk

The night    and you walk with me    we know simplicity   

   Is close to the source that sleeping men

       Search for in their home-deep beds.

       We know that the sun is away    we know that the sun can be conquered   

   By moths, in blue home-town air.

          The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under

The pastures.    They look on and help.    Tell me, freight-train,

                            When there is no one else

   To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea

         Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,

          Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar

               Like the profound, unstoppable craving

            Of nations for their wish.

                                                      Hunger, time and the moon:

         The moon lying on the brain

                                                    as on the excited sea    as on

          The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake   

         With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring   

         From tended strength.    Everything is in that.

            That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord

Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start:

         With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less

             Than save every sleeping one

             And night-walking one

         Of us.

                   My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

napo eight (seven got lost in the mail): le silence est d'or

This poem came to life with a line of this song (French lyrics here), but went in a completely different direction. To those who don't know French: le silence est d'or=the silence is golden. To clarify, I don't actually know French myself.
__________

le silence est d'or
for those who skip across commas of cummings
like professional frogs in spring (rather than
loud autumn-dry hares), which est d'or.

le silence est d'or
for us woven in the picnic blanket under the sunbulb,
rejoicing ice cream though withering
through heat & age. The difference est d'or.

le silence est d'or
for her in the apple room the magritte
room the room for
sinners like eve like cain like god who est d'or.

le silence est d'or
for my lips, the horizontal icicle,
for my eyes, frozen ponds in waiting
to be broken.

le silence est d'or
watching your hair curl like a language
caught among the leaves,
returning into spring.

napo six: spade/Chopin

________

Wrote three or four poems yesterday, none of which I'm particularly proud of. Here are two:

Spade

Prove you are a poet.

So she leans over the windowsill
pointing at the garbage
without fear of her passion for black.
And the garbage sits like smoke in the lungs.
Poets are  never soothed.
They continuously trip over,
thus invented the line break.
Even the happiest of poets
find the world tragic-- whether losing
their love or looking at the pink spade
beside the garbage
nobody has seen. But even plastic
needs to be watched, to be babysat,
to be written about
(as a lover, as a muse).

Chopin

formless creature
the rose crushed between her fingers

like the skipping of Chopin
Chopin is Warsaw

the brush of a blue-eyed stranger's hair
a lullaby for workaholics

the forest and the city
unite my ears

all I'm lacking now
is a rose on the piano and a note

we all find our form
in notes in petals in neon double-deckers

napo three: freedom&form

 The promised poem from third of April:



The stars crouch in my pocket,
beheaded and curling
around the raincoat walls like a stain of burnt milk.
I run. Cloths drag like pious whine,
antibiotic, rosary. Beauty
cannot be freedom. The depth
of imprisonment is the silk and the shine.

Will form free me?

On the road I want to be naked.
Touch the stones with my skin
like the eyes of  a fake painting.
Drive my chest into the wind
and reverse with the lung.

I'm walking in the rain
under an umbrella of parallel universes
and their tourists' letters home:
darling I've forgotten the roses
darling I hear washing machines in my sleep
and then wake.

The rain is under me now. The sun is
in my eyeball, a vivid image of  bushes.
cut  by the student gardener, sweating and
hung over.

Nudity is necessary because
it is the will not to lie.

But my pockets are too heavy
for the hitchhike across  freedom,
but my stars are too dim to shine through
the curtain across form.

napo five: moon

The moon in the afternoon.

Tiles cannot hush it. I tuck away all the signs
of it existing. My hands can make clouds,
but I cover it with a towel. It was closer
and easier, and wet. Rain for free.

Watching the moon when there are no stars
is  a traumatic experience.Painfully geometric
darkness washes us, water.

Now I know the moon is only a plughole.
I bathe in the sky like men in a heart,
breaking the shells of the bubbles.

What a perfect way to waste
the afternoon in the moon.

napo four: beginning

beginning the poem
is starting a journey across organs of one body.

a lumpy body that never leaves the sofa
except when falling
while reaching for the tissues.

poetry kills me
more effectively than selling my soul to the devil.

forgetting I had a soul
even when the stars pressure me into knowing.

I'm listening to waltz of the snowflakes, and spring has come
to me like a poetry journal comes to the farmer ploughing his field.

nobody is asking me to begin this poem.
an invented obligation, like that of sitting in the sun every morning
for the sake of the orange juice.

I will never end it either. What I like about endings is:
they cannot end.
the journals keep coming
and spring ploughs away the doubt of start.

___________

Overall, today was exceptionally bad. I sat for a few hours, unable to write a word of sense, and even reading didn't help much. After gobbling up unreasonable amounts of Frank O'Hara (I hope it's not visible in this piece), something happened, I wrote something, I probably won't ever look at it again. But hey, it still counts. It's a poem. Three minutes to midnight. I'd better publish.

excuses.

Darlings,
I wrote a poem today, but I think part/most of/all of it is going to be submitted to a poetry contest on youngwritersonline.net. I'll probably post today's poem on Saturday. As for today in general, it was okay. I realised I'm writing too much about stars, continued writing about stars, read a random poetry journal with slippery pages, revised before my exams (oh, you're sure to hear more about them later on), and ate a lot.

Bye for now.

I didn't know

I didn't know people.
I didn't know people read.
I didn't know people read me.

I didn't know that entering the library, over a year overdue, with glasses and new words, Deutsch words, words of poets, Dante's Inferno back at home after a 2011 in my dusty corner, a woman would just smile, say "I wouldn't call you if there wasn't anything important".

I didn't know.
I didn't know my writing.
I didn't know my writing is important.
I didn't know my writing is important to people.

I didn't know that this village of mud and alcohol reads, reads poetry, reads poetry and likes it, though says it's "hard".
I didn't know the poetry I wrote two years ago, the cliché and occasionally too deep for its own good, is hard.
I didn't know people enter that small library at the end of the word, asking for Nasim's poetry, asking for Nasim's poetry reading.
I didn't know the people who laugh at me on the corridors long for my words. That they will ever listen. I guess I'm now going to be richer in so much knowing it will overwhelm me like a big salty turquoise wave in the mouth, a wave you love, a wave that strangles you, a wave (or your body, or your body, or a tide) that is passionate.

Yesterday when there was snow, I was what-the-helling. Now I have no words but dziękuję*.

Let me know first dear, I need to put the posters up.

______

*thank you in Polish
PS: No, this isn't my second NaPo poem, in case you were half-wondering. It's just a quick result of absolute amazement. I hope that, after reading, you will know why.

napo one: tick

I

I don't know the difference between foetus and embryo.
I don't understand birth
of form of children of fire
of this snow that smells of salt
                                             of what
 I cannot grasp. I am a creature only of tail,
 curved and long like  an adult back.

But I am too primitive for adult. I am
only a clock bundled in meat, raw,
who hasn't yet learned to tick.
A clock who dissolves when a mist or a star
bites its curving side
and tries to separate
one hand from another.

II

All ticks.
Wombs, blood, flowers.
Being a clock doesn't mean deafness--
it is the mute throb of a heart in a human
that the ticking is to me.
Life takes
the moments I need my ticking.
Replaces them with water in plastic cups
(made of barbarically melted jellyfish after they had cracked into grains of an hourglass),
with platefuls of placenta dough
(shaped into stars by little girls sitting in lotus positions in a circle in a universe and lifting their skirts to praise the taste of their food).
Clocks aren't the only tickers.
Clocks barely tick.
A watch only transfers from the wrist
from the core of its owner.
A tide only takes from the internal translucency
from the core of the jellyfish,
The falseness of clocks suits the declaration of love
not form not children not fire

Time is only rhythm, ticking is only
the tribal call to start beating and breathing
and dance.

III

God made everything to tick like him.
In various shapes hid one rhythm,
a muffled staccato,  and
God conductor of the orchestra
wore his suit in glory, the suit you see
galaxies, the eyes meteorites.
God crashes into your heart
and watches the devastation a clock can bring.
When they tell you god is a fake,
you kick into their ribs, hoping
the abyss between them is also a lie.
Then you lie on the floor
hearing it tick
and cursing that tick until
God has no other way but to be fake.
You wonder what kind of people
would pay to go for his concert.
None, ticks your tongue.

IV

i am lying in an empty bath
missing my mother
who is downstairs

the newborn lightbulb
is also hungry
and intensity eats me

like a hot stone
its narrow throat
intensely beautiful

intensely timeless
i am lying in an empty intenseness
time is downstairs

V

She asks
              do you love me
She means
                can you hear us ticking together
She knows
                there is a disorder that doesn't let this happen
Creator answers
                         how can one object love another

VI

the mother's time
isn't the child's time

just as the cloud's substance
isn't the rain's substance

VII

They are buying a ticket to a concert to celebrate the birth.

PSSSSS: This is very rough. Unedited. Fresh. With a tendency to grow weaker. Thing is, I'm now really tired and in need of an early night before tomorrow. Sleep helps creativity, so...
Let me know what you think.

The snow says hi.

Whoa.

It's an April evening (yesss, I can say that starting from today), already after dark, and it's been snowing on and off all day. It's only been a few hours since I remembered NaPoWriMo has begun, although I was under the impression I couldn't wait to do it before I forgot it existed. That's me. Stressed today, will probably forget tomorrow. I did NaNoWriMo. It was different, though. It's easier, at least to me, to get started with prose, reach some wordcount and feel pleased with yourself; poetry doesn't like time. They feel like enemies. You have a day for a poem, that's it, thirty times. <-Is that hell? Then again, it's something like 24/26/28 times (I'm forgetful, but I think it's 26) you have to do something before it becomes a routine, so if I last long enough, I might end up outrageously prolific. Or so I hope.

Writing a 'poem' is easy. Why, I can always sit down, write a few lines, press enter, word vomit. What I'd like to achieve throughout this month is maybe not poems I'm proud of, but pieces I'm not ashamed of; pieces which I can bear to post here, press the "publish" button, have it done with. This is much harder to do.

This blog I'll use to record my napoings, but also/maybe/hopefully continue. If I see some inspiring pictures, read some inspiring poems, feel I have a message to deliver to the universe of the web, I'll come here and let the words jump up to you, even if you have no idea who I am; I hope my poetry will speak for itself. I know it can, if I try hard enough.

Now I'm going to run myself a bath, drown in essential oils (clary sage is glorious, try it) and burning water until my ears start ringing and I nearly pass out. I think it's the most inspiring thing I can do at the moment. And chocolate. Never forget your sense of taste, reader.

With lots of love and spring and snow,

Nasim.